Then remembering that Francis had been playing cricket for the Guards yesterday, he turned briskly over to the last page of sporting news, and found that his cousin had distinguished himself by making no runs at all, but by missing two expensive catches in the deep field.

From there, after a slight inspection of a couple of advertisement columns, he worked back to the middle leaf, where were leaders and the news of nations and the movements of kings.

All this last week he had scanned such items with a growing sense of amusement in the recollection of Hermann's disquiet over the Sarajevo murders, and Aunt Barbara's more detailed and vivid prognostications of coming danger, for nothing more had happened, and he supposed--vaguely only, since the affair had begun to fade from his mind--that Austria had made inquiries, and that since she was satisfied there was no public pronouncement to be made.
The hot breeze from the window made the paper a little unmanageable for a moment, but presently he got it satisfactorily folded, and a big black headline met his eye.

A half-column below it contained the demands which Austria had made in the Note addressed to the Servian Government.
A glance was sufficient to show that they were framed in the most truculent and threatening manner possible to imagine.

They were not the reasonable proposals that one State had a perfect right to make of another on whose soil and with the connivance of whose subjects the murders had been committed; they were a piece of arbitrary dictation, a threat levelled against a dependent and an inferior.
Michael had read them through twice with a growing sense of uneasiness at the thought of how Lady Barbara's first anticipations had been fulfilled, when Hermann came in.