'O Gavan, save me!' - The Messenger - 7

"O Gavan, save me!"

"It's too late." He drew his hand away. She turned to the friendlier banister and clung there. "They have taken everything," he said very low.

"Everything?"

"All the things you thought you had hidden."

"Hush!" She backed a step.

Napier, with the advantage of his inches, head and shoulders above her, had caught sight of an unfamiliar figure sitting in the upper hall, reading a newspaper. Grindley! Greta had not seen him, but she heard Sir William's voice coming out of Lady McIntyre's bedroom, and Lady McIntyre's raised in a sob: "William! William!—Need any one know? Outside us three and the police?"

"I don't see the slightest necessity." Sir William came out and shut the door.

He stood an instant ruffling up his hair and looking intensely miserable. Greta von Schwarzenberg had backed down the stair.

Sir William descended slowly, Grindley behind him. It was Sir William who started when he realized who was waiting there at the bottom. Napier saw that a strong impulse to turn tail and leave this unpleasant business had to be overcome. Sir William bustled on down. He passed Miss Greta without a sign.

"Where's the other?" he demanded of Napier, and just then Mr. Singleton strolled down the hall. Sir William nodded bruskly, and turned to the motionless figure of the woman. "I—a—" (he felt for his seals) "I am sorry to have to tell you that—a—that the police have convinced me you had better leave here."

"And why," she said, "should I leave here?"

"Because it appears that you abuse our hospitality."

She threw back her head. "What appears yet more clearly is that people I have trusted have betrayed me." Over the prominent blue eyes the lids drooped a little. "In my absence some one has laid a trap." She turned to Napier, with a breath-taking sharpness. "Is it you?"

He met her gaze. "I warned them about Gull Island, and I—"

"Gull Island! What has Gull Island to do with me?"

"No, no," said Sir William. "I don't myself connect you with the Gull Island business."

"Nor,"—she made a slight inclination that seemed to say she was not to be outdone in chivalry—"nor do I need to be told that you, Sir William, have no hand in this. You weren't made for such work."

Sir William's rolling eye caught, as it were, upon some unexpected support. It rested for one mollified moment.

"I haven't lived under your roof all these months," she went on, "under the protection of your great name, without understanding you, even though people you think your friends cruelly misunderstand me." The voice caught; she carried her handkerchief to her shaking lips. Singleton read signs in Sir William's countenance that made him anxious to end the passage between the owner of the great protecting name and the lady who invoked it. Singleton had joined Grindley, who stood leaning against the wall behind Sir William. In an impatient undertone, "Why didn't you tell him?" demanded Singleton.

"Did," Grindley answered. "Understood diary and tracing. Didn't give himself time to take in the—" His hand came out of his side pocket with a paper. Singleton plucked it away from him and carried it over to Sir William. As it passed, Napier caught a glimpse of Miss Greta's handwriting on a telegraph form bearing the post-office stamp.

"This was sent out from here at noon to-day." Singleton held the message under Sir William's eyes.

"Well, what of it?" retorted Sir William. "A perfectly proper instruction to a broker."

"Till it's been decoded. If you like, Mr. Napier can explain how afterwards. What it means is:

"Troopship leaves Southampton at seven to-night. Four searchlights playing constantly over harbor. No convoy."

There was a moment of deathlike silence. The woman stood as motionless as the carved banister at her back.

"Gavan," Sir William cried out, "is it true?"

"It's true," he said.

"You say this information was sent—" The terror in the old man's face evoked the shattered and shattering image of a torpedoed ship, a sea full of drowning soldiers.

"We stopped it at the post-office."

Relieved of the crowning horror, Sir William shook off the paralysis that had held his restlessness in a vice. He hurried half a dozen steps up the hall and half a dozen down, jingling and muttering, "This—going on in my house!" He drew up into a jerk as the woman darted forward and planted herself in his way.

"Why not in your house?" she demanded wildly. "Haven't you a hand and two sons in what's going on elsewhere? What are you doing to my brothers and friends? Is it worse to be drowned than to have your head battered to pulp? Than to have six inches of steel run through your stomach? Wouldn't it make you want to kill your enemies to see what I saw at the Newton Hackett drill-ground—a bag stuffed with straw, hung up—and hear the Staff Sergeant call it Fritz, and shout out, 'Now, men, straight for his kidneys!'"

"Gavan!" Sir William's voice called hoarsely, "make an end of this!" He went down the passage at the double, and shut himself in his private room.

Less the woman's rigid lips than her eyes asked Singleton, "What—do they—mean—to do?"

"You know what they do in a case of this kind in Germany?"

As if the men in front of her had been the firing-squad, each look a bullet, she pitched forward. She would have dropped on her face, had Napier not caught her. He shook her slightly by the arm.

"Here's Nan," he said under his breath, "I mean Miss—your friend and Madge—" The noise outside pierced through the common preoccupation. The motor was rushing up the avenue. Napier led the woman to a chair.

As she sat down, her head fell back against the wall. The face had a dead look.

"We don't want her fainting," Napier said sharply, as Singleton leaned over her.

"There is an excellent train," remarked the secret-service man, "that leaves Fenchurch Street just about this time to-morrow."

She parted her shaking lips. "What has that—to do—with me?"

"You will be able to catch it."

"Shall I—shall I really?" She made a fruitless upward clutching at his arm. Her hand fell back into her lap, as though lamed. "Oh, no! You only want—he wants"—she slid a look at Napier—"to get me out of here without a scene. People's—feelings—must be spared. All—except mine."

"He told me,"—Grindley's slow voice sounded, his eyes seemed to find vacancy where another's would have found Sir William's door—"he told me he didn't want to make it any worse for you than necessary!"

"Ah!" Something like life returned to the dead eyes. "Any worse, he means, for himself."

Napier turned away in disgust.

"Your seat in the Pullman," said Singleton politely, "is Number Sixteen."

"You don't m-mean they will let me go—home!"

"Yes; that's the kind of fools we are."

As the voice Napier's ears were straining for called out, "Greta!" Nan came up the steps, leaning forward, as she ran, to see into the hall. "Is that you, Gre—" She hung a second, framed there in the doorway, with Madge behind her. "What is it, dearest?" She flew to the figure on the chair. She kneeled beside it. "Greta darling, you've had bad news. Oh, what is it, my dear?" She chafed the slack hand. She laid it against her cheek. "Tell me, somebody!" she said, looking at Napier. "Who are these strangers?"

By a heroic effort, Miss von Schwarzenberg produced a masterpiece. "They—they are friends of mine," she said.

Singleton, after a faint smiling inclination in Miss Ellis's direction, as though accepting the audacious description as an introduction, made it good by saying to Miss von Schwarzenberg: "You understand then, you're not to give yourself any trouble about tickets or accommodation. We will see to all that, won't we, Grindley?"

Grindley made a consenting rumble in his throat, and withdrew with Singleton to the front steps. They stood there conferring.

Napier waited on thorns to get a word with Nan. Was it impossible, was it too late, to put her on her guard? She seemed to have no eyes for any one but Greta. If Singleton had doubted the closeness of her relation to that notorious character, what must he think now?

"Try to tell me, dearest, what has happened." Nan hung over the slack form.

"Are you going somewhere, Miss Greta?" Madge pressed to the other side of the chair. "Where are you going?"

"And why?" Nan urged with a sharpness of concern. "You've had bad news, my dearest, dearest."

"Yes." Greta remembered the telegram. She took the message out and half opened it. The paper was now folded in halves, instead of in quarters. Nan watched eagerly the fingers, which seemed to forget to open the telegram to her friend's eye.

"Poor father!" Miss Greta brought out the words in a tone so exquisitely gentle that Napier studied her face an instant.

He was sure that, as she sat there with that look of sorrow, absently tearing the telegram across, she was thinking lucidly and rapidly what her next move should be.

"Is it that your father is ill, dear?" Nan pressed closer to her side.

Greta nodded. Speechless with emotion, she tore the facing halves of the telegram to ribbons, the ribbons to fragments, all with the air, as it struck Napier, of the fille noble of the theater.

"Dear, I'm terribly sorry!" Nan took her hand. "But you mustn't think it is as serious as all that. Unless—what did it say?"

Greta looked down at her hands as though expecting to be able to hand the telegram over to speak for itself, only to find it, to her surprise, reduced to the fineness of stage snow.

"He has been telegraphing me for days to come home. I didn't realize it meant—this!"

"Perhaps it's not so bad as you think. Let us send them a message, reply paid. And you'll see. The news will be better."

Miss Greta shook her head. "I have put it off too long already," she said faintly. "There is the slenderest chance of my finding him alive." Suddenly she pressed her handkerchief to her lips.

"Darling Greta, do, do let me telegraph!"

Miss von Schwarzenberg drew herself up. She rose. She stood like the heroine in Act III. "I am a soldier's daughter. I obey." She went toward the stairs.

CHAPTER XVI

Mr. Singleton turned round, watch in hand.

"You could catch the seven-two," he said politely.

Miss Greta, at the bottom of the staircase, faithfully flanked on one side by Nan, by Madge on the other, paused to consider her friend's kind suggestion.

"You could be ready inside an hour if we both helped,"—Nan enlisted Madge as confidently as though there had never been a cloud between them.

"You'll have your things to pack, too," Miss Greta reminded Nan.

"Oh, I'll do that in ten minutes, after I've—after we've helped you." Nan's hand on Miss Greta's arm urged her to the enterprise.

"A—just a moment," Napier interrupted, the disorder of the raided room printed strong upon his inner vision. He saw it in pieces, like a Futurist picture—a corner of gaping drawer showing a confusion of papers, a glimpse of wardrobe-trunk dribbling flimsiness of lawn and froth of lace; in the foreground fierce, violent, malevolent, the broken metal shell of the false hat-box; Nan's eyes, no less clear, clearer than all else, looking down upon the chaos and indignity of a ruined life. She and the other "child," Madge, ought to be spared that spectacle. Over the newel of the banister Napier spoke directly to Nan for the first time since they had stumbled among rocks in the moonlight three weeks ago, fleeing before the tide that raced up the shore, and before the tide higher, more menacing, which had risen in their hearts. "If you were to get a telegraph form—if we could write out a telegram to send to Miss von Schwarzenberg's father—or—to—to—" he floundered.

"Yes," said Miss Greta. "To my father's agent, Schwartz."

"Anybody you like. We'll do our best"—he glanced at Singleton—"to get a message through."

Instead of going to the drawing-room for a telegraph-form, Nan took a scrap of paper out of her side pocket.

"Schwartz, chez Kalisch," Napier heard the dictation begin, before Madge created a diversion on her own account.

"Let me by, will you? I must go and tell Mother."

"Tell your mother what?" To Napier's relief, Miss Greta stopped her.

"That I'm going to London to see you off."

"No, dear." Greta caught at a tress of the girl's thick hair.

In the swift parley that followed, Madge, who had been strangely quiet until now, flatly refused to be left behind. "I'd go," she declared with sudden passion, "if I had to walk to London!"

Miss Greta leaned heavily against the banister. What would you?—her glance toward Singleton seemed to say. This is the devotion I am accustomed to inspire. Then hurriedly to Madge:

"Listen, darling. You must be very good and helpful in these last—whether they're minutes or whether they're hours—"

"D-don't!" A gulping sound, more angry than tender, was throttled in Wildfire's throat.

"You'd better, first of all," advised Miss Greta, "go and telephone Brewster to get the rooms ready."

Napier gaped at the effrontery of the suggestion.

"She means at Lowndes Square?" Nan put the hurried question with eyes of sympathy on Madge, who was plainly not at the moment in any condition to speak. "Couldn't I do it for you?"

The girl gave her old enemy a grateful glance and, instead of going first to her mother, pushed past the group at the foot of the stairs and bolted down the passage to Sir William's room.

"Lowndes Square?" Singleton repeated idly as he leaned against the door. "Is that Sir William's London house?"

Miss Greta did not trouble to reply to the obvious. "Schwartz chez Kalisch—you've got that?"

Nan nodded.

"It will be more convenient," Mr. Singleton interrupted again, "for you to put up at a hotel."

Miss Greta appeared to consider this suggestion also to be unworthy of notice. She stood wrinkling her brows over the form of the message.

"Let me," said Napier. He held out his hand for Nan's fragment of paper. "Then you can get on with the telephoning."

Couldn't Nan trust herself to look into his face? Without raising her eyes, Nan relinquished paper and pencil, and ran down to the telephone-room.

"Returning home via Folkestone to-morrow." Miss Greta, still leaning against the newel, dictated as imperturbably as though she had a week in front of her for packing and preparation.

He hardly looked at the words he scribbled. The instant Nan disappeared and Singleton had sauntered down the hall in her wake, he said in an undertone, "You wouldn't like her to see your room. You'd better go up and lock the door. Tell her to do her own packing first."

Miss Greta moved quietly up the stairs with Napier at her side. "They've broken everything open?" she inquired, with contemptuous mouth.

"You know what they came for."

She seemed to consider that in its various bearings as she paused an instant. "It isn't part of what they came for, I suppose, to rob me of my savings?"

"They will tell you about that. But if you need anything—"

"I shall need everything! I have nothing fit to travel in." She spoke as though, amid the wreck of life and reputation, her wardrobe was the most important matter she had to think about.

"I should be glad," Napier answered, "if you would allow—you will find others equally ready, I dare say; but anything I could—" She would indignantly refuse, of course.

To his astonishment she stopped again, this time near the top landing, to say in a rapid whisper: "I must pay some bills. I am afraid I owe forty or fifty pounds."

Napier assured her that she would have a part at least of her money returned, "in some form."

"I greatly doubt it. I've heard how they rob us."

"I beg your pardon, they do nothing of the kind. Not in this country!"

Miss Greta tightened her lip as she went on toward her room. She looked through plump Grindley as if he'd been thin air. Nan was flying up, two steps at a time, with a sheaf of telegraph forms.

Not far behind, Wildfire came flaming. "Father wants to see you, Mr. Gavan," she said.

Sir William was at the house telephone. "Yes, yes, my dear. No fuss, no foolishness, no publicity. The very fact of our allowing Madge to see her off—I thought it a horrible idea at first, but don't you see the value of it? Oh, here's Gavan. I'll come to you in a minute."

He hung up the receiver. "Look here, Gavan, the really important thing is that the silly newspapers shouldn't get hold of this. We are sending Madge up with an old servant to see the woman off. It will quiet any misgivings in the child's mind, a thing my wife is painfully exercised about. There's no doubt it would be a dreadful shock to Meggy; and besides, the great thing is, it will choke off the suspicions of any nosing, ferreting little penny-a-liner. At least, it would if—my dear boy, there isn't any one else I would ask such a thing of, but do you think you could—would you—"

The strangeness of that leave-taking!

Miss Greta was the first to come down, calm, carefully dressed in demi-deuil, as one too fearful of the death of her father to have heart for her usual pinks and apple-greens, yet showing the front befitting the daughter of a soldier. She seemed not to notice Grindley coming slowly down behind her, nor Singleton and Napier talking together on the steps. She occupied herself with her gloves as she waited till the men-servants passed her on their way back after hoisting a wardrobe-trunk and a hat-box on top of the service-motor.

"That American box, I am afraid it was very heavy." Miss Greta smiled as she dispensed her douceurs with the demeanor Napier could have sworn Miss Greta herself took to be suitable to the daughter of a German officer. It was, at all events, the demeanor popularly supposed to be the hallmark of the duchess.

"I hope," she said, advancing to the door and speaking to Singleton, "I hope you won't mind waiting a moment for Miss McIntyre. Sir William insists on sending his daughter along to look after me."

"Sir William should have more faith in us," returned Singleton, with his agreeable smile. "We have already telegraphed to Cannon Street."

"Cannon Street!" She supported herself an instant against the jamb of the door. And then she looked back to see that the butler was out of earshot. "Sir William can't know we are going to—Cannon Street, or he wouldn't be allowing Madge—" How well she knew one aspect of London!

"I don't mean the police station," replied Singleton.

"What do you mean?" she asked, indignant at the trick.

"The hotel."

She turned another look across her shoulder. The corridor was empty. "You aren't meaning I am not to leave the hotel?"

"You won't need to leave the hotel, not till about five o'clock to-morrow afternoon."

"Why didn't you say that in time to prevent my friends here from taking all the trouble to order my room to be ready for me at their house in town?"

Mr. Singleton did not stop to point out that the order had been Miss Greta's own and that he had politely opposed it. "I am sure you must appreciate that your preference for the convenience of a hotel will come better from you."

"There are things I must go out for."

"Oh?" he looked at her.

"Shopping. I have nothing I can travel in."

Singleton caught Napier's eye, and both glanced at Behemoth disappearing down the drive on top of the service-motor. Really, these Germans! This coolly dictatorial woman knew as well as Singleton did that in the bag at his feet was evidence sufficient to imprison her for life. She also knew her luck in having been in the service of a man whom it was undesirable to involve in a scandal. Nan and Madge came running down, while Singleton, with his unfaltering politeness, was still trying to think of some way in which to meet Miss Greta's objection. "You have so many devoted friends," he suggested, "perhaps some one could do these commissions for you."

"No."

"Then I am afraid you will have to postpone your shopping till you reach home."

"I could do your shopping," Madge volunteered.

"You see!" Singleton went down the steps and turned to hand the ladies in.

Napier was sure that Miss Greta was as aware as he was of the forlorn, frightened little face peering out from the drawn blind in Lady McIntyre's room. But the woman, settling herself calmly in the car, gave no sign; at least not till Madge, on a note of sympathy that struck Napier as curious coming from that source, said with an upward glance, "Mother!" And when Greta still affected to be oblivious, the girl said peremptorily, "Look!"

"Where? Oh!" Greta raised her face. She didn't bow; merely smiled. It was one of the saddest smiles possible to see. "Your poor mother had one of her prostrating headaches to-day. I am sorry." And then the car rolled away, bearing a haunting memory of that face at the window.

If Nan's excitement at the thought of nearing London helped the party over some difficult moments, it created others.

"You see, I went straight from the docks in Liverpool to Scotland, and from Scotland to Lamborough. This is the first time in all my life—oh, what's that?" She stared out of the window. Through a gap in the huddle of suburban dwellings and factories, looming dark against the deep-blue dusk of evening, a blade of pallid light pointed upward to something invisible in the sky. "What is that?" the overseas voice asked, awestruck. While she spoke, the giant shaft moved a little and then stopped. It seemed, human-wise, to reconsider. Another bolder shaft shot up beyond it, seeming to say: "This way! Have at them, brother!" The doubtful one quivered, and flashed upward, only to be hidden as the train rushed on into the intervening immensity which was London.

"The new searchlights," Madge remarked in a dry tone. "Rum if we should come in for a Zeppelin raid!"

"How dim it is in London!" Nan said, as she stepped out of the railway carriage. "There must be a fog."

"No. They keep the lights low these days."

On the opposite side of the platform another train, a very long one, was discharging its passengers. Most of these people, with untidy hair and sleep-defrauded eyes, were dressed in stained and tumbled odds and ends. Some were in working-clothes; women in great aprons, many carrying babies; little children holding to their skirts; and nearly every soul in the motley company, even the children, had one or more bundles, bags, or boxes in their hands. They were like people who had been waked suddenly out of a nightmare and told to run for the train. They seemed not to see the prosaic sights of the platform. The look of nightmare was still in their eyes. A middle-aged woman and an old man stood clinging together. The saddest immigrant ever landed in the New World had not shown a face like these.

"Where do they come from?" Nan was looking nearly as bewildered as the foreign-speaking horde.

"They come from Belgium," Napier said.

Singleton was waiting to hand Nan and Miss Greta into his cab.

"Non! non!" a high, agitated voice said in passing, "les Allemands n'ont pas dépassé la ligne Ostende-Menin!"

Out in the street newsboys were crying an extra: "Great battle raging! Arrival of Canadian Troops!"

CHAPTER XVII

About noon the next day a couple of porters stood waiting for the service-lift at the Royal Palace hotel. Each man had a sole-leather trunk on his shoulder, a trunk so new that the initialing "G. V. S." was still wet. It was something else which halted Napier in the act of sending up his card to Miss Ellis, a glimpse of Singleton's face behind an outspread newspaper.

"Cabs full of stuff keep coming," was the gentleman's sotto voce comment.

Napier wondered drily that anybody should expect to get the stuff out of England.

"Personal wardrobe. Member of household of cabinet minister. Special privileges. And nobody knows better that avoidance of publicity is worth thousands of pounds to Sir William and, I daresay, to the Government. She's playing it for all she's worth. She's got this Mr. Julian Grant in her pocket, too. He's up with her now."

The lift came down with Nan. She made a little hurried bow, and was for escaping. Napier stood there in front of her.

"Just a minute."

"I can't; I'm sorry. I haven't got a minute."

"Yes, you have," he said bitterly, "when I tell you it's about Miss Greta's affairs."

"Oh, about Greta—"

The face was whiter, more transparent, than he had ever seen it.

"You don't look as if you'd had a wink of sleep."

Although Singleton had vanished, Nan showed little disposition to linger. As Napier stood there, looking down at the face alight with fidelity and eager service, he knew in his soul he was thankful there wasn't time, nor this the place, to wring her heart with the disgraceful truth about her friend. The last thing he expected to say was the first to come out.

"A ... you don't gather, I suppose, that Miss Greta is at all harassed about money?"

"It is kind of you to think that!" She smiled at him. "The fact is, Greta—that is, I did cable home last night. I am going back to the bank now, to see if they've heard."

Napier arrested her slight movement. "Just let me understand. Do you mean that you've overdrawn your account?"

"Oh, not overdrawn. But the gold I got this morning just finished it. I seem to have needed a good deal of money lately, one way and another."

"You got gold this morning, you say?"

"Yes; wasn't it lucky? Greta has a prejudice against paper money. She thinks it unsanitary."

