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.

As well as I can remember it was the night of August 6th that the
first serious dispute arose. England had declared war. All our male
servants had left us except two American chauffeurs, and a couple of