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“Of course he’ll be at home if he’s going to give a party! Just as though he’d be anywhere else!” she remarked.
They wished to go over immediately and tell Bobby that they were home and all ready to be invited, but their mother would not allow this.
“He will come over by and by,” she said. But the day went by and no invitation came, although great preparations were going on, as they could see, for they kept very near the window that looked out on Bobby’s lawn. A slow drizzling rain was falling, or they would probably have been much nearer. But Bobby was evidently very busy getting ready. They caught only flying glimpses of him, and their hearts grew heavy within their breasts.
“O dear! I shall never, never get over this, never!” said Beth, swallowing the lump in her throat.
“I wouldn’t have thought Bobby could have done it,” said Ethelwyn, also swallowing.
After their bath, they begged for their best slippers, silk stockings, and embroidered petticoats, and on having their hair done in their dress-up-and-go-away-from-home style. “Because,” said Ethelwyn, “something may happen yet to make him think of us.”
So mother let them have on what they liked, for she was very sorry for them.
In the evening, after dinner, when the electric lights came flashing out, it was worse, because, still standing forlornly by the window, they saw the orchestra come, with their instruments, and presently the sounds of music came floating up to them. Then the ice cream man came, and Beth, who had almost melted to tears at the sight of the orchestra, shed them openly when the ice cream went around the side of the house. Having no handkerchief, she wiped her eyes on Soosana, her big rag doll. She always loved Soosana when she was unhappy, for she was so squeezy and felt so comfortable.

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To get out of France after getting in, a man has to go to Paris, see the prefect of police, various consuls, and so on. It was all interesting-the life in Paris-but it had nothing to do with U-boats. I had to go to England, and to make England, I had to go to Havre.
And I was in Havre. Looking out the window at a roof across the narrow street was a sign which read Hotel of the Six Allies. The Six looked as though it had been painted over. The head waiter told me later that it had. It had begun at three, then it became four-five-now six. But there were more than six now-did not the great United States count? Oh, yes, truly yes-but the paint and painters! They were growing more scarce. The war-yes. Everything was the war.
The head waiter was a little old fellow with a round back, a quizzical eye, and the hair of a first violin. After I beat my way by main strength through three table-d’hôte meals with him he let me know that he could talk English. Why hadn’t he told me so before? Oh! Did I not wish to practise my French? So many did, and if they made him understand, the tips were sometimes more inspiring.
The steamer for England had been scheduled to leave the night of the day our train arrived, but she did not leave. We did not learn whether it was the full moon or the U-boats shifting their hunting-grounds or the late air-raids on the south coast of England. Whatever the cause, no one growled much. The steamship people and the government were doing their best with a difficult service. The delay gave us another day to look the port over. I had been there years before. Then it was all French; now it seemed to be mostly British. The streets, the shops, the cafés, were crowded with English, Canadian, and Australian soldiers. British soldiers were running the tram-cars. In the country outside was a large British camp. The French owners of the ships and of the cafés in the narrow streets near the jetties catered especially to the British soldier and sailor. English tobacco, English rosbif-they advertised these in quaintly worded signs.
Ships lay between the jetties and the breakwater, coasting and deep-water steamers, and the little fishing-cutters with the tanned sails. There was a fleet (or a flock) of seaplanes all ready to take to either the water or the air. They took to both while we looked, hurdling the breakwater from the basin to get more quickly to some smoke on the horizon. They were brand-new planes all, with the most beautiful polished maple pontoons and bright varnish over paint that still smelled fresh.