"Oh, I see. And you were able to give her all she needs—of the sanitary sort?"

"No. I could get only sixty pounds."

"Not in gold?"

"Forty in sovereigns, twenty in half-sovereigns."

"You were uncommon lucky; but Miss Greta will have to give you back that sixty pounds, or the inspector will take it away at the station."

"Oh, surely not!"

"Beyond a doubt. They don't allow more than twenty pounds to be taken out of the country, and that mustn't be in gold."

She stared. "What do people do who have hundreds of pounds in your banks?"

"They have to leave it behind till the end of the war."

"Not Americans?"

Nobody, he said significantly, would be allowed to carry English gold to Germany.

Gravely, for a moment, she considered the astonishing statement.

"Heavens, the time!" Her eyes over his shoulder had found the clock.

"Only a little after twelve." He didn't stir from the stand he'd taken in front of her.

"You don't realize how much there is to do," she pleaded. Then, as he stood there so immovable, she made the best of it. "I believe, after all, I'll tell you."

"Better," he agreed.

"Well, only half an hour ago we decided Greta couldn't go alone. I'm going with her."

All his life he would remember what he went through in those next seconds.

"Julian,"—she threw in with a hurried glance at Napier's face—"Julian thinks it will be all right."

"You imagine you'll be allowed to go?" Napier said, with infinitely more firmness than he felt.

"Who would try to prevent?"

"Maybe your own embassy."

"Oh, the embassy!"

"It couldn't be anything but very unpleasant in Germany just now."

"Not for an American," she said.

"Even an American," he replied with an edge in his voice, "who has already overdrawn at the bankers' and whose cable can't, I should say, be answered in time."

A teasing, tricksy expression put her burdened seriousness to flight. "Of course I know, if I asked you, you'd lend me what I need."

"To go to Germany?"

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"No."

She smiled. A secret rapture escaped out of her eyes. "You wouldn't?" And then she seemed to put him to some test. "Julian is kinder."

"That's as it should be," he said.

She made a little harassed movement. "I must manage somehow. Julian's going to get my ticket. He's telephoning about all that now. But Greta wouldn't like me to ask Julian for a loan for her."

Napier glanced at the clock. There was still, thank Heaven, the passport difficulty. He scribbled a line on a card. All that was really essential was to make Julian abandon his efforts to remove the obstacles, and Nan would be spared what couldn't fail to be a horrible shock. His aching tenderness for the girl asked why she should ever know the truth unless, indeed, Greta von Schwarzenberg should succeed in carrying off the goose that laid the golden eggs. By all the gods, he must prevent that!

Eagerly she had watched him writing, and now she gave her own interpretation to the card Napier despatched upstairs. "It is kind of you to come and see if you can help us. But you oughtn't to have kept me! Send for a taxi, will you?" she called to the passing commissionaire. "Julian's promised not to leave poor Greta alone till I get back."

Taxis were beginning to grow scarce in London. Napier had followed her to the door; they could see the page-boy pursuing a cab. "Nan—"

She began to speak in a nervous, forestalling haste. "You've never understood about Greta. I believe it's people of strong natures that suffer the most. Last night she couldn't sleep!"

"How do you know?"

"I watched the crack of light under her door. Twice I knocked and tried to make her let me come in. She wouldn't. 'Go to sleep,' she said. As if I could! Once she unbolted the door and came on tiptoe into my room. What do you think for? To get a needle out of my case. Greta! sewing! And what do you think she found to sew? She wouldn't tell me, but I saw this morning. She had been trying to put herself to sleep by changing the buttons on that very-buttony ulster of hers. Took off all the round, bumpy ones and put on a flat kind instead. I can't see it's any improvement. But, then, I always hate buttons that don't button anything, except when they're on cute little page-boys."

The cab had rushed up to the door with Buttons on the footboard. Another of the button brotherhood stood by Napier's side.

"Will you please, sir, come up to seventy-two?"

He heard Julian's high voice through the closed door, and as it was opened, "All that doesn't matter a straw," he was shouting impatiently into the receiver. "Those regulations, you know as well as I do, can be set aside for the special case. I know she'll have to have a passport. You've got to tell the fella at the American Embassy. What? Look here, Tommy, you don't understand. I'll be round before you go to luncheon."

Napier had made his way among cardboard boxes and clothes-encumbered chairs, to the sofa where Miss Greta half sat, half lay, in a becoming mauve tea-gown. She gave him her hand.

"Hello!" said Julian, already looking up a new telephone number.

Madge came out of the adjoining bedroom, dragging an enormous brown-paper parcel along the floor. "Did you know Nan had got you the sealskin coat? How do, Mr. Gavan. It's a love of a coat. You'll wear it, won't you?"

"No; pack it," said Miss Greta, indifferently.

"But on the boat, Miss Greta. You'll want some warm—"

"I've got a coat," she said impatiently. "Take that thing back where you found it."

"I say,"—Julian jumped up to lend a hand—"I didn't know you'd come back, Madge. I might as well go now and see about the passport. What's this?"

"Can't imagine. That's why I brought it in." Between Madge and her unskilful assistant, the cord round the great bundle, already loose, came off. The contents bulged. Julian picked the unwieldy thing up in his arms, and a fold of heavy fur oozed out. And then the whole thing had half slithered out of his hold and fell along the floor.

"Lawks!" remarked Madge, with wide eyes on the superb black-fox rug, beaver-lined.

"Too heavy for anything but a Russian sledge," Julian objected.

"Well, will you take it back in there, and put it in the canvas hold-all!" Miss Greta settled back wearily against the ulster, as Madge and Julian struggled into the next room with the rug between them. "I understood Madge was going to bring the maid to do the packing," Miss Greta murmured discontentedly.

Napier leaned forward.

"Do you approve this plan of Miss Ellis going to Germany?" he asked.

"I can easily believe you don't approve it," she said with a gleam of Schadenfreude.

"I do more than disapprove," he answered under his breath. "I am going to prevent it."

"Oh? And how do you propose to do that?"

"I had meant to put a spoke in the passport wheel. But there's a better—a shorter way."

"Oh?"

He leaned nearer. "I have done my part to prevent Miss Ellis's knowing"—Greta raised her china-blue eyes—"the things some of the rest of us know."

"You are very considerate—of Miss Ellis."

"Exactly. I am too considerate of her to let her even apply for a passport without my first of all—enlightening her before you leave."

"Ah,"—she drew in her breath—"you would, would you?"

Napier was aware of having to brace himself to meet the unexpected dart of malignity out of the round eyes. But it passed—taking in the open door of the bedroom as it dropped. And in its place came pure scorn, controlled, intensely quiet, as she inquired in her society manner: "And you think Nan would believe you? You suppose for one moment that your word would stand any chance against mine?"

Napier concealed his harrowing doubt on this head. "I am to understand, then, you are willing that the facts we have been at pains to suppress should be known? Very well. I'll begin by enlightening Mr. Grant and saving him the trouble of seeing about the passport." He caught the sudden shift of focus in the china-blue eyes. "That's what I came up for," Napier added.

There was silence for an instant, except for the talk floating in through the open door: "No, let's fold it in three. I'll show you."

Was it the threat to enlighten Julian which had given her pause? "We have Singleton downstairs,"—Napier quietly suggested witnesses for the convincing of Mr. Grant—"and Grindley up."

"As if I didn't know!"

"Then you must know, too, that we are none of us making this experience harder for you than is necessary. But"—their eyes met—"we are not going to let you take that girl along."

"Couldn't live without her, eh?" she burst out. For the first time in Napier's experience of her there was a common tang in her tone.

He rose to his feet. "Simply, she is not going with you. I thought you might prefer to decide this yourself, or to tell her you have ascertained that the passport difficulty is insuperable; anything you like." She sat looking down on the film of handkerchief held affectedly in the thick, white hand. There was no sign of anxiety or haste in either her face or her weary attitude. "The alternative," Napier went on in a quick undertone, "is that she will be staying behind with full knowledge of all that we have up to now kept back."

She turned to him with smothered vehemence. "It never was my plan to take her. I don't know what on earth I'd do with her."

Napier repressed the jubilation crying out in his heart. "The question, as I say, is merely, will you give her up after struggle and exposure or will you do it quietly?"

She seemed to make a rapid calculation. "If I agree to this, will you promise that she shall never know what I've gone through, this last twenty-four hours?" The handkerchief went to her lips.

"No," said Napier, sternly, "but I'll promise that I won't enlighten her before you leave."

"And Mr. Grant? If you tell him, you may as well tell every one. He couldn't keep anything to save his neck."

"If you keep to the course I've laid down, I don't know any special reason for enlightening Mr. Grant." Napier knew that he was showing weakness over the point. Yet, after all, in a few hours the woman would be out of the country. Behind that wall of the German lines she would be lost.

By the time Julian returned to the sitting-room, Miss Greta had accepted the inevitable.

"I don't want to seem rude,"—she turned to Napier with her weary grace—"but I think I must ask to be left alone awhile. Perhaps you'll be so very kind as to explain to Mr. Grant that in these circumstances of family affliction"—only Napier recognized the Adelphi touch in the phrase and in the lace-bordered handkerchief pressed to heroic lips—"the more I think of it, the more I feel it would be best for me to go home alone."

Napier went back to the hotel at five o'clock with Julian, who drove his own big car to take the three to the station. The progress was slow and penitential, for Miss Greta declined to lose sight of the two taxis which followed with the luggage. Napier, with Madge at his side, sitting opposite Nan and Miss Greta, found himself taking refuge from the unconscious reproach in Nan's face by studying the buttons on Miss Greta's ulster. There was a great many of those buttons. The immense labor of changing them induced thoughtfulness. They were thicker, but weren't the bigger ones exactly sovereign size? The smaller on collar, cuffs, and pocket-flaps—weren't they precisely of half-sovereign dimensions, excepting, again in thickness? He began to count....

"Look at that shop!" Nan leaned forward over the long narrow cardboard box she was carrying.

The front glass was smashed, the place empty. Over the door was a sign, "Zimmerman, Family Baker." A little way on stood yet another shop with demolished front. On the opposite side was a third. There were seven in all, over each a German name.

Nan looked away. Miss Greta seemed not to have heard the exclamation, seemed to see nothing.

Some recruits for the army came lumping along, out of step, a sorry enough crew, pasty-faced, undersized, in ill-fitting, shabby, civilian clothes.

The china-blue eyes that had "gone blind" in front of raided German shops were full of vision before this mockery of militarism. As she looked out upon the human refuse for which war had found a use at last, the subtle pity in Miss Greta's face asked as plain as words, "What chance have these poor deluded 'volunteers' against the well-drilled German, fed and fashioned for war?"

The station at last! As Napier helped Miss Greta out, the front of her ulster swung heavily against his leg. "Sovereigns!" he said to himself.

The station was already densely crowded. While Napier and Madge mounted guard over Behemoth and the lesser luggage, Julian and Nan, with Miss Greta between them, disappeared in the crush.

When the reconnoitering party reappeared, Singleton was with them, porters at his beck, in his hand Miss Greta's ticket, passport, and German and Dutch money to the value of twenty pounds. He met the chief inspector as if by appointment, near the luggage, that loomed so important by contrast with that of other travelers.

To Miss Greta—although in her ugly ulster she looked less a person of consequence than she might—was plainly accorded a special consideration. Mr. Singleton was there to see to that. He could not, to be sure, prevent some respectful interrogation as to the money, etc., she was taking out of the country, some perfunctory examination of luggage.

The only anxious face in the group was Nan's. Miss Greta, calm as a May morning, her round eyes trustingly raised to the inspector's face, with eighty to ninety pounds in English gold on her coat, and how much more elsewhere who should say, offering her purse and keys. "One is an American lock. I may have to help you with that," she said sweetly.

Napier half-turned his back on them, but he stood so that he could keep an eye on the stricken face above the long cardboard box which Nan was carrying as if it were an infant. Through the din Greta's innocent accents reached him. "Nobody ever told me! Oh, dear, my poor little savings!" When Nan turned her tear-filled eyes away from the group about Behemoth, Napier joined her.

"What shall you do after—after she is gone?" he asked.

"I haven't an idea beyond going back to the hotel to wait for my cable from home." She made a diversion of opening the long cardboard box and taking out six glorious roses tied with leaf-green and rose-colored ribbon. But she held the flowers absently.

"I shall be at my chambers. If I can be of any—"

"Oh, thank you. I shan't need anything."

When Napier faced round again, Greta was smiling gently on the melted inspector. Perhaps that functionary wouldn't have "forgotten" to confiscate the few pieces of gold so frankly shown had he known they were the mere residue left over from the lady's midnight activities.

They found themselves on the platform with, unhappily, time still to spare. Singleton made polite conversation with Miss Greta, abetted by Julian and Madge—who was taking the approaching parting with astonishing composure. A lesson to poor Nan who couldn't keep the tears out of her eyes. Her effort to smile very nearly cost both her and Napier their self-possession. She went abruptly away from him, and stood dumb behind Greta at Julian's side.

"Take your places!"

A whistle blew. Miss Greta was shaking hands with Singleton. "Thank you so much. You have been kind." Her good-by to Julian and to Napier were quieter, but entirely cordial. She embraced Madge with dramatic fervor. "My darling child! We'll never forget—"

Nan stood, the tears running down her cheeks unchecked, and probably unaware. A little apart she stood, all her sympathy, her very soul, flowing out as a final offering. "Good-by, my Nanchen!" Miss Greta kissed her on both cheeks. "You'll write me? And you won't forget me?"

Nan was far past power of words. She thrust the roses toward Greta with a look that made Napier himself feel he could fall to crying. Even Miss Greta seemed touched by some final compunction. The carriage-door had no sooner slammed on her than she turned suddenly as if she had forgotten something. "Nanchen!" she leaned out and took the girl's face in her two hands. She bent and whispered. The guards shouted. The train began to move.

"Oh, will you? Will you, Greta?" Nan was running along the platform with upturned face.

Miss Greta leaned far out, giving a flutter of white to the wind and leaving a smile for memory.

Thank God! Napier breathed an inward prayer. She can't do any more harm here.

Nan stood staring at the last coaches. Napier touched her arm. "Well?" he said gently.

"I oughtn't to be miserable," she wiped her wet cheeks. "To have Greta soon to help me to bear things—ought to make it possible to bear them now."

"You are still counting on her help?"

She nodded, "I'm to hold myself ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To join her. I shall pack my trunk to-night."

At the tail of the dispersing crowd, they were following Julian and Madge down the platform. Napier slowed his pace, looking down at the face beside him. Weeks, months, of passionate, fruitless waiting—no! "I promised her," he said,—"the lady we've just seen the last of—that I wouldn't enlighten you about her true character till she was gone. You won't feel so badly at losing her when you hear what we know about Miss von Schwarzen—"

"Oh, oh!" Nan stood quite still an instant. "I thought Greta did you an injustice! You—you disappoint me horribly." She fled on to catch up the others.

After all, what was the use of quarreling about a woman who was out of the Saga? In a little while Nan would be able to bear the truth. Not yet, it was too soon.

Julian was to take her back to the hotel; and that wasn't the worst. Napier couldn't even go away by himself. He knew he ought to see Madge to Lowndes Square, where the McIntyre motor and maid were to call at seven o'clock for the purpose of conveying the young lady to Lamborough. It was, at all events, something to be thankful for that Madge wasn't howling. So far as Napier had observed, she hadn't shed a tear. This wasn't the first occasion upon which Madge's late self-possession had vaguely puzzled Napier.

The drive back to Lamborough was a silent one, except for that extraordinary five minutes or so, after Madge had turned to say, "I wish Nan had come back with us, don't you?"

"Yes," he said, "I wish she had."

"I begged her to. I said, 'What shall you do at that hotel?' and she said she hardly knew yet. She'd see. Rotten arrangement, I call it."

Napier smiled down at the girl. It occurred to him she was looking tired, too. And she hadn't cried a tear that Napier had seen. "You seem to be getting on better with our American friend," he said, teasing. "Stood it like a Spartan, even when you thought she was going to Germany with Miss Greta."

"Well, I thought Miss Greta needed somebody."

"But didn't you want the somebody to be you?"

"No."

He looked at her again. "I suppose you're expecting to have Miss Greta back after the war."

"No," she said again, looking straight in front of her.

The thought of the solicitude of her parents to keep the dear child in the dark, suddenly flashed over him, along with the conviction, Madge knows!

Was it possible she accepted Greta's guilt? He couldn't make it out at all. "Weren't you sorry to see her go?"

"It was horrid," she admitted. After a few seconds she found a steadier voice in which to say, "It's been pretty horrid anyway, you know. We could prevent people from saying things, but we couldn't prevent them from looking things. They wanted her to be a disgusting spy. They hated her worse for not being."

"Why don't you want her back when the war is over?"

She drew her red eyebrows together in a frown. "I expect," she said slowly, "it will be best for Germans to stay at home."

Napier laughed, but he felt sorry, in a way, to see Wildfire growing so sage. Evidently she had gone through a great deal in these weeks, a great deal of which she had given no sign. Behind her homesickness for her idol, Napier detected a great relief at the idol's being out of the way of suspicion and misprizing.

"That was why I wanted so to go and see her off. To try to make up a little; to do everything we could do just because I felt there'd never be any other chance." The tears came at last. "She was nice, wasn't she, Mr. Gavan?"

"She was wonderful." And before they fell back into that silence that lasted till they reached Lamborough, he asked, "How long have you known, Meggy?"

"Been sure only since yesterday—those men, what they did to her room."

There was good stuff in the McIntyre child, he said to himself. The part she'd played wouldn't have shamed Napier or even a Nicholson Grant.

There was nobody about to receive them on their return. When Madge had gone up to her mother, Napier took his way down the hall to Sir William's room. But he caught sight of him through the open door of the drawing-room at the far end. Sir William sat reading. That was natural enough, and he was sitting in his own chair. But as far away as Napier could see his chief, he was vaguely aware of something odd about the figure that was, or should be, so intimately familiar. It wasn't merely that Sir William did not instantly rise to his feet, seal-jingling, and call out, "Evening paper? Anything new about—" The first impression was of a man smaller than Napier had realized Sir William to be. Or had he—Napier half smiled at the grotesque idea—had he shrunken in these last hours? The great chair Miss Greta had fetched for him from Kirklamont certainly did seem ludicrously too big for a being so diminished, not only in body, but in spirit. His quick turns and vivid ways—what, Napier wondered with a dreamlike feeling as he walked down the room, had happened to all the familiar, foolish, endearing oddities? For an instant the thought thrust shrewdly, Is he dead? No, he moved.

"Well, sir, we have done your commission."

Like the action of a wooden automaton, one short-fingered hand was pushed out toward the reading-desk. It seemed to point to the small phial that lay on the ledge of the rack; the phial he had carried in his pocket for months now as precaution in the event of an attack of angina. But Sir William's eyes were not on the phial. They were fixed on an open telegram.

And it was that telegram Sir William had sat reading. For how long?

The telegram regretted to inform him that his son, Captain Colin McIntyre, while bravely leading his battalion, had been killed in action.

CHAPTER XVIII

Whatever it was she had heard or not heard from Germany, Nan presently unpacked her trunk and installed herself in a flat in Westminster, with a servant, two aged Belgian refugee women, and the grand-son of one of them, a little boy of five.

That for some time was the extent of Napier's knowledge of what was going on.

For the rest of that bewildering, tormenting autumn he had, with one or two exceptions, only fleeting and infrequent glimpses of the girl. And this in spite of the fact that she and Madge had set up an intimate friendship. Until a certain day in December, the two were often together both at the Lowndes Square house and at Nan's flat. The Belgian women, Napier gathered, were a sore trial. But that is another story.

Napier knew quite well he hadn't his lack of sympathy with her Belgian complications to thank for the sense of gêne, of being on new and uncertain ground in such encounters with Nan as the times permitted. Was it because she knew, and resented, his having prevented her going to Germany in Greta's wake? Or was it because some inkling had reached her as to the rifling of Greta's room at Lamborough? Madge couldn't have resisted the temptation to tell Nan the whole story by now. And why should Napier alone keep silence? Why, anyway, keep up this fiction of Greta's impeccability? "I'll have it out with Nan at the very first opportunity!"

Napier was almost happy, for a time, anticipating his first opportunity.

It came after a highly uncomfortable luncheon at Lowndes Square, the occasion of Julian's last appearance in that house where, ever since boyhood, he had been so welcome.

Ten minutes after the older people had sat down, Madge came in, bringing Julian and Nan Ellis. The girls wore that look of happy responsibility that had begun to shine on young faces in England.

"I've joined the Emergency Corps," Madge announced.

"Your new excuse for being late for meals," Sir William exclaimed, with a brusquerie intended to strike a few enlivening sparks out of Wildfire. And she actually let it pass.

Lady McIntyre, in her fashionable mourning, more shrunken and piteous than ever, went on addressing to Julian her polite inanities, couched for the most part in that form of acknowledged intellectual poverty, the question. How many more months did Julian think this dreadful war was going to last? "They" couldn't get home by Christmas now, could they? Wasn't it wicked, after promising? And what did Julian think about the letters in the papers about possible air raids?

"Wildest folly ever talked!" Sir William interjected.

"It's true," said Lady McIntyre, hopefully. "William has never believed there's the least chance of a Zeppelin reaching England."

"As much as your descending on Berlin out of a parachute. To insure against air raids is to waste money and cocker up the Germans."

"Do you think so, too?" Lady McIntyre fixed her blue eyes on Julian Grant's face. "Do you know, in spite of what William says, I can't help feeling that every one who goes out at night in these dreadful times ought to take precautions." As no one responded, she strengthened her point. "I hear the streets grow darker and darker. Every night—yes, every single night—people are run over. The only way is for everybody who goes out at night to insure themselves."

Nobody seemed to have the heart to disturb her apparent belief that to insure against accident meant that a stop would be put to these regrettable affairs.

