The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face. "Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.
"Rachel," I said taking her arm, with a desolating sense of the futility in my gesture of protection; "let us walk along the beach. I want to tell you something—— Something rather complicated."
"Is there going to be war, Stephen?" she asked abruptly.
It seemed then that this question which merely concerned the welfare of a hundred million people or so and pain, destruction and disaster beyond measure, was the most trivial of digressions.
"No," I said. "I haven't thought about the war."
"But I thought—you were thinking of nothing else."
"This has put it out of my head. It's something—— Something disastrous to us."
"Something has happened to our money?"
"I wish that was all."