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Atonement and New Testament language.-It will have been observed that in my examination of the subject of the Atonement I have said almost nothing about the New Testament evidence for the doctrine. This, I admit, is an entire departure from the method usually followed by those who write upon it, and may be thought by some to vitiate my whole argument. But the omission is of set purpose, for I am convinced that New Testament language about the Atonement, especially the language of St. Paul, has been, and still is, the prolific source of most of the mischievous misinterpretations of it which exist in the religious mind. To an extent this is the same with the Old Testament, but to a far less degree, for the language of the Old Testament is only liable to misapprehension when interpreted by the New. In a previous chapter I have endeavoured to show the imperishable truths which underlie Old Testament symbolism in regard to the Atonement, and I trust I have shown that these truths are as fresh and indispensable to-day, and play as great a part in human affairs as they ever did. But before I proceed to say anything about the New Testament symbolism, which has been largely derived from the Old, let us consider the question of the authority of scripture as a whole.
Tendency to bow to external authority.-There is always a tendency in the ordinary mind to rely upon some form of external authority in religious as in other matters. With one man it is the authority of an infallible church; with another the authority of an infallible book; with another the authority of some infallible statement of belief which ought to hold good for all time, but never does. At the best, external authority is only a crutch, and at the worst it may become a rigid fetter upon the expanding soul. The true seat of authority is within, not without, the human soul. We are so constituted as to be able to recognise, little by little, the truth of God as it comes to us. It may come from any one of a thousand different quarters, but to be recognised and felt as truth it must awaken an echo within the individual soul. If it does not awaken such a response, it is of no effect so far as the growth of the soul is concerned. What is true in this book will not be received as true by the readers merely because I say it, but because they feel it to be true and cannot get away from it. Why should we be afraid of trusting the human soul to recognise and respond to its own truth? All truth is one, and all earnest truth-seekers are converging upon one goal. It is the divine self within everyone of us which enables us to discern the truth best fitted to our needs, and this divine self is, as has already been pointed out, fundamentally one with the source of all truth, which is God.

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In time of sickness the management of the nervous child becomes very difficult. Restlessness and opposition may reach such a pitch that it may be almost impossible to confine the patient to bed or to carry out the simplest treatment. Sometimes days may elapse before the sick-nurse who is installed to take the place of the child’s usual attendant is able to approach the cot or do any service to the child without provoking a paroxysm of screaming. In such a case any systematic examination is often out of the question, with the result that the diagnosis may be delayed or rendered impossible. There is only one reassuring feature of a situation, which arises only in nurseries in which the management of the children is at fault; the doctor has learned from experience that this pronounced opposition of the child to himself, to the nurse, and even to the mother, is of itself a reassuring sign, indicating, as a rule, that the condition is not one of grave danger or extreme severity. When the child is more seriously ill, opposition almost always disappears, and the child lies before us limp and passive. Only with approaching recovery or convalescence does his spirit return and renewed opposition show itself.
Extreme nervousness in childhood carries with it a certain liability towards what is known as “delicacy of constitution.” The sensitiveness of the children is so great that they react with striking symptoms to disturbances so trivial that they would hardly incommode the child of more stable nervous constitution. For example, a simple cold in the head, or a sore throat, may cause a convulsion or a condition of nervous irritability which may even arouse the suspicion that meningitis is present. Or, again, a little pharyngeal irritation which would ordinarily be incapable of disturbing sleep may be sufficient to keep the child wide awake all night with persistent and violent coughing. The little irritating papules of nettlerash from which many children suffer are commonly disregarded by busy, happy children during the day, and even at night hardly suffice to cause disturbance. The nervous child, on the other hand, will scratch them again and again till they bleed, tearing at them with his nails, and making deep and painful sores.