"All this talk in the papers," Sir William went on, "is pure concession to panic. Like the nonsense about what the submarines might do. Nothing could suit Germany's book better."

"Except, I suppose, sinking our ships." For the first time Julian took some interest in the conversation.

"Sinking our ships!" quavered Lady McIntyre.

"I should have thought the loss of the Aboukir and Cressy (those awful casualty-lists!) might have made people a little less ready to talk about our invulnerable Navy."

"So,"—Sir William laid down his knife and fork and fell to seal-rattling under the table—"so you've come now to doubt the power of the British Navy!"

"I've come," said Julian, "to see the danger of not doubting it."

The seals joined the general silence.

"I wonder," Sir William remarked dryly, "what your father would say to your views."

"I could tell you, sir, if it mattered."

"If it mattered! God bless my soul!" Sir William looked at Julian for the first time with cold dislike.

After luncheon the younger members of the party still hung aimlessly about the table in the hall, while Sir William and Lady McIntyre opened the letters brought by the latest post.

Napier tried in vain, by any of the unmarked means, to detach Nan from the others. Finally he said, with less indirectness than he often permitted himself, "I never see you now. Are you still too devoured by the Belgian locusts to have anything left for your older—friends?"

"Locusts! How can you? I am not at all devoured. Or, if I am, it's by something quite different." She said it with her air of new importance.

"But in the midst of it all,"—she lowered her voice and spoke now as one positively beset by weighty affairs—"I keep worrying about Julian. Just because,"—she glanced back at him as he stood talking "Emergency Corps" with Madge—"just because he doesn't in the least worry about himself. Have you heard about the way his relations are behaving?"

"No," said Napier, disingenuously. "How are they behaving?"

"Simply abominably. Some of his friends, too. They cold-shoulder him in private; and in public—they cut him!" Her eyes gleamed with anger. "If they think that's the way to discourage Julian, they know very little!"

"I wish some one would discourage him from rubbing my old man the wrong way."

"He doesn't mean to," she said, with a proprietary air that haunted Gavan afterwards, "but, you see, Sir William and Julian approach everything from opposite poles."

Behind his soreness and annoyance, Napier was secretly amused at "the child's judicial air," as he characterized it to himself. "At opposite poles, are they? It would be interesting to know what they were—those 'poles.'"

"Oh, you think I don't know? Well, I do. Sir William's idea of the problem of government is the same as his idea of the problem of the individual. To acquire. Julian's is to apportion. To administer."

"Who told you all that?" he inquired gently.

She reddened. "You can't say it isn't so. To take care of other people's interests," repeated the parrot, "is the only way to take care of your own."

"Does Julian find the axiom work in his case?"

She reflected a trifle anxiously. "You've heard then?"

"Heard—?"

"His father has cut down Julian's income."

No, Napier hadn't heard that, but he wasn't surprised. Nan looked at him, indignant.

"You aren't surprised? You take it as a matter of course!" She turned away her head as she said, "Oh! I wish I could just once see his mother—" She stopped short. After considering an instant, "You couldn't manage it, I suppose?"

No, that wasn't a thing Napier could manage. He positively welcomed the exclamation from Lady McIntyre which cut the colloquy short.

"Another—upon my word!" An envelope fluttered to the waste-paper basket. She held an open paper in her hand.

"Another what, mum?" Madge left Julian to lean over her mother's shoulder. "Oh!" One glance was enough for Madge. She turned away. But one glance didn't suffice for Lady McIntyre. "It's too, too much!" She went over to Sir William, who had withdrawn with his letters to the window. They stood talking in lowered voices.

Nan's inquiring look met Madge's offhand explanation: "Another of Greta's bills. That makes £160, just for furs."

"Oh!" Nan stood up, then, in an access of shyness, "Just go and ask your mother to let me have it."

"No good!" Wildfire shook her mane. "She won't. She thinks you've had enough of 'em sent direct to you."

"Your mother doesn't understand. It's all right. I'm taking care of these things for Greta."

"Have you had another letter?" Wildfire demanded.

"No. I told you she's nursing her father day and night. She hasn't time to; besides, it's understood."

"Why do some of the bills come to us and some to you?"

Nan stood nonplussed an instant and then said:

"It's all right, I tell you."

"You mean you think she's going to pay you back?"

"Well, of course." Nan crossed the room and stood a moment in front of Lady McIntyre, with hand extended and speaking in an undertone.

"You may take it from me"—Sir William didn't moderate his tone—"Miss von Schwarzenberg won't pay the money back." His voice rose higher over the low protest. "For one thing, she can't."

"You think she hasn't got it?" Nan inquired.

"Oh, I haven't much doubt she's got it; but even if she wanted to repay you, she won't be allowed to send money out of Germany."

"Surely she'll be allowed to pay her debts?"

"Miss Greta would tell you, 'No trading allowed with the enemy.'" Sir William dismissed the matter with decision.

"You hear that, Julian? Not allowed to pay her debts!"

Nan's instinctive turning to Julian for sympathy and understanding was no more lost on Napier than Julian's comment, "There's no end to the little wickednesses of war as well as the great central one." He threw down the illustrated paper he'd been glancing at and took his hat. "Come along," he said to Nan under his breath. "Let's get out of this."

"Good-by." She held out her hand to Napier as he stood looking at the paper Sir William had given him. "I'm sure, if you aren't, Greta didn't know that horrid new rule."

"Good-by," was all Napier said.

"Of course she didn't know!" Julian atoned for the other's omission. "Come," he repeated impatiently, as Nan stood saying last things to Madge. "They're expecting us."

She started. "Expecting me too?"

"Yes, expecting you."

The girl glowed. No more urging needed.

Napier had, even then, a fairly shrewd idea of who was expecting them. And he had let her go without asking her the question he meant to ask! Was it worth while, after all? Wasn't it enough to know that since Greta von Schwarzenberg had left bills for furs, and trunks, and clothing to be paid for by her friends, she would inevitably leave a still heavier account to be paid for by her enemy? Napier "paid" every time he met Nan Ellis, and he knew he paid.

A deep disheartenment laid hold of him. His only escape from it was work. Enough of that and to spare. He had difficulty in finding time for drill, even at "the oddest hours"—odd for a young gentleman of his habits. Yet for the work that lay closest to his heart odd hours were all that Gavan had. This came about partly by reason of Sir William's increased need for, and increased dependence on, his secretary, partly because of his impatience with the desire of men like Gavan to join their university corps, or some other O. T. C. "and waste their time playing at soldiers." It was no good for Gavan to remind Sir William of the lack of officers to fill the gaps abroad, and the lack of instructors at home. "By the time you'd be able to instruct anybody the war'll be over!"

And still Gavan managed double duty during the last weeks of the fateful old year and the early days of the problematic new. The thoughts of people at home, after following day by day, hour by hour, the bloody November struggle for Ypres, settled now on those survivors who were making their first acquaintance with the stark misery of winter in the trenches. It stood to reason this sort of thing couldn't go on.

The next thing would be peace.

Those who believed in Kitchener agreed that no man as shrewd as K. of K. had ever made a prophecy so absurd on the face of it as that alleged dictum of his, "The war will last three years." The only way of understanding it was to interpret it as a recruiting call, and a final flourish in the face of the Teuton. K. of K. must have 100,000 men. Have 'em at once, too. Let the Germans put that in their pipes and smoke it!

Meanwhile the Germans were struggling for Calais and bombarding Rheims, and over on the other side of the world President Wilson talked peace.

Napier watched the gradual khaki-ing that came over the male population of the United Kingdom; watched regiments marching by day to the tune of "Tipperary," marching by night very quietly, on each man's shoulder a long white bundle, like little canvas bolsters—men on their way to entrain for the front, following in the wake of that fourth of the Expeditionary Army which had already fallen. With as little publicity as possible, hospitals multiplied. People began to look upon wounded soldiers in the streets without that shuddering, first passion of pity, that mingled gratitude and anger at the price exacted of those maimed men. "The price of our present, and our children's future safety," said the many. "The price of our past blundering," said the few. Of these, Julian, in season and out of season, rubbed in the unwelcome truth.

Napier was seeing nearly as little in these days of Julian as of Nan. They had had high words over the development and intensification of Julian's opposition to the war, and in particular over his strictures on the Government. Napier had studiously avoided all reference to Nan Ellis. Such efforts as had been possible to keep in touch with her were mainly unsuccessful. He had a minimum of time he could call his own, and she apparently had none at all. She was never at the little flat in Westminster except late at night, and she was seldom in Lowndes Square. Madge, too, resented this preoccupation on the part of her new ally. "Oh, don't ask me where she is. Gone to see some of Mr. Grant's queer friends, I suppose."

By this side wind and that, he gathered that Nan was being swept into the little pacifico-philosophic group and was thick as thieves with certain men and women whose names were beginning to be anathema to the general public. Gradually, in Napier's mind, the conviction tightened. If something isn't done, they'll not only have made a convert of that girl, they'll be making use of her—some use or other, God knew what!—for their nefarious ends.

Instead of Julian's protecting her, he'd likely as not do the other thing. All from the loftiest motives!

And upon that, Napier's first motion of enmity toward the man who had been his closest friend. Strangely to his own sense, with far more bitterness than he resented Julian's notorious anti-war work, Napier would, as he knew now, resent the harnessing of the airy spirit of the girl to that lumbering and ill-looked-on car.

What was to be done?

He had stood aside out of loyalty to his friend, who was also (as he reminded himself a thousand times) the first comer in the field. The field of private feeling. Yes. But there was no obligation upon Napier to stand aside while the girl he loved was swamped in a bog of disloyalty to the country, and of personal reprobation. Worse. Of personal danger.

No! he wasn't going to look on at that and not raise a hand. The old struggle which he thought he had abandoned, wearing this new face, became possible once more. Possible? It became inevitable. For it had become a duty. So he told himself.

The trouble was that on the rare occasions when he was with her, something in the new post-Greta manner of the girl—an intangible but effectual barrier—so barred the way to even the beginning of renewed confidence, that Napier, over-worked, over-anxious, found the edge of his impulse turned. He would leave her, saying to himself, "I'll have this out with Julian." And when he found himself with Julian for a few hasty minutes, "having it out" proved so baulked and inconclusive a business, "I must tackle Nan," Napier would say to himself.

Not that he failed altogether to tackle Julian, nor to tackle him on the admittedly burning questions: such as Julian's speech introducing a deputation to the Prime Minister, or that highly provocative letter assailing British pre-war diplomacy, the letter rejected by the "Times" and "accepted, of course, by the dingiest radical rag in the kingdom."

"They are using you!" Napier had burst out.

"I am content to be used. I ask nothing better."

More quietly, more gravely, Napier agreed it was a thing about which a man must be his own judge. But by so much he must hesitate to judge for others. "The Pacifists are making a cat's-paw of you, I tell you. If you like that for yourself ..." he shrugged. Then, abandoning his momentary return to the laissez-aller form of other days, he looked straight into Julian's eyes and with an earnestness that would have enlightened any one but Grant, "I don't know how you reconcile it to your conscience to involve a girl in such ..." he broke off. As Julian stood waiting serenely: "A girl as young and as far away from home—"

"Nan! Oh, you don't know Nan!"

Another time: "Why drag her into—all this?" Gavan demanded. "It isn't as if she could do anything."

"Oh, can't she!"

"What, in the name of—"

Although Julian wouldn't answer, an opportunity came to put the question to Nan. Napier found himself sitting opposite her at dinner in Lowndes Square on the night following the House of Commons debate on German spies. That topic, in the forefront of every mind, was ignored by tacit consent. Conversation fell for a few memorable minutes on the appalling statement, just issued officially, that there had been 57,000 casualties in the British Expeditionary Force up to the end of October. How many had fallen since in the bloody struggle about Ypres, fiercest of the war, and how many on either side would survive the stark misery of that first little-prepared-for winter in the trenches, no one present had heart to ask. But the question, urged in print and cried from platforms by Julian and his friends, was there in the girl's face.

Sir William seemed to answer by saying the one redeeming feature of the business was that it was too awful to last. The Germans must see they have failed.

"Why," the girl asked, with her candid eyes on her host, "if the Government believed that, why was Lord Kitchener calling for a hundred thousand men?"

"Oh, that—that was to show the Germans what they had to expect if they didn't come to their senses."

While the dessert was going round, she got up, with a look at the clock and an apology. It was understood that she had an engagement.

"Always an emergency in these days," Sir William mocked pleasantly at the Women's Corps. "Gavan, see they get her a taxi, will you?"

The footman's whistle grew fainter as Napier helped her into her coat. They hadn't been alone since those hurried moments on the platform after Greta had gone. Something now in her slight awkwardness as she struggled with her coat, her increased anxiety to be off ("I ought to have gone ten minutes ago. I can always find a cab quicker than a footman") gave Napier a feeling that he had misinterpreted her avoidance. Not the new Greta-born distrust of him, but distrust of herself. His heart rose at that quick conviction. Rogers wouldn't be long, he reassured her, and then: "I wish he might, or, rather, I wish I hadn't to go back to the House with Sir William. I'd take you wherever it is you are going." He stopped suddenly.

"Would you? Would you really? That's what I've been longing to ask. You wouldn't sit dumb, helpless, like me if once you'd heard Julian—"

"I'm under the impression that I have 'heard Julian.'"

"No! no! not just arguing with you. I mean at one of the meetings."

"I see. Where I can't answer back."

"And now you're looking like that!" She turned away with nervous abruptness, but he had interposed between her and the doorknob.

"And you—have you any idea how unhappy you are looking?"

"Well, why not?—if it is, as Julian says, 'such a brute of a world.'"

"Julian oughtn't to think so," Napier said bitterly. "Julian has you—"

"Oh, has he! Poor Julian!"

"Do you mean he hasn't?" They were both trembling.

"I mean, whether he has or hasn't, we aren't rid of the miserableness. Once you are started wrong, you can't get right, it seems. Not without—" Suddenly her eyes filled. A shower of words tumbled out in a shaken whisper: "At first—oh, for long, I thought you hardly knew I was there, at Kirklamont, in the world! Then, when you began to notice me, it was only to criticize me. Oh, I used to see you laughing; not with your mouth, with your eyes. You laughed at Julian, too, for thinking I was all right." She broke in upon his protest, which was none the less horrified for being self-convicted.

"Yes, yes; you tried to prevent Julian from caring. I could have forgiven you that," she said, with her look of indignant candor; "yes, I could easily have forgiven you if you'd done it from any nice reason, like jealousy. You didn't do it from a nice reason." Still under her breath, she hurled it at him.

"Hush! They might—" he glanced at the dining-room door.

"You thought I shouldn't 'do.' Julian—well, maybe you know what he thought. So I let him try to make up to me. He couldn't, but I let him try. And what's come out of it all is that Julian—"

"Yes, yes; I know, I know."

"I've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see"—she seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall light, vehement, unhappy—"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And besides that, Julian's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, why are you!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between love of a person and hate of his creed.

They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal years. I kept thinking that Julian won't ever come here again. And what a pity it was! Unless you—do come and hear him, Gavan, with me! To-morrow afternoon. Please!"

"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."

And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.

Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow—so narrow as to be negligible—limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace, no general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a draw as its opposite.

Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the ex-member of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans that ultimately drowned his appeal.

No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up there facing the crowd. Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His boyishness, and that something of moral passion that compelled you to listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.

His voice reached Napier tired and hoarse:

"You don't believe the Germans were encircled in a band of iron? You don't believe they hadn't sufficient outlet for their immense capacities? Oh, no; the commercial greed of other nations didn't hem them in! Tell me, then, what's behind this vast discovery of German activity in lands not their own? What about the difficulty even in England of combing them out of commerce, out of clubs, even out of Parliament? What about the hold they have in Sweden and Holland; in Genoa; in South America, not to speak of the United States? Now, notice. No other nation has so disseminated itself about the globe in practical activities. What's the reason? Can you answer that? Wrong. The reason is that energy must go somewhere. The Germans weren't to have colonies; they weren't to have seaports, not openly. So they took them in the only way left. They took them by a vast, silent effort that has sown the German broadcast over the world."

Agreement as to that exploded in every direction. The speaker strained his voice to dominate the din:

"They didn't specially love us—the Germans. No; nor we them, perhaps."

He was forced to wait till the enthusiasm which greeted that view had spent itself.

"Now, just think a moment. The Germans—I'm speaking of before the war, remember—they believed theirs was the only true civilization."

Wild derision from the English cockneys. The few soldiers scattered through the crowd appeared to have less emotion to expend than did the civilians. They listened stolidly. In the first lull the speaker went on:

"Now, why—why did these notorious home-lovers turn their backs on what for them was the only true civilization? Why did they come here in such numbers?"

"To spy!"

"To steal our jobs!"

"'Peaceful penetration' for the ends of war!"

"Listen! They overran us and other countries because we prevented the legitimate expansion of the German Empire."

High and clear over the confused shouting, "That's a lie!" a voice cried angrily. The direct charge acted like a stimulant. The word "lie" was caught up by a score of throats.

"An' why ain't 'e at the front?"

Above the increasing disorder Napier caught fragments from the platform:

"Waste places of the earth, crying out for labor and development. Yes, in bitter need of something the German could give, wanted to give—"

But pandemonium had broken loose, and reigned irresistible for some moments. As the wave of sound ebbed, those high, fife-like notes, conquering hoarseness for a moment, soared above the din and over the bobbing heads of the multitude:

"Waste places! Yet we grudged even the waste places to that supremely hard-working people. Why?"

A hail of answers, every one a stone of scorn.

"As you don't seem to know why it was we grudged these places to the Germans, you'd better let me tell you. We grudged them to an industrious people because the people weren't British people. What happened? No! no! no! Listen! The Germans—the Germans—"

Cries of "Belgium!" mixed with booing and cursing, drowned the voice again and again till the moment when it rose with "they" in lieu of the word intolerable.

"They have done what you say. I'm not here to deny it. They've turned the most fertile lands of Europe into wastes. Why? Because we refused them the places that were already waste. Energy must go somewhere. Energy that could have helped to save the world has gone to the devastation of Belgium, to the ruin of France. Gone to the torture and death of tens of thousands of British men. Whose fault? Ours, ours, I tell you!"

A roar went up as the crowd surged forward. Napier, carried with it, saw men near the foot of the platform gesticulating wildly with clenched fists above their heads:

"Liar! Pro-German!"

And still the penny-whistle voice shrilled clear a moment over the turgid outpouring of muddy minds:

"The vast crime, the unparalleled lunacy of war! If I have a private quarrel and I kill my opponent, I am hanged for a felon. If the Government I live under has a public quarrel, and at their bidding I kill some man I never saw before, I am a patriot. No! I am a murderer."

That was more than the soldiers could stand. They joined in the rush for the column. Yet, as Napier remembered afterward, the soldiers who by implication had been called murderers were less like wild beasts in their fury than the men who had stayed at home. The men weren't in khaki who strove, vainly at the first essay, by dint of climbing on other men's shoulders, to storm the platform.

As for Napier, he would never have been able to get anywhere near the speaker but that his precipitation was taken by those about him for uncontrollable rage. Even with the aid of hatred to forge him a way, he found getting to the front a cursedly impeded business. Then came that moment of sheer physical sickness at his closer vision of the pack of wolves ravening below the unfriended figure. Julian, facing the onset, facing the hate-inflamed eyes in heads just appearing above the platform; Julian still crying peace in that appalling loneliness which typified his yet greater loneliness in a nation and a time given up to war.

Ruffians with villainous faces, and simpletons fired with the responsibility of standing up for England, doing it so safely, too, by means of breaking the head of one young gentleman—up the platform they scrambled after their ringleaders and closed round the speaker.

In those last few hard-won yards Napier had collected a policeman. But above the attackers had fought Julian, to the edge of the platform. Napier had an instant's glimpse of him with a splash of scarlet down his face before they threw him over.

Upon that, a new emotion seized the crowd—a panic born of the consciousness of limits to police indifference. The mass swayed and broke away from where the figure had fallen. There were plenty of policemen, now that the need for their intervention was past.

Napier shouted to them for an ambulance, as he ran forward. Of the faces bent over the figure lying limp at the foot of the platform, one was lifted—Nan Ellis's.

"Wait!" Napier called to one of the policemen. "Get that lady out of this, will you?"

But the lady would come when she could take "him" along. "A taxi, please."

Some one had given her a large-sized pocket-handkerchief. She made a bandage and tied it round the bleeding head. Some one else fetched a cab for the lady. And the ambulance would be there in a minute.

"Oh, he'll hate the ambulance! Help me to get him to the cab!" she besought.

His eyelids opened, and he moaned a little as, between Napier and one of the policemen, Julian was carried through the alley which had been opened in the crowd. As the limp figure was borne past, they muttered and jeered.

"Oh, hush!" cried a voice. "Isn't it enough to have nearly killed him?" Nan's question cut its way through the muttering and hate; it startled the people into momentary silence. But when the little procession had gained the cab and were driving off, the anger of the disintegrated mob broke out afresh. The air was filled with cries, and for several hundred yards men and boys ran along by the taxi, shouting insult and imprecation through the window.

Napier looked out. Not one of those foul-mouthed pursuers wore khaki or sailor's blue.

That was something.

CHAPTER XIX

Late that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed."

Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new lodging, with the avowed intention of taking him home and seeing that he was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene.

In the midst of it, in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian in a few faint sentences put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the morning.

"Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me."

In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back into his mother's favor.

"Do they meet, those two?" Arthur asked.

"My mother and Nan? Rather. They get along like a house afire."

If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged circles of British shell shortage at the Front. The Germans had shells to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby; five hundred casualties, the papers said.

In spite of all the evil news, Julian was better. You could read that in his mother's face.

"I believe he'll be able to go over to America early in the new year," she said.

"To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed.

"It would be everything to have him out of England till the war is over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the law and the prophets, but so a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't you agree?"

