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“Well,” said the Doctor, “I don’t really know what a gentleman would do with it,” and he added, under his breath, in English, “but I know mighty well what this fellow could do with it, if he could get it,” and he lighted a fresh cigarette.

The keen old eyes had watched his face.

“I don’t suppose you want to buy it?” she persisted.

“Well,” responded the Doctor, “how can a poor man like me say, if you don’t care to name your price, and unless that price is within reason?”

After some minutes of hesitation the old woman drew a deep breath. “Well,” she said, with the determination of one who expected to be scoffed at, “I won’t take a sou less than my brother paid.”

“Come on, Mother,” said the Doctor, “what did your brother pay? No nonsense, you know.”

“Well, if you must know–it was FIVE THOUSAND FRANCS, and I can’t and won’t sell it for less. There, now!”

There was a long silence.

The Doctor and his companion avoided one another’s eyes. After a while, he said in an undertone, in English: “By Jove, I’m going to buy it.”

“No, no,” remonstrated his companion, her eyes gazing down the garden vista to where the wistaria and clematis and flaming trumpet flower flaunted on the old wall. “I am going to have it–I thought of it first. I want it.”

“So do I,” laughed the Doctor. “Never wanted anything more in all my life.”

“For how long,” she asked, “would a rover like you want this?”

“Rover yourself! And you? Besides what difference does it make how long I want it–since I want it now ? I want to give a party–haven’t given a party since–since Class Day.”

The Divorcee sighed. Still gazing down the garden she said quietly: “How well I remember–ninety-two!”

Then there was another silence before she turned to him suddenly: “See here–all this is very irregular-so, that being the case–why shouldn’t we buy it together? We know each other. Neither of us will ever stay here long. One summer apiece will satisfy us, though it is lovely. Be a sport. We’ll draw lots as to who is to have the first party.”

The Doctor waved the old woman away. Her keen eyes watched too sharply. Then, with their elbows on the table, they had a long and heated argument. Probably there were more things touched on than the garden. Who knows? At the end of it the Divorcee walked away down that garden vista, and the old woman was called and the Doctor took her at her word. And out of that arrangement emerged the scheme which resulted in our finding ourselves, a year later, within the old walls of that French garden.

Of course a year’s work had been done on the interior, and Doctor and Divorcee had scoured the department for old furniture. Water had been brought a great distance, a garage had been built with servants’ quarters over it–there were no servants in the house,–but the look of the place, we were assured, had not been changed, and both Doctor and Divorcee declared that they had had the year of their lives. Well, if they had, the place showed it.

But, as Fate would have it, the second night we sat down to dinner in that garden, news had come of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand-Charles-Louis Joseph-Marie d’Autriche-Este, whom the tragic death of Prince Rudolphe, almost exactly twenty-four years and six months earlier to a day, had made Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary–and the tone of our gathering was changed. From that day the party threatened to become a little Bedlam, and the garden a rostrum.

In the earlier days it did not make so much difference. The talk was good. We were a travelled group, and what with reminiscences of people and places, and the scandal of courts, it was far from being dull. But as the days went on, and the war clouds began to gather, the overcharged air seemed to get on the nerves of the entire group, and instead of the peaceful summer we had counted upon, every one of us seemed to live in his own particular kind of fever. Every one of us, down to the Youngster, had fixed ideas, deep-set theories, and convictions as different as our characters, our lives, our callings, and our faiths. We were all Cosmopolitan Americans, but ready to spread the Eagle, if necessary, and all of us, except the Violinist, of New England extraction, which means really of English blood, and that will show when the screws are put on. We had never thought of the Violinist as not one of us, but he was really of Polish origin. His great-grandfather had been a companion of Adam Czartoriski in the uprising of 1830, and had gone to the States when the amnesty was not extended to his chief after that rebellion, Poland’s last, had been stamped out.