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From the frontier of Bhutan, six thousand feet up on the face of the mountains, a line of men wound down the serpentining track that led to Ranga Duar. At their head walked a stockily-built man with cheery Mongolian features, wearing a white cloth garment, kimono-shaped and kilted up to give freedom to the sturdy bare thighs and knees-the legs and feet cased in long, felt-soled boots. It was the Deb Zimpun, the Envoy of the independent Border State of Bhutan. Behind him came a tall man in khaki tunic, breeches, puttees and cap, his breast covered with bright-coloured ribbons. His uniform was similar to the British; but his face was unmistakeably Chinese, as were those of the twenty tall, khaki-clad soldiers armed with magazine rifles at his heels. They were followed by three or four score Bhutanese swordsmen, thick-set and not unlike Gurkhas in feature, with bare heads, legs and feet, and clad only in a single garment similar to their leader’s and kilted up by a cord around the waist, from which hung a dah, a short sword or long knife. In rear of them trudged a number of coolies, some laden with bundles, others with baskets of fruit.
Where the track came out on the bare shoulder of a spur free from the small trees and undergrowth clothing the mountains the Deb Zimpun pointed to the roofs of the buildings in the little station a thousand feet below them and hitherto invisible to them.
“That is Ranga Duar,” he said briefly. The Chinaman behind him looked down at it.
“It seems a very small and weak place to have stopped our invading troops in the war,” he said in Bhutanese. “So here lives the Man.”
“The Man? Yes, perhaps he is a man. But many, very many, there be that think him a god or devil. They say he can call up a horde of demons in the form of elephants. With such he trampled your army into the earth.
“Devils? Leave such tales to lamas and the ignorant fools that believe their teaching. But if even a part of what I have heard about this man be true he is more dangerous than many devils. He stands in China’s way, and he who does shall be swept aside.”
“He is my friend,” said the Deb Zimpun shortly, and tramped on in silence.
Before they reached the station they were met by two of the Political Officer’s men, Bhuttias resident in British territory, detailed to receive and guide them to the Government Dâk Bungalow in which the Deb Zimpun and as many of his followers as could crowd into it were to reside during their stay. Arrived at it the long line filed into the compound.
Half a mile away down the hill Colonel Dermot and Wargrave watched them through their field-glasses.

Book Excerpt:
In proportion as every organ of the human body is free to perform its own functions, unimpeded by any other, the body is perfectly healthy and vigorous; and, in proportion as every organ of the body is receiving its proper support from every other, the body as a whole is vigorous, and in the full use of its powers.
These are two self-evident axioms, and, if we think of them quietly for a little while, they will lead us to a clear realization of true personal independence.
The lungs cannot do the work of the heart, but must do their own work, independently and freely; and yet, if the lungs should suddenly say to themselves:
“This is all nonsense,-our depending upon the heart in this way; we must be independent! It is weak to depend upon the other organs of the body!” And if they should repel the blood which the heart pumped into them, with the idea that they could manage the body by themselves, and were not going to be weakly dependent upon the heart, the stomach, or any other organ,-if the lungs should insist upon taking this independent stand, they would very soon stop breathing, the heart would stop beating, the stomach would stop digesting, and the body would die. Or, suppose that the heart should refuse to supply the lungs with the blood necessary to provide oxygen; the same fatal result would of course follow. Or, even let us imagine all the organs of the body agreeing that it is weak to be dependent, and asserting their independence of each other. At the very instant that such an agreement was carried into effect, the body would perish.
Then, on the other hand,-to reverse the illustration,-if the lungs should feel that they could help the heart’s work by attending to the circulation of the blood, if the heart should insist that it could inhale and exhale better than the lungs, and should neglect its own work in order to advise and assist the lungs in the breathing, the machinery of the body would be in sad confusion for a time, and would very soon cease altogether.
This imaginary want of real independence in the working of the different organs of the body can be illustrated by the actual action of the muscles. How often we see a man working with his mouth while writing, when he should be only using his hands; or, working uselessly with his left hand, when what he has to do only needs the right! How often we see people trying to listen with their arms and shoulders! Such illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely, and, in all cases, the false sympathy of contraction in the parts of the body which are not needed for the work in hand comes from a wrong dependence,-from the fact that the pats of the body that are not needed, are officiously dependent upon those that are properly active, instead of minding their own affairs and saving energy for their own work.