"Then—they're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out.

"Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything? The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we shouldn't like it, so I took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said the lady reflectively. "She must have been confused, for what do you think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can I help caring about anybody with such a perfectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Wasn't that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James see it as I did, and that it would all come right."

Julian's way of helping it all to "come right" was to employ his convalescence in carrying on the propaganda from his sick bed with unabated ardor; or, rather, an ardor increased by the excitement of its transmission largely through Nan Ellis.

That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given her recurred to him again and again. Messenger, indeed! carrying contraband, not to say high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street!

The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That was the heart-breaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news. Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the more private hour.

Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to allow them any more to discuss these things. And here was some one wholly forgetting, if she had ever heard, that constraint-breeding, melancholy fact; some one who pronounced the words abhorred in an even, every-day voice, smiled the while, and sat at her ease. Too newly Julian had skirted death for his mother not to make shift to endure that which first brought back the hues and lights of life to the corpse-white face.

Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn bed-table.

During one of Napier's visits, he had seen her rise and leave the room. When she came back, she found Julian laughing as he hadn't for many a day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick.

Sometimes the messenger didn't spare the mixed audience in Berkeley Street a graver, more passionate mood.

"Mr. Lazenby was wonderful, talking about the awful casualty lists, and the way sheer hate is shriveling up men's minds. I do wish you'd heard, Julian, what he said about America and what President Wilson might do for peace."

"By minding his own affairs and not interfering with our blockade? Yes." For once Lady Grant and her enemies were in accord.

"I told them," Nan went on, smiling at Julian, "that you said the President had the greatest opportunity in all history. 'Eggs-actly!'" she lifted and brought down her slim arm in accurate reproduction of Lazenby's sledgehammer gesture: "'The President of the United States is the man to go for!' They had cheered that. '—The man with a more absolute power and a greater range of action that any ruler on the earth to-day!'"

"Just so!" Lady Grant's deep voice came down more quietly but hardly less heavy than Lazenby's hammer, "—Raging socialists building all their hopes on the irresponsible Despot."

"Oh.... Despots!" Miss Nan appeared to pass these gentlemen in mental review. "Do you know, they've done something more outrageous than ever?"

Now we'll have it, Gavan thought to himself. He had been conscious on this particular evening of an undercurrent of emotion in the smooth stream of the girl's talk—a peculiar shining in her eyes, that perplexed him. It certainly wasn't happiness. She was for once keeping back something.

"I told you," she said suddenly to Julian, with that new intimacy which seemed to clear the room of other occupants, "I told you Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book was practically finished. Yes. Well, the authorities aren't going to let it be published."

"What!" Julian very nearly leaped out of bed. "Suppress the greatest contribution to sane thinking since 'Progress and Poverty'? To dare to ban the 'Philosophy of Force' and pretend we are fighting for liberty!"

"You ought not to have told him," Lady Grant reproached the girl.

Julian caught his mother up. "Not tell me? Of course she had to tell me. She knows if she didn't bring me the news here, I'd have to go where I could depend on getting it."

His mother exchanged looks with Gavan.

"I told them what I'd do." Nan said it with that little catch of excitement in her voice. "I'd get Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book over to America. They wouldn't be afraid to publish it over there."

"Why should they? The Americans aren't standing in the breach," said Lady Grant, with heightened color.

Nan looked away. Her mouth quivered a little. It was clear that she was reminding herself, Julian's mother!

"America! The very thing!" In the baggy dressing-gown Julian had twisted the upper part of his thin body sidewise, leaning towards the messenger.

"The trouble is," she began in a lower voice, and then hesitated.

"What's the matter?" His impatience made him irritable. "You aren't so silly as to suppose we can't say what we like before Gavan and my mother?"

"No, oh, no," she answered with a haste that convicted her. "I was just going to tell you Mr. Norfolk seems to think"—and for all Julian's assurance and her own acceptance of it, her voice sank—"the mails aren't safe."

"Not safe?"

She shook her head.

"Not any more. Mr. Norfolk says there's a—a supervision already."

"What?"

"Oh, not openly."

"A secret censorship! Hah! Hear that?" he challenged his friend. "That's what your policy's come to!"

"What makes Norfolk think—" Gavan began at his calmest.

"He doesn't think. He knows." There was a little pause. "Things don't get through. And the things that don't get through, they're always, he says, things of a certain kind." She broke the strain of the next few moments' silence. "I said if they didn't trust the mails why shouldn't Mr. Norfolk take his book over along with your 'League of Nations Manifesto' that they're all so wanting to get into President Wilson's hands. They asked me what I thought the inspectors would be doing while Mr. Norfolk was walking about with contraband literature under his arm. Did you ever hear such an excuse? I said: 'Do you think the inspectors would stop you? Well, the inspectors wouldn't stop me!' Yes," she added in a slightly offended tone, "they laughed, too. I didn't mind that so much as to see them accepting the—interference, and just sitting there. Talking! It made me wild. 'Do you really want to get that into the President's hands?' I asked them. 'Very well. You give it to me.'"

"You'd take it!" The involuntary exclamation slipped over Gavan's lips.

Julian hadn't needed to ask.

"You darling!" He held out his hand.

"Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr. Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's "Manifesto," then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they said."

"They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Arthur, seriously.

"What risk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British Government hasn't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own country. Besides, they wouldn't find it. And suppose they did, the English couldn't shoot me. I told them this afternoon, 'I'm not bound by your horrid war regulations.' But no," she said lugubriously through the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody's afraid."

"Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining in his moved face. "It's a great bond."

Gavan recognized the fact now, and all its implications, that Julian, with his pale halo of martyrdom, was able to draw closer to the girl than anybody else on her idealist side. Politics? She wasn't thinking about the future of governments and the stamp to be set on civilization, Napier told himself. She was thinking that bayonet work was cruel and revolting. She was prepared to let the great ideals be bayonetted like the babies of the Belgian stories, rather than let the war go on!

The last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening toward the end of January, about half-past six. Julian's convalescence, not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting: "Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs.

"And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being pelted."

She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America and the labor parties everywhere.

Away from that slavery to sickroom sensibilities, Gavan couldn't bear it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the peacemongers weren't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to Sir William, who had just lost his second son!

"Not Niel! Oh, Gavan, Niel!"

"Yes, blown to atoms at Soissons."

"Niel! Niel, too!" she cried. "If only they had been able to stop it in time!"

"Stop it! Stop men from going into a war like this! I'm not an idealist myself,"—he couldn't, to save his life, keep bitterness out of his voice—"but I do know there have been men who went into this war to defend the weak and to right wrong. A good many of those men can't speak for themselves any longer—" For a moment even Gavan couldn't speak for them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists—nearly every friend I had."

"Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian."

"Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go." He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they fight on, some of them because—other men have died and mustn't have died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. It's the dead call the loudest, 'Come, join up!'"

The tears stood in her eyes, but she shook her head.

"The dead can't speak for themselves. I wish they could. Soldiers—people who've been in it—aren't half so hot for going on with the struggle as a civilian like you."

"I'm not a civilian. I'm gazetted to the Scottish Borderers. This is the last time I'll see you."

"Oh, Gavan!" She held up her shaking hands.

He longed to beg her forgiveness, to say he hadn't meant in the very least to tell her like that; but all he could do was to explain, "The last, I mean, till I get my first leave," he ended in his most casual voice.

"Oh, Gavan!" she repeated. And then she turned abruptly and went out of the room. Left him standing there. Not even good-by.

It had been hard enough for Gavan to arrange it even before that awful news about Niel.

"You aren't fit," Sir William had stormed. When he calmed down a little, he went and had another talk with the doctor. No medical man who knew his business would pass Mr. Napier, Sir William was told; but the need for officers was great. Mr. Napier would have his way. In the final issue Sir William had his.

The very same evening of the interview with Nan this new thing had been sprung on Napier.

Something, Sir William said, that Gavan could do for the country that the country needed more than it needed another amateur officer at the Front. Gavan was to go to America by the first ship on a secret mission.

The newly commissioned officer protested with all his might. He had no experience of missions, secret or otherwise; he had no experience of America. Nevertheless, there were others in high places who agreed with Sir William. In the scarcity of suitable men at that particular crisis, and in view of the confidence felt in Napier by the authorities, they were in agreement as to the advisability of despatching him, in addition to the practical expert from the Admiralty already over there, to pay a private visit to America, in the course of which certain government contracts for munitions of war were to be effected—quietly, without rousing pro-German opposition.

The exigency was put to Napier in a way difficult to meet. He had himself seen regiments of men in training for months in civilian clothes, and who had never held a firearm in their hands. He had seen an entire camp drilling with dummy rifles. He was aware of the lack even of the plants necessary to turn out rifles to equip a quarter of the recruits called for. And now Sir William told him the secret of the shortage of ammunition for British troops already at the Front.

"We've sent our men out there to face the German guns, and our men can't reply! We've got to have guns and shells and rifles ... everything. We've got to get them from America. You've got to get them from America; you and Jameson."

Sir William quoted yet another reason besides the main ones given, for Gavan Napier's being the man to go; his personal friendship with one of the chief of that group called "Steel Kings" overseas.

As usual in the case of projects with which William McIntyre had most to do, this one was quickly shaped and smartly carried through. Time was the essence of Napier's mission to America, not only in view of the needs of our men in France, but in order that neither the other neutral governments nor the Central empires should know of the attempt to tide over the interval of scarcity before the munition plants of Great Britain should be established and the output secure.

The night before he left England, Napier received his final sailing orders during a tête-à-tête dinner with Sir William at the club. The privacy of those last minutes was broken in upon by Tommy Durrant, hot-foot on Sir William's traces. Tommy was just back from the Front. Something ought to be done, according to Tommy, to lessen the ineffectiveness of the inspectors of refugees crossing over to England. He retailed the story then going the rounds about a man who spoke Walloon all right, arm bandaged, sling—all that sort of thing. Somebody on the boat didn't like the look of him, and had the wit to ask to see his wound. He was very sensitive about showing his wound. It was not unnatural, "doctor's orders," and that kind of thing. An R. A. M. C. man got the landing authorities to insist. Fearful shindy! Fella's arm as sound as Tommy's own. Didn't Sir William believe it? Very well, then. Not five hours ago, as Tommy was waiting to get through the barrier on this side, he had noticed a Belgian nun. He'd seen lots of nuns. Why should he have noticed this one? Couldn't make out till she turned her head with a backward look just as she disappeared. "And it was that woman who used to be at your house, Sir William; the governess."

Napier's heart failed him for one sick moment. To be leaving England at the very moment of Greta von Schwarzenberg's return! Tommy was asking Sir William why "a lady like that" should be coming back here in disguise. Surely there was something very fishy about it.

"Well, you say you've reported to Scotland Yard. Let them deal with it!" Sir William rattled his seals impatiently.

Poor Tommy was having no success at all with his news. It was plain that Sir William was more annoyed at being made a participant than at the fact itself. Napier couldn't refrain from warning him.

"She'll be trying to get into communication with Miss Ellis—with Madge."

Tommy, more considerate, soothed Sir William.

"She won't risk that, whatever's the explanation of her slinking back. She'll lay low for a while, anyway." Tommy registered his conviction, "She saw I'd recognized her, and didn't love me for it."

CHAPTER XX

A good part of that last night in London, Napier spent in writing Nan a full account of the results of Singleton's visit to Lamborough. He wound up by warning her that Greta was in London, disguised as a Belgian refugee. Moreover, Scotland Yard would have full and accurate knowledge of those with whom the woman held any, even the slightest and most innocent, communication.

He sealed the letter and left it in the trusty keeping of his servant. The packet was not to go out of Day's hands except to be placed in those of Miss Ellis.

Napier's secret was well kept. His own family had so little idea of his change of plan that until he had cabled them from New York, they supposed him to have vanished, in the now familiar way, into the B. E. F.

Before ever the Atlantic liner left the docks, Napier's eyes, or rather, his ears, in the first instance, began to open. What they took in was the fact of the singular pervasiveness of the German tongue. On examining the speakers, they were seen to be men young or youngish and certainly Kriegsfähig. The stamp that the German system sets on the person who has been trained to military command differentiated certain of these foreign-speaking passengers from the ordinary reservist. There were at least four Germans of good military rank on board, no doubt calling themselves "Americans returning to their American homes." Here was a chance to observe at short range one of the greatest difficulties of those days: how was England to safeguard herself without wounding the susceptibilities of a friendly, but officially neutral, nation?

As he shouldered a way among his alien enemies, that new, involuntary hatred of the Teuton accent may have played some part in the rapture with which his ears greeted a voice not English, indeed, yet sounding for him its special harmonies.

He turned with a leap of the heart toward the voice that floated up from the crowd pressing to the gangway, a voice that called out to a porter something about a "green suit-case." Looking down from, the height of the tall ship, for all his hungry eagerness, he couldn't see the face that went with that voice, nothing but hats: men's soft felts and hard bowlers; the feathers and ribbons of ladies' headgear. Then came a moment when, among them all, a little cap of brown came slowly up on its golden wings till it landed Nan Ellis on the deck.

This latest manifestation of the cap of magic produced in Napier's mind a medley of instinctive joy, an utter bewilderment, and that readiness of acceptance, apparently without effort or cost, with which we greet those strokes of fortune whose strangeness throws us back on the essential mystery through which the most commonplace of us daily threads his way.

Her first words in another mouth would have been an intolerable irony:

"So this is how you go to the Front!" He was glad of the quick flush that rose to ask his pardon.

"To accept the worst construction on my being here," he answered, smiling, "I am not the only shuttle-cock."

She evaded the explanation of her own presence with a speech that even at the time struck Napier as being more odd than her apparition on board the Britannia.

"Forgive me for saying that. I know, wherever you are in these days, you are at the Front."

It was something. It was undoubtedly too much, and yet it comforted. The eager hope rose in him: she had come to know of Greta's return. Without Napier's intervention, she had come to know of matters in that connection which had made her flee. Hardly was the hope framed when it was dashed.

"I got tired of waiting to hear from Greta," she explained. Besides, she had a feeling she couldn't go on. She'd written him that. To show him she really had got off, the letter was to be posted from Queenstown. It was in—Heavens! where was the green suit-case? Seeing him had put it out of her head.

Oh, Napier would look for, he would find, the green suit-case!

But, no, she dashed after him. "Certainly not," she faltered as she caught him up, unless by any chance she shouldn't find it in her cabin. With consternation in her face, she flew down the companionway.

Serenity had returned when Napier met her a quarter of an hour later on the way to the dining-saloon.

"It's a wonder I knew you," he said, "in a different hat."

"Can't wear the Mercury on board ship. But I won't have you mocking at it." She stood with several letters in her hand.

"Why mayn't I mock at a Mercury cap if I like?" He remembered he hadn't waited till now to commit that indiscretion.

"Because my Mercury cap is your responsibility."

"My—"

"You've forgotten already!" As they went down, she reminded him of that time she appeared in the blue hat with Michaelmas daisies. "You perfectly hated it." Yes, he remembered he hadn't liked it. And Julian had quoted Herbert Spencer. Nobody was ever satisfied with hitting on the right thing. If a person found a special kind of ink-pot that suited him, or a milk-jug that would pour without spilling, or clothes that were just right, "we were so certain to want a change that the same thing wasn't made again," Miss Nan supplemented. "But my same-shaped hat has been made again and again, and you never noticed! That's all I get."

It was only to himself that Napier said: "No! no! She got more—more than was wise or well."

"Did you find the green suit-case?" he asked, "and my letter?"

"Oh, yes. But the letter was hardly worth showing."

He claimed the sealed envelope and opened it on the spot. He read:

Dear Gavan:

This is to say good-by. Since my talk with you I haven't felt I could go on staying here in England. So, as I have no news from Germany and hear that my mother is in New York, I'm moving heaven and earth to get off to-morrow in the only really good sailing this month. I wish I need not think of you over there in France, but I don't know how I can help that.

Yours,

Nan Ellis.

P.S.—Perhaps you wouldn't mind writing me. N. E.

She gave a New York address.

Only to himself he put the question, On what terms had she left Julian? What lay behind the delight in the eyes that welcomed Napier? Ask? Not he. He would try not so much as to wonder. Even if the shining of the hours in front of them was no more than the fragile iridescence of a bubble floating in the sun, the greater was the need not to touch such beauty with too inquiring finger.

They found their places in the haphazard way of the first luncheon, before the seating is arranged. By ones and twos others came in, till the table, at which Nan was the only woman, was full. The strangers at her end seemed disposed to silence. Such words as fell audibly, though English and addressed chiefly to the waiter, bore out the impression given by the faces. Napier saw the steward about it afterward. There were to be no Germans at his table as finally selected. He wished afterward he had added, and no American actors. In which case Miss Nan wouldn't have come up from dinner with Mr. Vivian Roxborough and walked the deck at his side a good half-hour. If it were only for Julian's sake, she couldn't be left to Mr. Vivian Roxborough. Napier made it his business to avert the chance.

That next day—forever and forever the sunshine and the sweetness of those hours would leave something of their flavor and their light behind. If only they could go on sailing, sailing, and never land!

So Napier said to himself, as he hurried back on the second afternoon, after a talk with the captain—a talk somewhat marred by a flickering fear as to whether that actor might have appropriated the guardian chair. No; one of those Germans! Napier's change of table had neither prevented Nan from bowing to some of the men she had broken bread with during that first meal on board, nor prevented chance conversation (initiated by one or other of the Germans) upon that promising opening, "You are American?"

Even Nan knew that the handsome big man who stood by her now was an officer. He may have been thirty-eight, and he was certainly in the pink of condition. In the midst of whatever it was he had been saying, Napier carried the lady off to the lower and less-frequented deck.

"How they must laugh at the stupid English, those Germans!" he muttered, as he strode along at her side. "Here we are, six months after the declaration of war, and enemy aliens still going back and forth as easily as in times of peace. Those that don't find their way back into the German Army—"

"How can they!"

"What's to prevent them? Anyway, those who don't take the popular pleasure trip, New York to Genoa and so to Germany, can be trusted to advance the German propaganda in the two Americas. But they won't find traveling so easy after this."

"Why? Who will prevent them?" Her questions had come quickly.

"The British Government will prevent them—after the Intelligence Department gets my report." He took out of his pocket a paper destined to have an effect, the least part of which was to give Napier many a sleepless night months after he had posted it.

The first eyes to rest on the report after Napier's own, regarded it, as he felt even at the time, with something more than disapproval.

"Don't send that!" the girl urged. She added reasons in whose syllabling Napier heard Julian's voice. Oh, he had well indoctrinated her! As Napier listened, obviously unmoved, there came into Nan's earnestness a note that gave him more uneasiness than her "opinions"—a note of anxiety, a note of something very like panic. "You can't send that! It—it might make such trouble, not only—not to people you call your enemies." She caught herself up. "As Julian says, 'The reactions from that kind of tyranny—'"

Napier said quietly he must accept the reactions.

"But you can't!" she repeated. "It's the greatest mercy you've showed it to me. Oh, Gavan, you don't want to make trouble between England and America? You will if you send in that report. I do beg you—"

Napier had seldom known more difficult moments than those that followed. As she stood beside him on the saloon-deck near the companionway-door, he glanced at the mail-box near the purser's window. Its open brass mouth seemed to bray a warning: "If you don't post that letter now, you never will." Napier stepped inside, and dropped the envelope through the slit.

Nan sat down on a folding-stool near the ship's railing. Napier went back and stood silent by her for a moment. Then he said:

"Give me what credit you can. I don't remember ever doing anything harder than that."

To his surprise, instead of reproaching him or punishing him with silence or with tears, "What do you expect your Government will do?" she said.

"Oh, I don't know." He didn't try to keep the touch of impatience out of his voice. "Regulate the traffic a little better, perhaps." He would have left it at that but for a trifling occurrence. The head of the German officer whom they had left a few minutes before on the upper deck appeared just then out of an open port in the dining-saloon. For the merest instant it was there, only to be withdrawn. And why, pray, shouldn't a man of any race look out at the sea from a public window? even, come to that, glance out at a pretty girl? "People may as well know," Napier said, "that the British Government has come to a point where it will be obliged to exercise its censorship openly and thoroughly instead of—" He frowned in the direction where the offending head had been. "I doubt if these fellows on board here have even been asked to make a declaration, let alone been examined."

"Why should they be examined?" The voice beside him rose indignant. "On the open sea! bound for a neutral country!"

He looked at her with different eyes. "The British port was the proper place," he said. "And perhaps people were examined. You know better than I."

"I know?" She stared at him.

"You know if they asked you to make a declaration before you came on board."

"Me? A declaration! About what?"

"As to what you are taking over." He heard his own stern voice as if it were some one else's.

"They asked," she said, with her chin up, "if I were taking over any letters to people in America?"

"And what did you say?"

"That I wasn't taking over any letters." Her note, like his, had grown less and less patient. "Though I don't call it their business to ask an American going to America if she—"

"Do you mean," the interrogation went on, "they didn't look for themselves?"

"Look! Look where?"

"Look through your luggage, your hand-bag, your 'green suit-case.'"

"Certainly not."

"Well, they ought. And I shall see that next time they do."

Not anger only, and not only spirited revolt, appeared on the face Napier loved. The something else he had been vaguely aware of showed there clearer. He glanced sharply round and then bent over her. "What would happen if they did their duty? What if they were to search you?"

"To search me!" She stood up.

"Sh!" He looked round again.

"They can't!" she triumphed. "Not now."

"Ah!" The emission of breath came as though forced out by a sudden physical anguish.

"What's the matter? What are you thinking?" she cried.

"I'm thinking that I wish to God you'd go and get all that infernal stuff of Julian's in the green suit-case and throw it overboard."

"I haven't got any 'infernal stuff,'" she said, with the faint pink rising in her cheeks.

