She had been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but never ceasing growth of a world peril for too many years not to be widely awake to each sign of its development.
"Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany.

It will form a pretext and a clear road to France and England," Lord Coombe had said.
"A broad, clear road," the Duchess had agreed breathlessly--and, while she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they fluttered and floated.
But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of the fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked out into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the eastern sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague tumult of heart and brain and blood.
"What's the matter ?" he was thinking.

"What have I been doing-- What have I been saying?
I've been like a chap in a dream.

I'm not awake yet." All that he had said to the girl was a simple fact.

He had exaggerated nothing.