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The atmosphere was charged with electricity. A great roar of cheering went up from below like the roaring of surf, and it was followed by a clapping of hands like the running of the sea off a shingly beach after the boom of a tremendous breaker.
An old man, dressed wholly in white, carried shoulder-high on a chair glittering with purple and crimson, and having a canopy of silver and gold above him. He wore a triple crown, which glistened in the sunlight, and but for the delicate white hand which he upraised to bless the people, he might have been mistaken for an image.
His face was beautiful, and had a ray of beatified light on it-a face of marvellous sweetness and great spirituality.
It was a thrilling moment, and Roma’s excitement was intense. “There he is! All in white! He’s on a gilded chair under the silken canopy! The canopy is held up by prelates, and the chairmen are in knee-breeches and red velvet. Look at the great waving plumes on either side!”
“Peacock’s feathers!” said a voice behind her, but she paid no heed.
“Look at the acolytes swinging incense, and the golden cross coming before! What thunders of applause-I can hardly hear myself speak. It’s like standing on a cliff while the sea below is running mountains high. No, it’s like no other sound on earth; it’s human-fifty thousand unloosed throats of men! That’s the clapping of ladies-listen to the weak applause of their white-gloved fingers. Now they’re waving their handkerchiefs. Look! Like the wings of ten thousand butterflies fluttering up from a meadow.”
Roma’s abandonment was by this time complete; she was waving her handkerchief and crying “Viva il Papa Re!”
“They’re bearing him slowly along. He’s coming this way. Look at the Noble Guard in their helmets and jackboots. And there are the Swiss Guard in Joseph’s coat of many colours! We can see him plainly now. Do you smell the incense? It’s like the ribbon of Bruges. The pluviale? That gold vestment? It’s studded on his breast with precious stones. How they blaze in the sunshine! He is blessing the people, and they are falling on their knees before him.”

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He looked eagerly around for his assailants. At first he could see no one. Suddenly through the undergrowth about thirty yards away the muzzle of an old musket was pushed out, and then a dark face peered cautiously behind it. The eyes in it met Dermot’s, but that glance was their last. The soldier’s rifle spoke, and the face disappeared as its owner’s body pitched forward among the bushes and lay still. At the sharp report of the white man’s weapon the firing all around ceased suddenly. But the intense silence that followed was broken by a strange sound like the shrill blast of a steam whistle mingled with the crackling of sheets of tin rapidly shaken and doubled. Noreen, crouching submissively in the shelter where Dermot had placed her, thrilled and wondered at the uncanny sound.
The soldier knew well what it was. It was Badshah’s appeal for help, and he wondered why the animal had given it then, so late. But far away a wild elephant trumpeted in reply. There was a crashing in the undergrowth as Badshah dashed away and burst through the cordon of enemies encircling them. Dermot’s heart sank; for, although he rejoiced that his elephant was out of danger, his sole hope of getting Noreen and himself away had lain in running the gauntlet on the animal’s back through their invisible foes.
As he gripped his rifle, keenly alert for a mark to aim at, his thoughts were busy. He was amazed at this unexpected attack and utterly unable to guess who their assailants could be. They were not the Bhuttias again, for those had no guns. And the man that he had just shot was not a mountaineer. Although it was evident that the firearms used were mostly old smooth-bore muskets, and the smoke from the powder rose in clouds over the undergrowth and drifted to the tree-tops, he had detected the sharp crack of a modern rifle occasionally among the duller reports of the more ancient weapons. The mysterious attackers were apparently numerous and completely surrounded them. Dermot cursed himself for his folly in halting for food instead of pushing on to safety without a stop. But he had calculated on the superstitious fears of the Bhuttias who had been scared away by the sight of him and Badshah; and indeed to all appearance he was right in so doing. He could not reckon on new enemies springing up around them. Who could they be? It was almost inconceivable that in this quiet corner of the Indian Empire two English people could be thus assailed. The only theory that he could form was that the attackers were a band of Bengali political dacoits.