To Napier's further characterization of "the stuff," his bitter denunciation of this using of English good faith to hamper, if not to betray, England, the girl had her defense. Or, rather, she had Julian's reinforced by the American's innocent belief, prior to 1917, that to the citizens of that favored land no Old-World rules need apply, no Old-World danger was a menace. "Americans don't recognize," was one of her phrases. "We make our own rules. You are talking in the air. I am not carrying over any letters."

"Look me in the eyes, Nan, and say that you are not carrying something that I would prevent from reaching America if I had the power."

She got up and walked alone toward the stern of the ship. As she turned to come back, Vivian Roxborough rose out of his chair. Before he reached her side, a capped and aproned figure darted out of the narrow corridor, near the smoking-room, and spoke to Miss Ellis. The girl and the stewardess went below together. No sign of Nan for the rest of the afternoon.

At six o'clock Napier sent a note to her cabin.

I hope you're not feeling out of sorts in any way. But if you are, mayn't I see you a moment?

Yours ever,

G. N.

The answer came back:

Not out of sorts at all, thank you,

Yours as always,

N. E.

When he didn't find her at the dinner-table,—she had been punctual hitherto—Napier went back to the upper deck and waited for her near the companionway. Ten minutes went by. She must, after all, have been below somewhere, and was no doubt at dinner by now. He went back to the saloon and looked in. She was not there. As he returned again to keep his watch on the corridor leading from her cabin, the same stewardess who had carried the girl off early in the afternoon came laboriously up from lower regions, carrying a tray.

"Oh—a—you are the one who is looking after Miss Ellis, aren't you?"

"Yes. I'm taking in her dinner."

"Oh, I see." But it wasn't true. He didn't see in the very least why he should be punished in this way, a sulky way, moreover, and singularly un-Nanlike, as he told himself.

Just after the luncheon-bugle sounded the next day, Napier met the same stewardess again. Again she came toiling up the companionway, tray-laden.

"You are taking that to Miss Ellis?"

Yes, she was.

"She is ill, then?"

"No, she isn't ill. Just having her dinner in Number Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four isn't Miss Ellis's number."

"No, sir. It's the number of the lady who isn't feeling very well, though she does eat well. I'll say that for her." The woman pursued her way with the access of vigor that a dash of vindictiveness will sometimes generate.

He had not so much as a glimpse of Nan until evening. Going down to dress, he met her coming out of the library with an armful of books.

"Well, at last!" He tried to take the books. She backed away from him.

"No, no, thank you. They're just nicely balanced."

"Look here, what have I done?"

"You've barred my way." She tried to pass.

"It isn't like you to take a mortal offense and not say how or what about."

"I haven't—taken offense." She leaned against the wall, hugging the books.

"Then why do you stay in your cabin the whole blessed time?"

"I haven't been in my cabin. I've been in—I've been looking after a lady who wasn't well when she came on board and who is a very bad sailor. So as I'm rather a good one—she will wonder what has become—" and before Napier could gather his wits, Nan was flying down the corridor.

The next day same program was continued, except that Napier hung much about corridor and companionway, waiting in vain for even a glimpse of the flying figure. While walking the deck he had located Number Twenty-four, noting with surprise that a passenger who was ill, especially a woman looked after by Nan, should keep her port closed in fine weather. He had of course looked up the number on the table diagram. Twenty-four was occupied by Mlle. La Farge, the devil take her!

A restless, wearisome day. He knew it an ill preparation for sleep. He turned up the light over his berth, the fierce, unshaded light, and read till his eyeballs burned. He extinguished the horrible glare and lay in the dark, turning and tossing, seeing in the renewal of his Nan-fever a punishment for defective loyalty to his friends. Twelve o'clock came. Is she asleep? As for him, he was wider awake than ever.

One o'clock in the morning. It wasn't to be borne. The real trouble was that instead of taking a proper amount of exercise, he'd hung about waiting. What was the night, the morning, rather—what was it like? He couldn't bring himself to turn on the fierce flood of light. He felt his way to the port. Yes, a gibbous moon, rolling lopsidedly among the cloud-rack over a corrugated-iron sea. Was it hot or cold away from the stifling steam heat? He opened his port and breathed deep. He was not the only sleepless passenger. Two heads showed dimly, two figures in long ulsters leaning against the rail.

Presently a voice: "Now a little more walking, and you'll feel better."

Nan! Good Samaritanizing! She was supporting the shorter figure, her arm round the thick waist. They started down the deck in the direction of Napier's open port, but thought better of it. They turned and went the other way in face of the wind.

Napier pulled on some clothes and hurried out. When he got to the other, the colder side, of the ship, there they were, going at a good round pace for an indisposed person, pounding down the deck locked in that embrace.

Well, women were odd beings. Here was evidently some frantic new friendship started. He drew back in the semi-darkness and leaned against the wall, smoking. The two heads hatless, with motor-veils tied round them, were close together. The invalid ceased speaking as they passed.

Nan's voice was blurred, troubled. "There must be some mistake—" the rest was lost.

As they turned to come back, the mild, intermittent shining of the moon lit the two faces for a passing moment—lit one delicate-featured, pale, eager; and the other, full, pink-cheeked, with heavy, handsome outlines and prominent eyes. By all the gods, it was?—No, it couldn't—Something worse than a headache must be the matter with Napier when he could imagine so startling a likeness.

"I don't know how to get any more," Nan was saying.

"You can borr-ch-ow some," said the other in remembered accents.

When the figures turned to come down again, the shorter of the two halted suddenly. Napier had come out of the shadow and stood in such dim light as there was, with his back against the ship's railing, waiting for them.

It was the invalid who first caught sight of him. She turned about, and before one could much more than blink, she had wrenched open the weather door and disappeared.

Nan stood still for a bewildered instant, while Napier went forward.

"So that's why!" he said. "Very well, then, you've got to know!" Leaning on the railing there beside her in the windy moonlight, he told her what Singleton had found in Greta's room.

Before he had gone far Napier was acutely aware of the girl's stiffening; aware of a withdrawal, infinitesimal as expressed in the body, a chasm as between their souls. He could feel that she was thinking: "Gavan looked on! He allowed that baseness at Lamborough!" That he should put a false construction upon what was found was the least of his misdoing.

"Oh, yes,"—she turned sharply away—"she told me you'd say that!"

Was it anger or suppressed tears that clouded her voice? Napier didn't know.

"What Greta must have suffered those horrible last hours at the McIntyres'! All to spare me, to save me the humiliation of knowing how you could treat my friend! She knew what that would mean to me. We,—" she gave him her eyes again—"we at home treated Greta like a princess. And she deserved it." As Napier made no attempt to rebut that view, she dropped her head, struggling an instant with some new enemy to self-control. "Greta puts me, too, to shame. That longing to see me again that made her risk coming back to England! Only to find that she might do me an injury, might compromise me! Imagine Greta in a thick veil, waiting about in the dusk to catch a glimpse—Saw me coming out of the shipping office with Madge. And when she found I was sailing on this boat, dropped everything to come along! Greta understands loyalty." She fell back upon ground evidently prepared for her. "Isn't it 'trying to undermine,' isn't it 'poisoning the mind,' if you ask me to put the worst construction on innocent things? Greta's diary! As she says, if you'd read my diary to my mother, you'd have me in the Tower. Oh, she is fair and just! She's been saying to me only to-night, that since I'll be going back there, perhaps living among them, I'm to remember it's only to the Germans the English are perfectly horrible. She was quite willing to leave me my illusions about you all till you yourself tear them away."

"Do you mind telling me how I've done that?" He tried to stem the torrent.

She steadied herself with an elbow on the railing.

"Haven't you told me yourself about going through my friend's trunks when she wasn't there? Oh, that—that, Gavan, was—" She turned suddenly and buried her face in her arm.

"Yes, it was a mistake."

She lifted a wet face up to him in the moonlight.

"The alternative," he said miserably, "would have been better. Instead of the private one, a public examination, Greta Schwarzenberg in prison instead of free—"

"Then she is right!" Nan stood back, clear of the railing, facing him. "You do want to be revenged."

She stood there, with the wind catching at the ends of her chiffon veil, blowing them back over her shoulder, for that instant before she, too, fled from him through the weather door.

CHAPTER XXI

The morning of arrival found every one in the natural state of excitement induced by eight days' anticipation and three thousand miles of progress toward a given goal. Napier's glimpse of Nan, hurrying out of the breakfast-salon by an opposite door as he went in, showed excitement in her, too. Notwithstanding all that had happened, he was determined not to part from her on that note of last night. Anything, the merest commonplace, rather than that, he told himself, unable to strangle a larger hope.

Not in vain he, in his turn, despatched breakfast in short order and went above. There she was on the promenade-deck, her back to him, her face to the faint, still far-off outline of her native land.

In the raw chill of that February morning the prospect appeared anything but welcoming to Napier. It was different for her. In the forefront of her mind she was no doubt waving the Stars and Stripes. But, Napier could have sworn, deep in her heart was the thought of him and a secret planning of one of those "meetings in New York" she had spoken of in the first days. She stood there lightly poised, a little wistful, more than a little alluring. Another man, noting the empty deck, remembering that other sea they had stood by, locked together, would have gone up to her and put an arm about the waiting figure. The scene of pretty confusion and tender yielding, the withdrawal, "Some one is sure to come!" and the hurried arrangement to meet—he saw it all. He wondered afterward what would have happened had he played his part.

When she found him at her side with "Good morning," she turned sharply as though to fly. It was all in the convention.

"You must be very happy to-day," he said.

"Happy! Why should I be happy?"

"Well, to be so near home."

"Oh, home!" She lifted her shoulder slightly. "New York is less my home than—" she stopped short.

"Than England?" he said.

"There's one thing, anyway," she said in her elusive way. "If I can't go back for a good while, neither can you."

He stared at her, a great hope contending with mystification.

"Do I understand," he forced himself to answer lightly, "that you refuse to let me return home without you?"

Her cheeks showed sudden color.

"The Germans refuse to let either of us go if what Greta has heard is so."

"And what has she heard?"

"That soon after we sailed the Kaiser declared a blockade of England, an Atlantic war zone."

She saw that Napier had already had the wireless news before he asked:

"How does that affect you and me?"

"Even neutral ships aren't safe after to-morrow," she said, accepting with the hypnotized docility shown by so many in those early days any edict bearing the German stamp. "What I've been thinking is, you'll be over here till the end of the war, so there'll be time to—to understand—to get some things straight, anyhow." She turned to answer the good morning of one of the ship's officers.

Napier always believed that the first real shock to Nan's faith in Greta came as the passengers of the Britannia were about to disembark an hour later. Mr. Vivian Boxborough, very smart in new ultra-English clothes, had been observed threading his way among the crowd on deck, plainly in quest of Miss Ellis. No sooner had he caught sight of her than he pressed forward, and no sooner was he near her than he stopped short, his eyes intent on the lady at Miss Ellis's side.

Greta had forborne to challenge curiosity by absolutely concealing her features. But probably no one better than she understood the serviceability for disguise of a heavily figured white-lace veil.

Mr. Roxborough must have known her well to be able to say with such assurance: "Why, Greta—" and then in the rebound from that betrayal of too close acquaintanceship away to the other end of the scale: "I didn't know you were on board, Mrs. Guedalla."

Greta stared at him through the meshes of the elaborate pattern and said with her grand air: "Some mistake, I think."

Roxborough pinched his lips. "Oh, you don't remember me! Well, perhaps you'll remember your husband. I'm rather expecting my manager to meet me on the dock. Or perhaps it's you Mr. Guedalla is waiting for," Roxborough added with a peculiar smile.

Greta put a hand through Nan's arm and drew her near the gangway. Something must have been said for the girl turned her back with decision upon her late admirer. But her face was more than disturbed; it was shamed, frightened. A cut in public is a terrible thing to the innocent mind.

Napier stood close behind the pair, waiting for the excuse he felt that Mrs. Guedalla would make for not going down with the crowd to confront her husband. But the lady was too entirely mistress of herself for that. Perhaps she counted on Mr. Guedalla's knowledge of the wisdom of not interfering with his wife. Straight down the gangplank she walked, Nan behind her, recovering herself enough to make little signals toward a group—two ladies, a young man, and three children with flags—waving and smiling at Nan Ellis, first from the end of the crowded pier, then running along at the side, and now waiting finally at the bottom of the gangway to fall upon the girl with their welcome.

Napier had no difficulty in deciding which of them was her mother in face of the fact that Mrs. Ellis looked more like an elder sister. Yes, that must be a nice woman; but stupid, he decided, noting the cordiality, after the first motion of surprise, with which Mrs. Ellis received the lady in the baffling veil. She kissed Greta through the lace. Bah! With Nan's address in his pocket, he could afford to leave her and her party in the hands of a customs officer, opening trunks on the pier.

Indeed, he had little choice, he found himself appropriated by an English friend and an American steel magnate—carried away into a world about which all that he had heard had very little prepared him.

His private as well as patriotic interest in the possibilities unfolded did not prevent him from putting himself in touch with the British Intelligence Department before he dined that first night on American soil.

The chief agent in New York was, or had been, as Napier knew, the British partner in an American shipping house. That he had married an American heiress, Napier also knew. He was the more surprised to find Mr. Roderick Taylor installed en garçon at an hotel.

"My w-wife," said the long, fair young man with the strictly pomaded hair, "is in P-Paris with her sister, who is or-organizing American Hospital Relief. In any case,"—his smile seemed to accept Napier as one to be treated frankly—"all sorts of coming and going is less marked in a c-caravansary like this." The luxurious sitting room bore at that moment, though it was not yet six o'clock, signs of the indicated traffic. A bridge table not long abandoned, to judge by the glasses and cigar ends, stood there.

He had run across Stein, coming out from luncheon, said Mr. Taylor. Old Viennese friend of his, Stein. Had him up along with O'Leary, the Sinn Feiner, and a German-American dark horse, Bieber. "We are all dining at Bieber's to-morrow," Mr. Taylor smiled as one who preserves a native modesty in full view of triumph. It wasn't the smile he showed to his experimental bridge parties. "Greta von S-S—" the slight, very slight stammer gave a touch of unreadiness which perhaps prevented the extreme competency of Mr. Roderick Taylor from being too marked. Napier noticed later than the stammer was hardly discernible when the engaging young man was off duty.

"Yes, von Schwarzenberg." He helped Taylor over the barbed-wire of Teutonic syllables.

"Know her?" Taylor could go on glibly enough. "Rather!" And what, he asked, made Mr. Napier think the woman who had crossed with him as Mademoiselle La Farge was—

Clearly Mr. Taylor, whether in obedience to his own judgment or to the issue of some mot d'ordre, was disposed to take Napier at face-value; but he was far from accepting Napier's facts on the sole ground of Napier's belief in them. After the Schwarzenberg incident had been probed and sifted, Mr. Taylor sat back in his chair, gently perplexed and obviously perturbed.

"It's not that we haven't been expecting her. The chief value of one of our men is that he has hitherto been able to keep in touch with her. But if she really has left the other side, he ought to have warned us." He took up the receiver of his desk telephone, and then laid it down. "We go warily with Miss von Schwarzenberg." He rose and opened a door at the very moment that a frail, grizzled man entered the adjoining room from the hall. "Oh, Macray, just a moment!"

The man did not stop to take off either hat or coat. Middle-aged, dyspeptic-looking, he came in, settling his black-rimmed pince-nez on an insufficient nose. He took a reporter's note-book out of his pocket and stood there, sour, hopeless, a mere sketch of a man in black and white.

"Greta Schwarz is back," said Mr. Taylor. Without a pause and in the same low voice he ran rapidly over the main facts in the story Napier had told him. "Just set them to work," he wound up. "Quickest way to get on her track—" he turned to Napier—"what's the American girl's address?" Napier did not disguise his reluctance to produce that particular information.

"You understand," he repeated for the benefit of the pessimist with the note-book, "this Miss Ellis is under the most complete misapprehension about the woman."

"Of course, of course," agreed Mr. Taylor.

Macray impassively poised his pen. Napier gave the address. Macray set down a grudging stroke or two, and then: "All New York knows where to find Schwarzenberg," he said, dragging out the information as though to talk increased his affliction, whatever it was. "Just heard. Been seeing reporters all afternoon."

"Who's been seeing reporters?" Taylor demanded.

"Schwarz."

"The deuce she has!"

Macray felt in his pocket. He drew out an evening paper, damp from the press, and folded to display:

COLONIALISM IN AMERICA

ENGLISH DICTATION

IMPRESSIONS OF GERMAN-AMERICAN BACK FROM
BELLIGERENT COUNTRIES

Napier stood at Mr. Taylor's side, and together they read how Miss von Schwarzenberg had not been an hour on this dear American soil, before she perceived with pain that, while Germany was fighting for freedom of the seas, for human rights, America was forgetting she'd ever won hers. After a genial reference in passing to the burning of Washington by the British, the lady protested that history wasn't her strong point. Would some one, therefore, kindly tell her who had given the seas to the British? Upon the eloquent pause that seemed to have followed that request, the lady illustrated the service Germany was rendering the United States in protesting against English domination. It must be very humiliating, the lady thought, for Americans to have their mail-bags opened, their letters confiscated. "Of course some of the letters are for Germany. Why not? Is England to tell you to whom you may write? Isn't America a neutral? Or is that a pretense?" She gave cases of bitter hardships, German parents, old, ill, dying, whom faithful sons had long been accustomed to supply with remittances from America. In suffering British interference, America, so Miss Greta told the interviewer, had failed in dignity. Weakly, supinely, slavishly, America was submitting to British insolence.

Nothing in the interview occasioned Napier so much concern as the fact that it was stated to have taken place at a named hotel, "where Miss von Schwarzenberg is staying with old friends."

Mr. Taylor laughed a trifle ruefully as he threw down the sticky paper and applied a pocket-handkerchief to his long, white fingers. "I like America, he assured the newcomer, but there's no denying it's a queer country and a queer people. Isn't it so, Macray?"

Macray's only answer was a faint groan. He picked up his newspaper and walked gloomily out.

"The very strangest mixture," Taylor went on, "of shrewdness and innocence. Take their attitude toward this woman. She impresses them enormously." He disregarded Napier's "She impresses most people." "Over here they take this Mrs. Guedalla, or Schwarz, or whatever her real name is—they take her not only for a woman of education, but a woman wohlgeboren. They accept her account of misuse of her name. An obscure Western actress who, you are told, bears a certain dubious likeness to the real Greta von Schwarzenberg had feloniously adopted that honorable name. 'You know the stage way,' says Schwarzenberg. 'Tottie Tompkins turns into Arabella Beauchamp.' The real Miss von Schwarzenberg has naturally never been on the stage. She is musical. All gebildete Germans are musical. And that fact had been her salvation, so she tells these fatuous friends of hers over here. Being musical in the thorough German way enabled her to hold out against her proud, despotic father. When he tried to compel her to marry the dissolute Freiherr of vast possessions, Miss Greta ran away with her governess. Oh, always the scene is carefully set! And then, in order not to live on the governess, Miss Greta took to teaching music. They swallow it all! They look upon her as a patriot. A German patriot, of course; but still laboring devotedly and legitimately for her native land."

What made Taylor's dealings with her a delicate matter was the fact that she had these powerful friends, Americans whose good faith and general decency of conduct no reasonable being could doubt. She had kept herself in close relations with these people even while she was abroad. His wife discovered that in Paris. How did Schwarzenberg keep up these useful relations? Through the one channel of organized participation in the war then open to American sympathizers, Relief.

"Lord! the jobs put through in the name of Relief!" Taylor exclaimed.

On his second evening in New York Napier went with the Van Pelts, his hosts, to hear "Lohengrin" at the Metropolitan. In a stage-box sat Miss Greta, very handsome, in green, with a silver wreath on her fair hair. The elderly lady beside her, according to the Van Pelts, was a well-known "society leader" with a taste for philanthropy. She had largely financed a certain branch of American relief work. That was her husband just coming into the box. But the girl—the Van Pelts couldn't make out the girl. Napier could.

The next day, three tables away from him, at a men's luncheon given to Napier at a hotel, Greta again, with a different party except for Nan. Napier saw the girl's face brighten in that instant of catching sight of him. He saw her half rise, and then, as Greta fixed her eyes on Nan's, Napier saw the girl subside. From time to time she looked over wistfully. In a general movement after luncheon, emptying and refilling the great room, he was able to time his going out so that he might snatch a word with her.

"You haven't forgotten where I am?" she said hurriedly after they had allowed new-comers to separate them a little from their respective parties.

No, he hadn't forgotten; but he had read that she—he nodded in Greta's direction—was also at the same hotel.

"And that keeps you away! That's all you care!"

"Do you want, then," he said, with that daring which the sense of being safely lost in a crowd will lend—"do you want me to care?"

"No! At least I oughtn't to." Greta and her guests were waiting. "If I'd known how to find you," Nan went on speaking deliberately, as though making a declaration of rights, "I should have written you. I could let you see part of a letter I've had from Julian. He tells news the papers don't."

Napier thanked her gravely and gave a private address. As he saw her disappear with "that woman," he said to himself for the thousandth time, If only he'd been allowed to tell Nan about that Gull Island villainy at the time, she couldn't have gone on making her loyalty a cloak for their common enemy!

The temptation to use his knowledge now, strove in him with an instinctive as well as a reasoned shrinking. The Gull Island affair couldn't, he argued, still be a secret of any state importance. But in proportion as he cleared away that obstacle, the clearer yet another stood forth. It was one of the evils of a most evil time that he, Gavan Napier, of all men, had been forced to play a leading part in the violent end of a man with whom he and this gentle, sensitive girl had broken bread! Napier caught again that animal-like gleam of bared teeth as Carl Pforzheim writhed across the table for his pistol, saw again the gush of scarlet after the figure turned, met the knife, and fell back against the wall. Let all that horror be hidden in the island earth and in oblivion. If Nan knew, never, never could it be forgotten.