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“Get me out of this, I am stifled-ill,” Miss Metford said, in a low voice to me.
As we were hurrying from the room, Brande and his sister, who had joined him, met us. The fire had died out of his eyes. His voice had returned to its ordinary key. His demeanour was imperturbable, sphinx-like. I murmured some words about the eloquence of the lecture, but interrupted myself when I observed his complete indifference to my remarks, and said,
“Neither praise nor blame seems to affect you, Brande.”
“Certainly not,” he answered calmly. “You forget that there is nothing deserving of either praise or blame.”
I knew I could not argue with him, so we passed on. Outside, I offered to find a cab for Miss Metford, and to my surprise she allowed me to do so. Her self-assertive manner was visibly modified. She made no pretence of resenting this slight attention, as was usual with her in similar cases. Indeed, she asked me to accompany her as far as our ways lay together. But I felt that my society at the time could hardly prove enlivening. I excused myself by saying candidly that I wished to be alone.
My own company soon became unendurable. In despair I turned into a music hall. The contrast between my mental excitement and the inanitiés of the stage was too acute, so this resource speedily failed me. Then I betook myself to the streets again. Here I remembered a letter Brande had put into my hand as I left the hall. It was short, and the tone was even more peremptory than his usual arrogance. It directed me to meet the members of the Society at Charing Cross station at two o’clock on the following day. No information was given, save that we were all going on a long journey; that I must set my affairs in such order that my absence would not cause any trouble, and the letter ended, “Our experiments are now complete. Our plans are matured. Do not fail to attend.”

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During a not inconsiderable period Mr. Fluker indulged the honorable conviction that at last he had found the vein in which his best talents lay, and he was happy in foresight of the prosperity and felicity which that discovery promised to himself and his family. His native activity found many more objects for its exertion than before. He rode out to the farm, not often, but sometimes, as a matter of duty, and was forced to acknowledge that Sam was managing better than could have been expected in the absence of his own continuous guidance. In town he walked about the hotel, entertained the guests, carved at the meals, hovered about the stores, the doctors’ offices, the wagon and blacksmith shops, discussed mercantile, medical, mechanical questions with specialists in all these departments, throwing into them all more and more of politics as the intimacy between him and his patron and chief boarder increased.
Now as to that patron and chief boarder. The need of extending his acquaintance seemed to press upon Mr. Pike with ever-increasing weight. He was here and there, all over the county; at the county-seat, at the county villages, at justices’ courts, at executors’ and administrators’ sales, at quarterly and protracted religious meetings, at barbecues of every dimension, on hunting excursions and fishing frolics, at social parties in all neighborhoods. It got to be said of Mr. Pike that a freer acceptor of hospitable invitations, or a better appreciator of hospitable intentions, was not and needed not to be found possibly in the whole state. Nor was this admirable deportment confined to the county in which he held so high official position. He attended, among other occasions less public, the spring sessions of the supreme and county courts in the four adjoining counties: the guest of acquaintance old and new over there. When starting upon such travels, he would sometimes breakfast with his traveling companion in the village, and, if somewhat belated in the return, sup with him also.
Yet, when at Flukers’, no man could have been a more cheerful and otherwise satisfactory boarder than Mr. Matt Pike. He praised every dish set before him, bragged to their very faces of his host and hostess, and in spite of his absences was the oftenest to sit and chat with Marann when her mother would let her go into the parlor. Here and everywhere about the house, in the dining-room, in the passage, at the foot of the stairs, he would joke with Marann about her country beau, as he styled poor Sim Marchman, and he would talk as though he was rather ashamed of Sim, and wanted Marann to string her bow for higher game.
Brer Sam did manage well, not only the fields, but the yard. Every Saturday of the world he sent in something or other to his sister. I don’t know whether I ought to tell it or not, but for the sake of what is due to pure veracity I will. On as many as three different occasions Sim Marchman, as if he had lost all self-respect, or had not a particle of tact, brought in himself, instead of sending by a negro, a bucket of butter and a coop of spring chickens as a free gift to Mrs. Fluker. I do think, on my soul, that Mr. Matt Pike was much amused by such degradation-however, he must say that they were all first-rate. As for Marann, she was very sorry for Sim, and wished he had not brought these good things at all.