The "news" in the letter she sent from Julian, was all of the gathering strength of the peace movement and the glorious part in it which America was destined to play. President Wilson, "the man with more power and a greater range of action than any ruler on the earth to-day"—President Wilson was the hope of the world. The rest of the page had been torn off. Nan was learning discretion, poor child!

In the intervals of business conclaves in the city, trips to Pittsburgh and elsewhere, Napier continued to cultivate Mr. Roderick Taylor despite that gentleman's refusal to lunch out, or to dine out. Not with Mr. Napier! Taylor was never seen in the company he most liked, as he said in his pleasant way. But there were private smokes and talks during which many things that had been mysteries to Napier became clear. Those were the days when Taylor and his agents were almost daily unearthing evidences of the underground activity of the pro-German propagandist. Among these moles of international mischief Taylor's weasels came upon Schwarzenberg's traces only to lose them. "Suspects of more public weight and interest, particularly men, were far more easily dealt with. These border-line women were the devil."

Never in all that time was Napier wholly free from a dread of hearing the name of Ellis in connection with Schwarzenberg; for always in his mind the figure of the winged messenger followed the devious ways of the German, followed like her shadow. The girl he loved was lavishing faith and service, as well as financing this enemy of England. The thought was an anguish to him.

Nothing of all this to Taylor. The sole reference to the chief ground of Napier's own interest in the situation was a carelessly expressed opinion, "Schwarzenberg must be making a considerable hole in the Ellis pockets."

But, no. According to the omniscient Taylor, Schwarzenberg's spendings were on a scale quite outside the Ellis range. Taylor half closed his whitish eyelashes and regarded the end of his cigar. "I am, I believe, on the track of Schwarzenberg's new resources."

That telephone again! It was always ringing in here when Macray was out. Taylor listened, laughed, and made an appointment.

An Italian, he explained, a Mr. Luigi Montani, over here with his family. He had taken from some friends of Taylor's a furnished house in Washington. All arranged in twenty-four hours. Not a syllable in the press.

"He's just been telling me that when his servants, Italians, went downstairs the first morning, they couldn't open the front door for the mass of pro-German literature shoved through the letter-box overnight."

The incident set Taylor talking about "the slender thread" on which may hang "the everlasting things" in international relationships. He talked of America with, as Napier thought, an understanding given to few foreigners. You couldn't shake Taylor's faith in America. "But her ignorance of one entire hemisphere!"

Was it greater, Napier asked, than Old-World ignorance of the new?

No, no. Lack of mutual understanding was the common danger. To increase it was the German trump-card.

"People talk of America's largely unconscious power to wreck the world's best interests. She won't!" he cried with a passion that seemed alien to his nature; "but if there's even a danger of it, it is because of innocent susceptibilities which the underground people, Schwarzenberg and her crew, are rubbing raw." And there was another thing. "If they should 'get at' Wilson, we'd be in a bad way."

"The whole world would be in a bad way," said Napier, with a dizzying sense of the issues at stake.

"Yes, the whole world," Taylor agreed. And on his face, too, was a deeper gravity.

"I heard something last night"—Napier sat up suddenly—"that made me furious. I denied it. I want to hear you deny it. Fellow from Washington told us the President has given up receiving the British Ambassador."

"It's true."

"My God! then Bernstorff has got him!"

"Not at all. It's true Wilson's given up seeing the British ambassador, and it's true he's given up seeing the German ambassador. Oh, a long head, Wilson's! He corresponds with the accredited official representatives, and he sees the unofficial, the people he can learn from and the people he can indoctrinate. You'll be dealing with him less advantageously because of your mission, even though it's private. But"—Taylor got up to find a match. He paused to lay a hand on Napier's shoulder—"see Wilson soon."

It was already arranged, Taylor was told.

"Well, don't talk only munitions." Nobody better than the President, according to Taylor, knew that the old diplomacy was doomed. "This is the hour of the unofficial envoy."

In Washington, four days later, Napier had cause to remember that dictum.

CHAPTER XXII

Napier arrived at the White House some minutes before the time set for his interview. Hardly had he embarked upon a little kill-time tour through the public rooms when he heard hurrying steps behind him, and turned to confront Nan Ellis.

Her greeting was the strangest, considering all things.

"How do you do? I wanted to know—oh, have you seen Greta?"

No, he hadn't, he could not forbear adding, Why should he?

"She was to meet me here." The girl turned and scanned the corridor, but in an excited, absent-mindedness as though her thoughts couldn't pretend to follow her eyes. "I expect they won't let her go. Her own Embassy is immensely polite to Greta. I never knew she had so many grand acquaintances." She broke off, and then added breathlessly, "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting to see—certain people. I don't need to ask what you are here for," he added.

Her eyelids winked as though he had flicked something in her face. "Oh,"—she considered a second,—"I suppose you do know more or less, since Julian made me talk before you. Do you know what I think?"

"I'd rather like to."

"Well, you shall. I think men are the indiscreetest people on the earth." And then, with that same suppressed excitement, she added, "All except one."

He made a movement toward a sofa—a movement she misinterpreted.

"O Gavan, don't go in just yet! He's got cart-loads of people to talk to, and I haven't anybody. You see, it must be somebody that as good as knows already. There isn't any one but you, is there? Of course, what I came for was to see the President. Every good American wants to see the President. So I done it—" she laughed as she threw up her head—"like Huck Finn."

"Not, I gather, with the hoi polloi?"

"The what?" But she didn't stop. "Oh, the trouble I had! I wrote and I wrote. I might just as well have been in an effete monarchy trying to approach the throne on my hands and knees. It made me mad, I can tell you. I said so. Told Senator Harned so. He's a friend of my mother's. But Senator Harned wanted me to give him the papers. Imagine!"

"Julian's manifesto?"

"Everything. As if I would! I've come all the way from Europe for a personal interview, and a personal interview I've got to have, or—well, something would have to be done." She wagged her head.

"I see. Something with boiling oil in it."

"Oh, they came to their senses at last, this very morning." She shone in the refulgence of the late-risen sun. "But do you know, up to the very last minute I had to be as firm as the Washington monument. He sent a Private Secretary to see me. And the Private Secretary tried to make me 'abandon the matter.' Called it 'the matter'! I denied that 'matter' was the main object. I must see the President. I was an American. Hadn't every American the right to see the President? Every American had the right to wring his poor hand in the presence of hundreds of other Americans. 'Very well,' I said, 'if I mayn't see him, I'll tell Senator Harned that I applied and sent in his letter, and waited for days, and was turned away at last.

"He asked me to wait a minute—the Private Secretary did. So I 'done it' again. After a while another man came and spoke to me, a gloomy man with a face like a clergyman who's got a crime on his soul, and he took me into the Presence." She was only half laughing. "The Presence and I said, 'How do you do.' I was almost too excited to look at him properly, now that I'd got him. But, O Gavan, he is, he really is!"

"H'm," replied Gavan.

"Wait till you see! He asked me why I'd come. Melancholy man still hung about. 'I should like to speak to you alone,' I said. Do you think he would? No. As much a 'fraid-cat as any king. But he looked at the melancholy man, and melancholy man went and looked out of the window. It was really as good as having him out of the room if I lowered my voice. Then I told him. I gave him Julian's Manifesto and the rest. Yes, I had them all in the green suit-case." She laughed triumphantly.

"Well, I wouldn't advise you to carry such merchandise again."

"I sha'n't," she agreed, "not in any such way as that. Babyish, I call it. But it was all right this time. I sat and watched him while he read Julian's Manifesto. He read it twice. It took hold of him. I could see that. Then I found him looking at me through his glasses.

"'What do your friends want me to do?'

"'To save civilization,' I said."

Napier could see her "doing Julian" for the President.

"I was awfully excited, but I remembered some more. He listened. He listens well. He makes you do your best. I felt encouraged. I made a case. Then I told him—oh, you won't like it, but I told him that Julian and the rest had far more backing in England than the newspapers gave the smallest inkling of. I told about the kind of men who were opposing the loss of liberty in the fight for liberty.

"'It is a menace before every country,' he said, in a discontented sort of way. He seemed not to want to think about it. I could see he was tired of considering me as a messenger any longer. I felt in the queerest way my best strength, my value, all going when I found him beginning to look at me as just a girl. He asked me questions that hadn't a thing to do with the great business. They were kind questions; oh, yes, kind, and as if he were really interested. He gave me a feeling, too, that he'd make everything all right. He made me feel very small and insignificant myself, but mighty proud of America."

"He seems to have taken your measure very accurately."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, up in arms.

"Oh, we've been told he knows how to deal with women. He can manage even the Suffragettes."

"Now you are a little spiteful. I know. You are jealous because you haven't got a President. You've only got King George."

"I've come to be grateful for George," said Napier, fervently.

"That may be, but nobody can call him exciting."

Napier assured her that was the precise ground of his gratitude.

The assurance went unheeded. She was still simmering with the excitement of her interview.

"Now the President is exciting. Perfectly wonderful, I call him. And perfectly splendid about peace, though he did say"—the little pucker gathered between her brows—"he did say we might have to fight for it. I forgot to ask him what he meant by that. I shall be dying to hear what you think about him. Couldn't we"—she hesitated, and then as Napier did not make the hoped-for suggestion she made it herself—"couldn't we meet?"

"Nothing I 'd like better—if you're not with—if you're here with your mother."

No, her mother was still in New York with the children. That was one reason Nan was having to go back. For Mrs. Ellis was leaving on Saturday for California. "Father needs her, and she says I don't, now I have Greta."

"I see; you have Greta."

"Greta is dining out to-night." She scanned his face with an expression which, in the retrospect, comforted him even more than to remember her delight at the arrangement finally made. He was to call for her. "Not later than half-past seven," because she had the packing to do before bed—time. Yes, they were going to New York by the early train. Greta had to be in New York to-morrow night for a meeting.

"Hallet Newcomb's, I suppose?"

Nan opened her eyes.

"How odd you should guess! But isn't it fair-minded for her to go to a pro-Ally lecture by an Englishman?"

He smiled faintly as he hurried back to the anteroom.

On the way out, after his interview with the President, Napier could not fail to see among the waiting crowd, composed chiefly of men, the very striking figure of a yellow-haired woman in deep conversation with a certain senator much at the moment in the public eye. But Miss von Schwarzenberg did not leave Mr. Napier's recognition to chance.

"Oh, here you are!" She turned her back on the important person and joined Napier with as much effrontery as though the meeting were what she so successfully gave the impression it was, a matter mutually arranged. In face of the absence on his part of the least response, she walked on at his side. "I'm the only one here in all this throng," she said in a confidential tone, "who isn't waiting to see the President."

"That's a lie!" he said to himself as he stalked on.

"I'm waiting to see you. You must bear with me, I'm afraid," she said in gentle accents. "It's about Nan. You haven't been to see her because I'm there. Isn't that a pity?"

Napier's apparent obliviousness of her presence vanished. He made no effort to keep his indignation out of his face as he stopped abruptly to say: "I decline to discuss that or anything else with you." He turned his back on her with unmistakable finality, marched out into the corridor, and so to the columned porch, with never a look behind.

Napier hadn't often betrayed in public such heat of anger as the woman's audacity had stirred in him. Much she cared! he told himself, still tingling. She would shrug her handsome shoulders and return to her senator. Presently she would be entering the sanctum Napier had just left. To-morrow, in Hallett Newcomb's audience. Newcomb was one of those Britons invited by American friends to come and correct transatlantic misapprehension, and to present facts. Yet even such unorganized and unofficial efforts, so slight in sum, were not suffered by the thoroughgoing German propagandists to pass unchallenged or unneutralized. In this connection Roderick Taylor had set down to Miss Greta's credit an astute discovery. It was that, as some one put the case, "pro-Ally Americans stayed away from these meetings in vast numbers." Your pro-Ally American didn't need converting. He was occupied in other ways. What he failed to recognize was that in the absence of a sufficiently represented pro-Ally element in these audiences, Miss Greta's confederates, judiciously disposed about the hall, could and frequently did get up a powerful and "spontaneous" pro-German demonstration. By this means certain meetings convened in the interests of the Allies were turned into triumph for their enemies.

In front of Napier, at the office desk in Miss Ellis's hotel, stood a man impressing on the clerk in an undertone the importance of a letter he had brought. Could he have a receipt for it? Could he see the bell-boy who was to deliver it? That business despatched, the clerk was free to attend to Mr. Napier. Yes, he had been told a gentleman of that name would call for Miss Ellis at 7:30. A bell-boy was waiting to take Mr. Napier up.

Side by side in the elevator they shot through story after story, to be set down near the roof. With his thumb pressing the envelop to a little brass tray, the bell-boy held in its place, address face-downward, the much-sealed packet which had been the object of so much solicitude. At the end of an interminable corridor the bell-boy tapped at a door. Without waiting, he opened it and went in, returning almost at once with the tray empty and the words, "This way, sir."

The instant Napier was over the threshold, the door was shut behind him. He stood facing Miss von Schwarzenberg. She had risen in the act of laying the sealed packet on the table. In the midst of his surprise Napier mentally registered the fact that he had never seen her in more brilliant good looks. She was wearing over her dinner dress a superb fur coat, thrown back to show her jeweled neck.

"I am too early," Napier said. "I will wait downstairs."

"You are not too early. It is Nan who is late. She won't be a minute." Miss Greta pointed to a chair as Napier stood that instant rigid by the door. "Don't," she cried softly—"don't be so hard upon me! Can't you see that I'm not standing in your way any more?"

"If that is so, you have your own reason for it." He turned and laid his hand on the door-handle. These American fastenings! He turned the knob fruitlessly.

"Don't be so hard!" She had come toward him; her voice burred softly over his shoulder. "When I'm trying to keep the straight road, don't force me down into the dark ways I abhor. Oh, listen, Gavan! Give me a chance to explain!"

"What's the matter with this door?" he demanded.

"How do I know?" She pressed her lace handkerchief to her lips.

He rattled the handle.

"For God's sake! don't make a scene!" she cried in a harsh whisper. "Are you so bent on humiliating me!—both in private and in public as you did this morning? Another woman wouldn't forgive you this morning. And now, again, you want to humiliate me. Before hotel servants!"

"You told that bell-boy to fasten the door."

"Hush! For Nan's sake, anyway, don't make a scandal here!"

Napier turned and looked at her. "Whatever your motive is you are wasting time."

"Not if you give me five minutes to explain. For you, too," she said with meaning, "it won't be wasting time."

His answer was to lift his hand and press the electric bell.

"Ah,"—she stepped back,—"you are implacable! You—you don't care how much you injure yourself if only you can injure me. Yes, you—!" She broke off and turned away. For several moments she stood in that attitude, giving him ample time to relent, her meek head bent, the dazzling whiteness of her neck set off by the dark fur collar falling away from her shoulders. The silence was broken by a stifled sob as she carried her handkerchief to her lips and began to walk up and down. "I can't disguise it from myself any longer. You"—she stopped in the middle of the room—"you are the great disaster of my life." She waited. She gave him time to disavow the role. "Very well"—she folded her arms under the heavy fur—"very well," she repeated with a quiet intensity, "I shall not go out of your life, either, without leaving my mark. She shall make it up to me! Yes, and she shall make it up to Julian Grant for what he has given and lost. Be sure I shall see to that!" She came forward with an air of great dignity, slipped some catch, and opened the door. "Go!" she said in a penetrating voice.

Out of the elevator that shot up in response to Napier's ring stepped the same bell-boy. Napier's last look back showed the boy running down the corridor, one of the long list of Greta's slaves.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. Nan stood waiting.

"Why," she exclaimed with boundless surprise, "where have you come from?"

"There has been some mistake," Napier said. "I was taken to the wrong floor."

"I should think so! I was going down to see if my message had been forgotten. Oh, come while I get my gloves."

She disappeared through a sitting-room into a room beyond. Clearly Greta had taken some trouble to achieve her brief tête-à-tête.

As Nan came back, drawing on a long white glove, Napier was aware of some one flying down the stairs, some one for whom express elevators ran too slowly. A moment after the terrified face of the bell-boy appeared at the open door. "Come! Come quick! She's dying!"

"Who is dying? What has happened?" Nan demanded.

"Miss von Schwarzenberg," he gasped. "Quick!"

"But Miss von Schwarzenberg has gone out!"

"No! no! She's upstairs. Come quick, or it will be too late." He rushed to the elevator and rang. "It's coming!" he cried over his shoulder.

"Is he crazy?" Nan asked, dazed, but following Napier.

"It is probably some device to prevent your going out with me," he said as the elevator stopped.

Again the boy sped down that interminable upper corridor, the two hurrying at his heels.

"I'll wait for you," Napier said. They had come to the door which the boy had not dared to open till he was supported by the presence of others. He knocked now, opened, and stood back.

Greta, in the arm-chair, the fur coat at her feet, had flung bare arms out across the table and half sat, half lay there, moaning, with hidden face.

Nan rushed in and took the woman in her arms. Napier, full of disgust for what he looked on as a piece of cheap theatricalism, was startled as the face fell back against Nan's shoulder. That it should be so blotched, so disfigured in that short time, bore witness to the violence of whatever the feeling was that had torn and still was tearing the woman. More than by any other sign, the fact that her heavy hair had become loosened unbecomingly, grotesquely, brought Napier the conviction that for once Greta von Schwarzenberg wasn't acting. The great yellow mass of braids and curls had lurched over one ear, giving a look more of drunkenness than grief to the convulsed face. That one glimpse was enough. Napier turned away and paced the corridor for those leaden-footed minutes till Nan ran out, looking blindly up and down.

"Where are you? Oh, the most cruel, awful thing has happened! She has just had his letter. Greta's lover—Count Ernst Pforzheim is dead." The girl's eyes were full of tears. "Think of poor Greta running away up here to hide herself so as not to interfere with my pleasure!" She turned back to the room.

"Have you heard—any details?" Napier detained her to ask.

"Only that he died for the fatherland."

For all Taylor's professed anxiety to have Napier's report of his interview with the President, he was late. He was very late. Macray had looked in twice, the lines in his sallow face deepening as the black-rimmed glasses verified the solitary figure in the room.

Finally he came in and closed the door. He crossed the long room and stood at Napier's side before he said with that brisk familiarity that cost Napier something not to resent: "Remember that shady Bureau de Change, Mr. Taylor told you about?" As Napier did not instantly respond, Macray went on in his gloomy telegraphese, "Suspicious boom since Schwarz's reappearance."

Oh, yes, Napier remembered that.

"Hahn—fellow we've had investigating—been waiting for Taylor two mortal hours. Off to Chicago to-night—Hahn. 'Fore he goes, detail in bureau business got to be established. Hahn wants to go openly—one of the public—see 'f he c'n do business."

"Well, what's the objection?"

"No objection. Only Taylor's kept him waitin' such an infernal time, Hahn won't be able lay hands on anybody right sort before bureau shuts. Wants a witness. Fellow seems think I c'n hang fishin'-line out the window and hook what he calls 'suitable witness.' S'pose you wouldn't?"

Napier was growing accustomed to exigencies and odd manners. He had the man in. Once or twice before he'd seen here the clean-shaven young German-American, with his look of the typical waiter (which he wasn't) over-fed, under-exercised, a little scornful, with a leaden eye fixed on the main chance. One thought instinctively of tips as one's own eye, leaden or otherwise, took in his "waiting" air. He regarded his prospective companion without enthusiasm.

"You can't wear a stove-pipe hat," he said, "and you'd have to borrow a different overcoat."

Napier's instinctive reluctance was overborne by Macray's misinterpreting its origin. "Schwarz won't be there. No fear! All same, no sense exciting remark."

Napier in his turn made no secret of the ground of his special interest in the enterprise. "Why do you think she's behind this concern?"

Macray's curt: "Don't think. Know," decided Napier.

Two flights up, in a derelict office building on lower Broadway, they found a back room with a number on the door. It bore no business sign, no name.

The arrangement that Hahn should do the talking was initiated in the German tongue as they climbed the dingy stairs. Napier's secret uneasiness took alarm at the sound of steps behind. He looked back. On the first landing, under the flaring gas, which of itself was a sign of the outworn character of the place, a shabby old man in a fur cap was coming up behind them. Coming stealthily, Napier felt. But Hahn talked on stolidly about a hypothetical family in Karlsruhe. He knocked at the door, and then went in.

A hairless head, with outstanding ears, bent over a table, reading. The gas jet, directly above, was set in a green tin reflector, and all the light in the room seemed to concentrate itself on that corpse-white cranium; or, rather, the effect was as though the masked light, instead of being thrown on the man's head, had its origin there. A polished and luminous orb, it seemed to contain the shining like one of those porcelain globes over the old-time lamps.

"Is dis de blace vhere I can send money to Sharmany?" Hahn inquired.

"Yep," said the clerk. "Shut the door, will you?"

Hahn had not budged. "Bott safe, hein?" he said.

"Absolute." The man got up and shut the door. It was a drafty old place, he explained. "Safe?" he went on, resuming his place and gathering the light to himself again. This was not only a safe way; it was the only safe way.

Hahn produced a worn pocket-book. He wanted to send fifteen dollars to Karslruhe.

Fifteen dollars? It was a long way to send only fifteen dollars. The worst of it was, the commission was heavier in proportion for a small sum like that. It cost the company as much to send fifteen dollars as it would cost to send five hundred.

"Vot gompany?"

"This one. Who sent you here?"

"Fleischmann, Sevent' Avenue."

"Well, didn't he tell you about the company?"

"All Fleischmann tell me is de address." What he wanted, Hahn went on, was to send fifteen dollars every fortnight.

"Oh, every fortnight." The polished head bent over the address.

Hahn opened his pocket-book and fingered some bills. But how was he to know the money would reach Karlsruhe?

"Simple enough; we guarantee it. I give you a receipt." The man opened a book of printed forms, dipped a pen into a dirty ink-stand, and wrote the date.

How long, the visitor insisted, before he would hear from his family that the money had come?

"Depends on how soon they write." The tone was distinctly superior. "Family habits in these matters are different, we find."

His family acknowledged their letters instantly, Hahn said, if they got them. They hadn't been getting them.

"You have been here before?"

"No."

"I thought not. Then why did you expect your letters to get through, above all if they had money in them?" The unshadowed eyes in the pudding visage rested on the three five-dollar bills Hahn still held in his hand.

Hahn wished to know how soon he might hear if his family acknowledged at once.

"As a rule inside six weeks."

What would be the longest time, Hahn then wished to know.

"Two months—"

"It is a lie!" came from a crack in the noiselessly opened door. At a child's height from the floor a fur cap was thrust in. The gray beard sticking out beyond the mangy headgear gave the old face a fierceness instantly contradicted by the eyes.

"I haf a letter," he said, trembling with excitement. "De money I send two mont' before Christmas it nefer come. De money my friend send t'ree veek before dat, it nefer come. You gif me my money back!" He came in, swinging his greasy coat-tails about his shambling legs. "Here is de baper to show you get my money."

The altercation went on in German, with excuses, threats. "Get out, or the police—"

"Oh, you vill not like bolice here."

There was righteous anger on the part of the man at the desk; but a certain caution, too. Nobody could say at a time like this that in one case out of thousands something wholly unforeseen might not happen to delay—

"It is not delayed!" the little man screamed. "It did not come! It vill not come! Vhere is it? Gif it back!"

"Ah-h, I remember you now!" the unlashed eyelids narrowed. "In your case, and to an address like that—"

"Vot de matter vid the address?" screamed the old man. "Berfectly goot address!"

"I warned you it would be wisest to insure." He turned bruskly away from the agitated figure. "I will talk to you when I've finished. These gentlemen are in a hurry."

"Not at all. No, certainly not." Hahn backed to the door. He would wait.

"Vy to insure," the old man was shrilling, "if to send by you is, like you said, so safe? Hein?" He leaned over and hammered the ink-stained desk with a dirty fist.

The man behind the receipt-book shifted his position. He got up, and the light in the globe he bore on his shoulders was extinguished as by the turn of a screw. Hands in pocket, he stood in a shadow above the green reflector. "Safe, money undoubtedly is, in our hands. If," he repeated, "in one case out of a thousand it gets out of our hands, what then? Maybe you have heard there is a war? Maybe you can read?"

The old man gibbered with rage and offended pride; but the lines of defeat, which life had stamped on his face, deepened.

"Very well," said the other, with an effrontery that said he had marked the signs, "since you can read, you know who it is who robs the mails. Only twice since the war have they caught us, and we have sent tens of thousands of dollars. Ask the thieves of English where your money is!"

"Ai!" In the middle of the tirade the old man had turned away and spread out his hands in impotent grief.

"In war," the agent called after the broken figure—"in war it is wise to insure."

"Gone! All gone! Ai!" The quavering old voice trailed down the dingy stair.

Hahn mumbled an excuse, and the two new clients withdrew despite vigorous protests. Once outside the room, Hahn plunged down the two flights as though in fear of his life. When Napier reached the street there was no trace anywhere of either the old man, or of Hahn.

He recognized their collaboration in the account given in the New York papers, a few days later, of an exposure of one of the several concerns, all, it was hinted, under one (unnamed) management which, with no capital beyond a back room, a table, a chair, and a clerk behind a book of receipt "blanks," raked in hundreds and thousands from gullible people who thought they were helping their friends in Germany.

CHAPTER XXIII

"Schwarzenberg and her friends will be a little straitened for a while after this," said Taylor.

The expression "her friends" grated on Napier, and Napier was already in a restless, uncertain mood. Taylor had noticed that. Significant as both men "deemed" the interview with the President, Napier had hurried over it to canvass and sift the Hahn adventure.

Taylor, lounging on the sofa, sipped his liqueur at his ease. How did he know the bulk of the bureau's money went into Schwarzenberg's pocket? Two reasons. First, she'd earned it. Languishing business doing a roaring trade from the moment she took hold. Second, the fellow she set to watch the rogues she'd put in charge was a rogue himself.

"Oh, we've deserved well of our country in blocking up a few of those rat-holes," Taylor concluded.

"My interest in it," Napier paused to say, "wasn't pure patriotism. It's made me pretty sick to see this Miss Ellis—rather a friend of mine she is, very intimate with my chief's family—so hopelessly taken in. I had an idea this bureau business might show up—"

Taylor abandoned his lounging posture. He sat looking at Napier very steadily out of his greenish eyes.

"Oh, I quite understand," Napier went on, "the exposure is too discreet to be of any use to me."

"I should rather think so!" remarked Mr. Taylor.

"All the same, it isn't fair, leaving people like the Ellises in the dark. The mother is off to the Pacific coast to-morrow." Napier added that he was due at their hotel in half an hour. He was going to talk to them, he said.

Still Taylor sat there, regarding his guest through a haze of cigar smoke. "I thought," he said after a moment, "you mentioned that you had talked to them—to the girl, anyway."

"I said I'd told Miss Ellis what Singleton found in Schwarzenberg's box. And God knows that ought to have been enough—"

"Too much," said Taylor, quietly. "Of course they passed it on to Schwarzenberg."

Napier doubted that. "You don't know the Ellises," he said, ignoring the limitations of his own acquaintance. No, his mistake had not been in telling too much. His mistake was that he hadn't told the Ellises enough. He was going to repair the mistake to-night.

"How are you going to do that?" Taylor asked in the same careful tone.

By telling them—telling the girl, anyway—that he'd avoided telling her before—the proved desperate character of this woman's accomplices.

A peculiar fixity came into Taylor's green eyes.

"You can't pass on information we've put in your way here."

"Certainly not," returned Napier with some heat. "What I shall tell has nothing whatever to do with you. I sha'n't hint bureau." Again he consulted his watch. The time dragged.

"You'd mind, I suppose, giving me an idea what you do mean to hint?"

"I sha'n't hint at all. And I've come here to-night expressly to tell you, first, that I mean the Ellises to know about Gull Island. About Greta von Schwarzenberg's connection with it and with the man we found there."

There was silence in the room.

"I dare say you are wondering why, in the face of the exigency, I've put it off?"

Taylor had stopped smoking, but he said nothing.

"If I'd told her what I found Carl Pforzheim up to on Gull Island, she'd have to know what became of Carl. Well, I'm now going to tell her."

"You can't do that!" Taylor had come to life. He leaned forward, blinking his white lashes as if a cinder had blown in his eye.

"Why can't I?"

"For one thing, telling the Ellises would be as good as giving Schwarzenberg the key to the whole Gull Island business."

"Well, why not? Do her good. Put the fear of God into her, perhaps. And she can't spoil a game that's over and ended."

Taylor laid down his cigar.

"The Gull Island game," he said in his guarded voice, "isn't over and ended."

Napier stood waiting.

"We've got one of our best men there this minute, personating Carl Pforzheim." Taylor nodded in the face of Napier's stark astonishment. "Your friend Singleton. He's managed the Gull Island job from the beginning. Went up again the day after you were there. Wirelessed the German agent at Amsterdam that he'd had wind of a raid on the island. He was going to destroy every trace and get out. Singleton saw to it that the truth of that much was verified, and duly reported to the Wilhelmstrasse. He promised them—still, of course, in the character of Pforzheim—to get back to the island as soon as it was safe. Well, he has got back."

"What the devil could he tell of any use to Germany that wasn't fatal to us?" Napier demanded.

"You don't yet appreciate the situation," Taylor said softly. "It's a post of special advantage just because the man in charge can choose his own time to be there. He can give important information that reaches Germany the merest trifle too late, or information that he knows they've had already from another quarter. They're fond of verifying their intelligence. And he tells them things they want to believe and can't check—things they have to take his word for, things that will throw dust in the eyes they count on seeing clearest. I tell you, Gull Island is one of the cogs in the wheel of the British machine. You won't mind if I'm frank? Well, then, you'd have hard work to commit any indiscretion"—Taylor rubbed it in—"that would serve Schwarzenberg's ends so well as to enable her to warn the Germans that a British decoy was nesting in Carl Pforzheim's place."

As he stood there, a prey to increasing uneasiness, Napier had his further glimpse of one of the disintegrating effects of wartime: the unknown quantity in character. How that had been forced home! Taylor had seemed "one of the best." No one in the British service was more trusted, and, Napier's instinct told him, no one more justly. None the less, Napier didn't see headquarters writing "all this" from the other side.

"I suppose," he found himself saying, "I oughtn't to ask you how you heard about the decoy duck on the island?"

"Well"—Taylor reflected an instant,—"after all, my instructions—yes, I'll tell you. I have it on the best possible authority. Ernst Pforzheim told me."

"Ernst! Ernst Pforzheim is in an English prison, or rather, he was before—"

"Exactly. Before he became of such use to our side. Clever dog as that fellow Singleton is, he couldn't have worked the Gull Island oracle without Ernst Pforzheim's help."

Ernst had helped Singleton! No! no! there were limits. It was, anyway, safe to say, "You must in that case rather deplore his death."

"What makes you think he's dead?" Taylor asked.

"His particular friend, Miss von Schwarzenberg, had the news yesterday."

"She had, had she? Ha! ha! The canny Ernst!" Taylor subdued his mirth to say: "Just so. Wilhelmstrasse doesn't have the news. We're all right; and Master Ernst can go on drawing pay from two governments. Oh, he's a very practical person, is Ernst. The situation is his own invention. A piece of 'war economy,' he called it. 'You English hard up for ammunition. Why waste it shooting a spy when he can give you more valuable information than anybody in the German Secret Service?'"

"You can't seriously mean we were such fools as to trust a man like that?"

"So far from trusting him, we keep him under surveillance every hour of his life. Two of our men specially detailed."

"You aren't telling me he's over here!"

"Been here six weeks."

"Then he's a free man!"

Taylor smiled. "A man who's been doing the sort of business Ernst has, is never a free man. Nobody knows better than Ernst how little his life would be worth if he took any liberties. And why should he? This is his harvest-time. He knows he'll get more out of us than—"

"Than out of Germany?"

"They'd ask very awkward questions of Ernst in Germany; he can evade them here. But there's a day of reckoning waiting for Mr. Ernst in the fatherland. No one knows better than he that he's safer with us, looked after by two capital fellows, till after the war. Then off to South America with a fat bank-account. And, by Jove! he'll have earned it! The cheek of the devil! Except for one enterprise!" and Mr. Taylor chuckled as he relit his cigar.

"We'd been wondering," he went on, "Macray and I, why the beggar had grown so content never to go out. No more music, no theater, no smart restaurants, and so far as we could see, no reason on earth why, with one or other of the men who stick to him day and night, he shouldn't revisit his old haunts. Not he!" Again that pleased chuckle. "Not so long as Greta von Schwarzenberg is circulating about New York!"

"Why, he and she are, or they were, thick as thieves."

Taylor nodded.

"And it would be undeniably useful to us to have that relation continue. It's where our friend draws the line. 'All very well to laugh,' he says to me, 'you don't know the woman. I do. Nein, danke.' So he sits and smokes and plays cards, drinks and overeats himself, and is losing his figure. I can take you round any evening, and you'll see for yourself."

"I've come to say good-by." Napier stood before Nan Ellis in the great public parlor of her hotel. More and more his most private experiences of American life had seemed conditioned by the vast restlessness of these places. He noticed that Nan, like many of her compatriots, was able to achieve an obliviousness to such surroundings that amounted to a kind of privacy.

Instead of relinquishing his hand, she had clutched it tighter: "You are not going back to England?"

"What's the use of my staying here?"

"The use?" She let his hand go. Napier received the impression that the lowering of her tone was less attributable to two or three other absorbed groups seated about the great room, than to some sudden rush of feeling that clouded her voice. "You are safe here."

He looked at her for a moment. Deliberately he shook off the impression her tone more than her words had made. "No,"—he shook his head,—"I'm far from safe where you can ring me up."

"You don't like me to ring you up?"

He could have laughed if he'd been less oppressed. "It's no use. I see I can't do anything to protect you. I might as well be on the other side of the world."

"No! no!" she protested with an eagerness that caught her breath. "Besides, you are very far from sure of getting to the other side of the world as things are."

His look of angry scorn, for the contingency implied, agitated her.

"Oh, do believe me! This is a thing I know more about than you do."

"It isn't a knowledge you should have," he said sternly.

She swept the rebuke aside in her alarm. "Don't imagine," she said in that strained undertone—"don't imagine the warnings in the papers aren't serious. It is one of the things I couldn't write. Why didn't you come and see me and my mother last Thursday?"

He was aware of being as little able now, to make idle conversation with Nan, as he had been that night, after Taylor had barred all use of the Gull Island evidence. He dropped out mumbled phrases, "Unexpected business," having "to go to Washington," and was there anything else she hadn't been able to write?

Yes, yes. There was a great deal more, more than she had any right to say. But this much she must tell him: "You aren't to ask me how I know, and you won't ask me to tell you more than I've a right to. I have a right!" She flashed an instant's defiance at some unseen opponent, "or I'll take it, anyhow. The torpedoing is going to be extended. Yes!" she said as though to convince her own shrinking incredulity as much as his. "Neutral as well as enemy ships. They're going on till England is as isolated as she's isolated Germany. If England won't believe that, if England doesn't realize,"—she waited an instant as if to give him time to throw out a life-line of hope to her proviso,—"then," she said as she took in Napier's motionless figure and stern face—"then what's before us is too horrible."

"I am glad you recognize the horror of the German policy."

"What good will that do!" she began hurriedly, "if you—" and then half to herself: "But you simply mustn't go! You didn't know, perhaps," she leaned nearer, "passenger-boats have been carrying guns."

"Really?" said Napier.

She nodded. "It's true. And that's why the Germans say they will sink passenger-boats. So they can't be used any more by travelers, now that they're warned."

"You see it as simple as that? Germany is to tell neutrals they are not to travel even in neutral waters!"

"If we don't use passenger-boats for passenger-boats, they aren't passenger-boats any more." (Napier heard Schwarzenberg speaking.) "They go loaded to the guards! Yes, war material for the Allies."

"If that is so, why is it? Would you see the Allies punished, enslaved, because the Allies haven't, as Germany has, devoted the last forty years to making and accumulating arms? Germany—"

"Oh, it's America I'm thinking of—after you!" she threw in. "If America's part is going to be just to grow rich and richer out of this awfulness, I don't know how I shall bear it. And that's what I'm telling Julian. But all that,"—she swept it aside with one of those quick motions of a flashing hand,—"if I beg you not to go—"

"It's no use," said Napier.

"Nothing I could say or do?"

He shook his head.

"Very well, then," she said with hurt mouth that quivered, "what is the name of your boat?"

He considered a moment. "Don't you think it would be very indiscreet of me to tell you?"

"It will be the discreetest thing you ever did in your life."

"Why do you want to know?"

"I want to know because"—again she bent to him—"because there's a black-list." He saw her eyes bright with terror. "You must give me time to find out...."

"I see," he interrupted. "You would like me to owe my life to Greta von Schwarzenberg."

"To me, Gavan,"—the pallor of her face yielded to a sudden flush,—"if you could bear that."

"I haven't decided on my boat," he said.

"But I thought you came to say good-by?"

He was going on a few weeks' tour on this side, he said.

Oh, the lightening in her face. He seemed bent only on teasing her a little, in withholding the answer to her quick: "Whereabouts are you going to tour?" When she had waited for the answer that didn't come she said: "You're afraid I'll tell. Everybody's afraid every one else will tell. Everybody's changed."

"Not Miss Greta, surely?"

"Greta as much as anybody," she flung out. And then, as though she regretted that ebullition, she added hastily: "I suppose I mustn't ask you—what next, after the few weeks' tour."

"Yes, you may ask that," Napier said, the smile going out of his eyes. "France next."

They parted with no hint from him of the fact that one result of his second visit to Washington had been an extension of the highly successful unofficial mission.

For Taylor had been right in saying the old sharp demarcations between government departments were being erased. More and more diplomacy impinged on the twin provinces of trade and world finance. The astute were beginning to see that the problem of munitions was own brother to food supply, which in its turn was a matter of transport. In view of the now frequent sinkings of Allied ships, not only South American meat, wheat, but South American tonnage, might become of supreme importance in a protracted war. Unfortunately, German influence had attained dangerous proportions in those remote, fertile areas below the equator. Napier and another unofficial British envoy received orders from home to proceed to Rio on instructions from the British Ambassador at Washington.

He returned to New York early in May, to find the country in a state of excitement such as the United States had not known since the assassination of Lincoln. Some twenty-four hours before, the Germans had torpedoed the Lusitania. Fifteen hundred lives had been sacrificed. The effect on Napier was the effect on many. The Lusitania dead recruited tens of thousands.

On the afternoon of the day of his arrival in New York, Napier returned to his hotel, having engaged passage to England by the next ship.

A lady, he was told, waited to see him. What lady was likeliest to have news so quickly of his arrival? He shrank from the thought of Greta as from something reptilian. It couldn't be Greta on this day of all days. And who else, but the being of all the world he most hungered to see? So thinking, he made his way among the hosts of horror-stricken people, one sole theme in every mouth, Lusitania! Lusitania! Some, and not one most voluble or outwardly most excited, uttered the word War with an accent that Napier wished might have been heard across the Rhine. He kept on telling himself that he knew it would be Nan he should find waiting; but he was not prepared for the Nan he found, nor for that low exclamation: "At last! At last!" nor for the shaken voice in which she disposed of his question how had she known of his arrival.

"An arrangement with the clerk," she said, to ring her up as soon—

"Then that was before!"—said Napier hungrily.

"Yes, before the awful news." A shuddering vagueness seemed to close about her like a mist. It shut out the moment's shining at his coming. He could see that blank horror at the tragedy obscured for the moment everything else in life.

Only Napier, it seemed, felt the added strain of this coming and going of excited people, the bringing in of telegrams, the dictating of others. The girl paid no more attention to the other people scattered about the great room, to their tension or their tears, than they to hers. As she turned to throw her trembling body down in a chair by the window, the look in her eyes startled Napier.

"And did you see what the papers said?" she demanded.

The terrible newspaper accounts, which he had not yet found time to read, she had by heart. Behind that veil of nervous vagueness he caught glimpses of the intensity of her realization—her participation, one might almost say—in the scenes off the Irish coast.

"Had you any special friend on board?" he asked.

"Special fr—" she repeated in that low voice. And then her note climbed quickly to what for her was the climax of the huge disaster. "They were Americans!" So she confessed that limitation which a faulty imagination sets to our humanity—a limitation she had imagined she despised. "Americans they were, and innocent. I keep thinking most of the children. There were such lots of children, Gavan, on that boat. I kept seeing them all night long. I could hear their voices growing weaker—" her own failed her for a moment. And when she found it again, it was a different voice altogether, firm and bitter. "People say to me, 'the Lusitania was warned not to sail.'"

Yes, Napier had heard that was so.

"As if that could excuse—it's what Greta says. 'They were warned,' she keeps repeating. 'They disobeyed the warning.' The little children, the babies disobeyed the German warning! Oh-h!" The small tightened fist beat upon one knee to call back the self-control that threatened to desert her. "I've had a horrible morning with Greta. She—something has died in Greta. I'd been feeling ever since—" Again she broke off and seemed to seize upon comparative commonplace to steady her nerves. "It was true about her being married. She admitted it the day she read of Mr. Guedalla's death in the paper. She got some money. It wasn't her not telling us she was married; it was other things. Oh, I've been unhappy enough! But this—this! Gavan, I couldn't get her to say it was horrible. She wasn't even sorry. Oh, Gavan, she was glad!" The locked fingers writhed in her lap. She seemed not to know that she was weeping. "What do you think Greta said at last? 'It would be a lesson,' she said. A lesson! To torture and kill fifteen hundred innocent people. A lesson to the children! To little babies!" She turned her quivering face away a moment. "I think," she said under her broken breath—"I think I should have gone mad if you hadn't come back. Oh, I'm so glad you're back!"

He simply hadn't the courage at that moment to tell her he was going to sail for England the following day. He told her in a very gentle note sent late in the afternoon. They were to dine together.

She met him with steady looks.

"I've cabled to Julian," she said immediately, "that I'm coming back with you."

The Parnassian was to sail at ten.

Napier had stood outside the entrance to the dock, waiting for Nan, since ten minutes past nine. At twenty minutes to ten there she was at last.

"But where is your luggage?" he called out. He had warned her not to trust it to other hands. In that second before the cab drew alongside something in the face at the window prepared him for the answer. "That's why I am late. I had to have everything taken off. And I tried to telephone you. Just as I was leaving—this came." She held a paper toward him as she got out of the cab. She stood there while he read:

I depend on your waiting till I come sailing to-day Olympic.

Julian.

As Napier looked up, speechless in that first moment, she whispered: "Serves me right. Greta said, I was running away." She put out her hand and steadied herself against the window-frame of the cab. "Where you're going they shoot deserters, don't they! Well, I've been shot. Oh, not fatally! just in the leg. Enough to stop me."

"You are going to wait for Julian?"

"What else is possible?" She hung her head. "He and the others, they've depended on me. Well, they must not any more. And when he comes,"—her breast heaved as she brought it out,—"I shall tell him something else."

"Tell Julian! What shall you tell Julian?"

The lifted eyes were swimming.

"That it's you. That to see you go without me breaks my heart."

"Nan!" he cried and pulled himself up with an effort that brought the blood into his face. Other passengers, arriving late, for all their own agitation at the prospect of some hitch in getting themselves and their baggage on board, stared back over their shoulders at the leave-taking out in the street.

Napier flung a "Wait!" to the cabman, and held his watch in one hand. "Come," he said and took Nan by the arm. He walked her a little way from the dock entrance.

"I think," he went on gravely, "I wouldn't tell Julian. You see, Nan, you've got to consider that I mayn't be coming back." He didn't look at her. "What's the use of telling Julian? Isn't there enough misery in the world without adding to it?"

"That's what Julian and I think," she said, blurring her words. "Enough misery in the world without war. You never cared about that old misery as Julian did. And that's what makes it so—so—not to be borne that you should feel you have to go and meet the new horror out there."

"Well, I do feel like that," he said.

"And yet it isn't any longer just duty. You want to go!" she cried. "I saw that yesterday when we talked about the Lusitania."

"Yes," he said grimly, "I want to go."

"Well, so do lots of my countrymen." And Napier couldn't have told whether dismay or pride was dominant in the new note. His hand slipped down her arm and found her fingers. Napier's valet, Day, came running out of the dock-gates. He looked distractedly across the wide, open space before the slips.

"Yes!" Napier hailed him. "I'll be there!" He gripped her hand hard before he let it go. "I'll have to run for it. Good-by." On an impulse, whether mere instinct to cover his emotion or some obscurer working of the mind behind his wretchedness, he caught Julian's cable out of her hold. He held the paper in front of his misty eyes as he hurried toward the dock entrance. The hour the message had been sent from London struck him now for the first time. He halted suddenly. In a voice harsh with the effort to keep it steady he called back: "Did Greta know that you meant to go with me?"

"Yes," came the panting answer as the girl ran forward a few steps. "I told her before I saw you that I couldn't bear it over here any longer. And now you—you are leaving me!" She stopped.

"You'll lose the boat, sir!" Day called out.

Napier's last vision of Nan Ellis showed the girl still standing there looking after him and sobbing openly in the street.

This cable, he knew now was no reply to Nan's. It was the reply to some message sent hours earlier by Greta von Schwarzenberg.

CHAPTER XXIV

Napier and Julian exchanged wireless messages as they passed each other on the high seas. "Nan is waiting for you in New York," was Napier's greeting.

When next Napier heard of either of them, he was in France; those two were together in America. Then he heard of Nan's being in London "for two weeks." Next she wrote him a line from New York: "Because Julian is over-worked, and he's had horrid letters from home. Please write him something cheerful."

Napier responded to this invitation by sending a sealed packet through the foreign-office bag, giving a brief account of Greta von Schwarzenberg's more pernicious activities. He ended by commending Julian to Roderick Taylor for confirmation. The answer to this, anxiously waited for, came in the form of a truly Julianesque denunciation of all secret service: "As long as we employ spies we shall suffer from spies." Greta, according to Julian, had been alarmed and harried into associations alien to her nature. As to the incontestable fact that after being deported, she had slipped back to England and had crossed the ocean disguised as a Belgian, that was "our doing. If we go interfering with freedom of travel, we must expect—" For his own part, he was busied from morning till night about matters of major importance. He had no time for fellows like Taylor. In some ways America was disappointing, but England was going from bad to worse.

From one and all of Julian's letters of that period Napier gathered that for refreshment in a very dusty time, Julian bathed his spirit in Nan Ellis's unfailing sympathy and faith. Driven and harassed as Julian was, alienated from his family, divided from old friends, with neither health nor energy to make new, he seemed able to wait for the girl's slow-forming inclination toward a closer relation, since as he wrote in his astonishing way—"since she is of such service to the work." Her special "service" seemed to be the going back and forth between London and New York.

Through all that trench nightmare compounded of dirt, physical and mental misery, and hourly danger, the bitter knowledge was pressed home that the being Gavan Napier loved best on earth was crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic on an errand he abhorred. An errand which he himself by putting the secret-service people on the track of Atlantic contraband, had changed from something safe and easy into something so difficult and so full of peril that he quailed before opening those letters of Julian's, which might tell of the failure, the detection, the arrest of the messenger.

From English sources, as the months went on, echoes reached Napier in the trenches of Mr. Julian Grant's writings and speeches on the other side of the Atlantic. These were utterances of such a character as to bring disaster upon certain persons in London held responsible for not foreseeing the inadvisability of allowing the notorious pacifist to cross the Atlantic.

It was at a time when Anglo-American relations had suffered to the point of danger by the British authorities having held up American ships carrying supplies which would ultimately find their way through neutral countries to Germany. Whether owing to the fact that German propaganda in the United States was then at the height of its success, the war spirit called to life by the Lusitania disaster languished during a protracted interchange of Notes between the United States and the Central powers.

Nan was as poor a letter-writer as Julian was admirable. One of her meager little missives reached Napier soon after the so-called "great advance" which toward the end of September, 1915, gained a fragment of French soil about Loos at colossal cost.

"I want you to know," she wrote, "that I've been learning these last months in New York what the triumphs of German methods would mean for the world. Here, in the midst of all this luxury and waste, I've come to envy loss and sacrifice. If we in America don't get our share of it, I don't know what is to become of us." And then, from the passionate patriot, that passing mock at "America, from a safe distance, distributing victuals and justice to people giving up their lives."

Looking back, after all the turmoil and tragedy had gone by, Napier realized, as clearly as though he had been an eye-witness, the despair that fell on Julian when he heard from her own lips that Nan was "against what Germany stands for. I want my country to be against it," she wrote Napier, "and there seems to be only one way. It isn't, not yet, the way of peace. Well, there it is. I have failed Julian in the work he cares more about than anything in the world. I say to myself, I won't fail him in other ways if I can help it. What do you say, Gavan?"

Before there was time to "say," Napier had received his two wounds, a shell-shattered foot and a damaged right wrist. He was sent home, and for six-and-thirty days lay chafing in a London hospital. The time hung horribly. Most of Napier's friends were in active service or dead; the rest were swamped in work. He'd have gone out of his mind, he said afterward, if it hadn't been for Tommy Durrant. Tommy, with his eye-glass and his pre-war elegance unimpaired, his alertness and sound sense increased by new responsibilities, was still behind the old scenes and in and out of the new as well. He had been "lent" to the Admiralty Intelligence Department. Tommy was full of the increasing difficulty in Anglo-American relations. One day he came in full of "a scheme we've just put through"—a scheme talked of with a careless air, but in a voice carefully modulated.

"That woman on the other side who used to be at the McIntyres'—came back as a Belgian nun after we'd deported her, you know—well, your friend in New York, Taylor, has traced a beastly lot of trouble to her and her gang. For months Taylor's kept telling our people over here it was childish to go straining every nerve to keep the American balance from tipping the wrong way, pouring out money, losing prestige, above all, losing time, while we leave people like Schwarzenberg and her nest of adders to breed their poison—"

"What can we do?" Napier interrupted, hopeless of the answer.

"Get her out of that."

"Out of America?"

Tommy nodded with such vigor his eye-glass fell out.

"I admit it'll be damned difficult, but Singleton," he said, replacing the monocle firmly once more—"Singleton thinks he's found the way." Then, in the deepest confidence, Tommy told Napier about an ex-German spy, one Ernst Pforzheim, who'd had relations with the Schwarzenberg woman. "He'd done a lot of useful work in America as well as here, but Singleton had got our people to tell him they weren't satisfied. There was really only one thing they wanted of Pforzheim, and he hadn't done it. He'd already told the chief there were special reasons why he, Pforzheim, of all people in the world, shouldn't touch this Schwarzenberg business. The chief couldn't see it.

"'But I'm dead!" wails Pforzheim.

"'You've got to come alive,' the chief grinned. But you never in your life saw a man as depressed as that German when he heard he was somehow or other to find a way to rid us of Schwarzenberg.

"'To rid you of her?' he says, his eyes bulging. 'She's a deal more likely to rid you of me.'

"The chief looked as if he could bear that, but he said all he insisted on was that she should be got out of America. No power under heaven, Pforzheim told him, would tempt Schwarzenberg to leave America.

"'You set me an impossible task!' he wept.

"'It's the condition,' says the chief.

"'It's my death-sentence,' says Pforzheim. That was how he went off."

For the next three weeks, whenever Tommy appeared, Napier would ask, as though Ernst Pforzheim, too, were in hospital, how that person was "getting on."

Though Tommy was forever full of other news, all that he was able to produce relating to the luckless Ernst was that he'd disappeared.

Napier hadn't succeeded in getting his letters forwarded from France in those terrible days. After four weeks in hospital he cabled Julian what had happened and that he was getting on all right. A fortnight later, the day of Napier's discharge, came a telegram from New York.

Returning with Nan to-morrow. S. S. Leyden.

Julian.

Not altogether by the ways that would have seemed most direct, not solely through the principals concerned, did Napier come by his most intimate knowledge of what happened on that voyage, which was for many to be the last. From his long familiarity with the way Julian "took things"; from familiarity, not long, but lit by the lamp of passion, with the natural turns and reactions of Nan Ellis, Napier filled in the outlines of the widely published and privately rehearsed story, until to him, the lover on shore, the experiences of that voyage wore an actuality denied to many of those who in their own persons lived out the awful hours. As it accumulated, this knowledge of Napier's came to be of that completer type that some of us cherish concerning matters in which our sharing has been of the kind invisible. We were not "there" in any ordinary sense. Yet indubitably we are more intensely there, in that we are not blinded by panic or numbed by the mental or the bodily blow. We, aloof in the conning-towers of love, are spared no sight, no pang. We look down with every natural sense sharpened; with some perceptions, called as yet supernatural, giving voices to the silence and to the darkness vision. But apart from these less generally recognized avenues of information, there were the great outstanding facts which filled the papers of two hemispheres.

The first six days of the Leyden's voyage were, from the steamship company's point of view, wholly uneventful. Mr. Julian Grant had come on board obviously far from well. The reporters who interviewed him just before he sailed remarked upon the fact. Hallett Newcomb, a middle-aged Englishman of letters, returning home upon conclusion of an extended lecture tour, who had some pre-war acquaintance with Mr. Grant and yet more with Gavan Napier, had been struck at once by the change. Julian Grant's litheness had become fragility, almost emaciation. He walked with the old briskness, but as under a load. Those little lines slanting away from each side of the mustache should have taken the antique pencil another ten years to grave. Grant hadn't yet given his life in the Great War, but of a surety he had given his youth. It was gone forever. In those bright Indian-summer days that followed he would lie bundled up in his deck-chair while hour after hour, in that low, comforting voice, the girl who was his traveling companion read to him. The passengers commented on a supposed likeness between the two, though there was little in it beyond a common delicacy of feature and identity of coloring. People on the Leyden, according to Newcomb, took the pair at first for brother and sister. Anyway, she treated him like a brother, a younger brother who was to be soothed and cared for.

The matter in those books and papers that Mr. Grant seemed never to have enough of was not such stuff as would have soothed the British censor. However, it stirred to enthusiasm the frequent visitor to that sheltered nook on the deck—Miss Genevieve Sherman, as the forged passport gave out Miss Ellis's fascinating black-haired friend. To the fact that Miss Ellis didn't seem to know the lady was her friend, Mr. Hallett Newcomb was an unwilling witness. He had chanced to see the younger woman making her escape from the other on deck, only to be trapped in the cul-de-sac corridor at the bottom of which was Newcomb's cabin. Behind the half-hooked-back door he was looking through his papers for a registered cable address. The tête-à-tête outside began so quietly that he had for those first moments no sense of hearing anything private.

"So you didn't expect to see me," said Miss Genevieve Sherman whom the girl called Greta.

"How in the world could I expect such a thing?"

"Why not?"

"Why not! For the reason that sends my heart into my mouth when I realize only a little of"—the girl's voice hesitated—"of what you must know far more. The risk, Greta, the awful risk!"

"It's dear of you"—the heavier voice was caressing—"dear of you to keep thinking of that. And you're a clever child to have spotted me at once."

"Clever? I've seen you as so many people by now, I think I've got down at last to the things you can't change." The weight of sadness in the words brought out one of the woman's challenging laughs.

"I gather that what you think the essential me doesn't make you very gay, dear child."

The dear child said nothing.

"You shouldn't be surprised to see me here, running some risk it's useless to deny; but after the way we parted, what else could you expect?"

"Greta, you haven't come because of—not really because of me?"

"You've never realized," said the appealing voice, "what you were to me."

There was a longer pause and then, half choked, two little sentences fell out: "It all seems no good any more. I shall never feel the same."

"Not the same, perhaps. You may feel something better, closer. Anyhow, I couldn't let you go away, to the other side of the world without—Why, Nan you didn't even answer my letters!"

"I couldn't."

"Couldn't?"

"There wasn't any more to say."

"That's where you're wrong. There is more to say. And that's one reason why I'm here—"

Newcomb slammed down the top of his portmanteau and rattled his keys.

Any ill success she may have had with the girl did not prevent Miss Greta from seizing every opportunity to work on the sympathies of the gentleman, above all, to ally herself with his international ideals. "You and I" was a phrase which Newcomb often caught as he strolled by; "from our point of view," was another. One of the impressions that was to remain longest, because so often renewed during the week at sea, was the group of which Grant remained the center; he lying spent, in his chair; Miss Ellis in another, finger in book and eyes lowered; while on the other side of him sat Miss Greta, suave, smiling, talking to Mr. Grant, but turning ingratiatingly every now and then to the girl, only to be met by that refusal of the eyes even more marked than the blankness of her silence.

Miss Greta did not continue to take this irresponsiveness well. Behind the continued and tireless effort her mood hardened, her resentment grew.

Newcomb could see that much, though she pretended with some success to make up for any disappointment, and more than make up, by turning the head of a lanky American youth.

The source of Mr. Craig Ashmole's attraction baffled Newcomb till he found out the young man's business: Mr. Ashmole was on his way to England to fill a telegraphy post. Two days out from New York one of the Leyden's wireless operators had taken to his bed; Mr. Ashmole was now installed as deputy assistant. The carroty and myopic youth was not above twenty-three and very keen about his job. He knew it well in its scientific, if not in its political, aspect; and he knew women not at all. Miss Greta's amused effort to fill up this hiatus in his education afforded no less amusement to certain lookers-on at the little comedy, as they thought it.

This was not the view of the one or two who knew the persistent fight made by the lady, that first day out, for the privilege of receiving wireless messages. Under the new rule no one had access to outside news except specially privileged official persons. It was doubtful if the rule held good after Miss Greta had publicly flouted more personable men in favor of the deputy-assistant operator. At carefully chosen times and, for the most part, in out-of-the-way corners she flirted outrageously with the absurd Ashmole. She dazed him, she dazzled him, she rattled him, she pumped him. She raised him to heaven, she reduced him to despair. She comforted him till he saw stars on the blackest night.

It was Saturday, and they had been six days at sea. But for the fact that the captain had gone ninety miles out of his course for some good reason of his own, they might, before the light of that day failed, have been sighting the round towers on the Irish coast.

The usual restlessness of the last hours of a voyage, when people alternately pack and write letters, or pack and feverishly cement new friendships and pack, was augmented by the fact of each passenger finding in his cabin late that afternoon a card on which appeared the sinister legend, "In case of need your boat is—" and a number followed. The very calmness of the information, its manner of conveyance, increased the eeriness of the warning.

Was it the lifeboat-card which those two, Grant and Miss Ellis, were discussing with that absorbed intensity?

When Newcomb had finished his four miles with the second officer and the congressman from Vermont, he came to a stop by Grant's corner in time to hear the girl break into the middle of something he was saying and urge Grant to go below. He was to try to sleep off his headache; anyway, "make up a little for loss of rest before—before—" she stumbled and looked away an instant. A world of trouble was in the face she turned again to watch the slight figure go swaying down the deck and catch at the jamb of the door to steady himself an instant before he disappeared into the companionway. He had left a book open on his rug. On the deck, all around his chair, lay the modern exemplars of that literature of peace which seems, like the old, to bring the sword.

Newcomb's eye roved once again over titles in English and German, and from the scattered incrimination he looked at the face of the girl.

"I seem to have noticed that these sentiments don't stir you to much enthusiasm."

"They are worthy of enthusiasm," she answered, as though parrying an attack on Julian behind his back.

"Why do you make phrases?" Newcomb demanded.

"I don't." Whether her quickened look sprang from a pricked conscience Newcomb couldn't be sure. "Well, aren't they full"—her eyes swept the litter of books and papers—"full of fine and splendid things? You know they are. Only—"

"Only?"

She drew herself up, and the tight-pressed lips parted to say: "However much we believe them, if the house was on fire, we couldn't think about these things. The house is on fire. I can't think about—anything except saving the house and the people who are being burnt."

"Doesn't Mr. Grant tell you that those are exactly his aims—'to save the house' and 'to save the people'?"

"Yes," she owned sadly; "he thinks about saving everything except himself." She stopped abruptly, frightened at having made an admission which may have implied much or little. She studied Newcomb a moment with a gaze that made him long to say: "Yes, believe in me. Why shouldn't you?"

Whether the silent monition reached her, certainly her next words showed no agitation, rather, a queer, poised sagacity.

"What I sit here thinking," she went on, "is that maybe a stupid fireman, even a bad, lying fireman, could 'save the house' where Julian—Julian would only be burnt to death with the rest."

As though acting on sudden impulse, Newcomb brought out the question he had been longing to put all these days.

"Do you mind my asking you why are you leaving home at a time when traveling is, to say the least—" In the pause he said to himself: She won't trust me. Why should she—except for the difference it had seemed to make to her when she learned that he was a friend not only of Grant's, but of Gavan Napier's. In the first days they had talked about Napier.

"I've come," she said after a moment—"I've come because, do what I would, I couldn't prevent Mr. Grant's coming."

"I see. You wouldn't be on this ship if Mr. Grant weren't."

She hesitated again.

"You can see how ill he is, and his coming to America and getting deeper into—all this, holding those meetings and being so attacked about them at home, that's my doing."

"Your doing!" said Newcomb, giving astonishment the rein.

"Yes. If I hadn't written to him—the things I did write, he wouldn't have come to America."

"What things?"

"I can't tell anybody that. But it's because I didn't do something I'd promised, that's why Julian's here. Since there are things I can't do, it's my business to do what I can." Very wisely Newcomb sat silent; she, too, as long as she could bear it. "I've told you this,—you see how private it is,—but I've told you because—" Her voice clouded. She turned away her head.

"Isn't it because you realize that I'd like to be of some use if I could?"

"Would you—could you help about him—about Mr. Grant?"

Newcomb's moment of silence unnerved her.

"Oh, if you knew how we all tried to keep him in America!"

"Wouldn't he have stayed," Newcomb dared to ask, "if you had stayed?"

"No! no! Oh, you don't understand Julian. He has a duty—to the other men at home and to the country. He thinks he can help; you've heard him. 'While some men, who see it that way, are fighting for liberty abroad, it's laid on others to fight for liberty at home.' I could almost be glad he is so ill if only we had landed and I could get him home to Scotland! I didn't know whether you might, perhaps, be willing to help me to do that."

"Willing? I would indeed be willing. The question is: my power, anybody's power."

She bent forward, but the breath that should have gone in words she held an instant. And then very low the syllables fell out: "What will they do—when we land?"

"What will they do?"

"Yes, to Julian."

"I don't know."

"You haven't the least idea? Well, Julian has. He's been telling me, preparing me this afternoon."

"What has he been telling you?"

"That—these—these are his last hours as a free man." She dropped the ghost of a sob into the silence, and her head went down into her hands. It was only for a second. She sat erect again. "What he's been saying in America is enough, he thinks. Do you think that's enough to put a very noble person in prison in free England?"

Newcomb hadn't often wanted more to do anything than he wanted now to reassure her. It should be accounted to him for righteousness that he said: "I don't know."

CHAPTER XXV

At dinner that last night, the place of the wireless youth was vacant. So was the place of the Dutch official next Lady Neave, whom they called Lady Gieve, because during the first days she had worn her jacket of that name, deflated, but evident, all day and, according to report, all night. Half-way across the Atlantic she had been smiled out of her fears to the extent of carrying the life-preserver over her arm.

Miss Ellis was the only person who took no part in discussing the rumor which ran about the ship of a wireless message said to have been received by the Dutch official. His bedroom steward, also Dutch, had seen the message—"A great battle and a German defeat."

The news accounted beyond doubt for the increased noisiness in the dining saloon. From the table behind Newcomb rose excited accents, "Es ist unglaüblich!"

Newcomb turned, and caught Miss Ellis's eye. He had changed his place to the empty one beside her after hearing that Mr. Grant wasn't coming down—"a headache."

"The wireleless leakage seems to have let loose a fair amount of furor Teutonicus," he said.

She nodded; plainly she had heard the news. But she didn't want to discuss it at a board where old Professor Mohrenheim and his gentle, kindly wife occupied their places, as polite as ever, but restrained and preoccupied to-night. Voices from the all-German table rose louder.

It was known that on the last voyage excitement over some war news, published in the customary small weekly, had led to a riot. Certain offended patriots, among both Germans and their opponents, had been brought to port in irons. This was the first crossing during which no newspaper had been issued, and no wireless telegrams had appeared on the notice-board. The wisdom of these measures was abundantly proved. The mere breath of rumor had transformed the ship's company. Allies put their heads together and exulted. Neutrals argued more or less openly, betraying in every word the impossibility of neutrality. The old German couple at the end of Nan's table sat marooned. They glanced now and then, wistfully, at the all-German table next them. The sound of their tongue rumbled and clashed above the jar of crockery and service metal.

"Isn't it strange,"—Nan leaned to Newcomb as she lowered her voice,—"when I used to hear German, I'd think about music and poetry and beautiful words like Waldesduft—"

"And what do you think about now—words like Belgium?"

"That isn't fair," she said quietly. "All war is awful."

"But I'd like to know what you do think about, then, instead of music and Waldesduft."

"No."

He urged her. "Please!"

"I couldn't, not at the same table where that dear old couple sit," she said quickly and glanced down the long table at the Mohrenheims.

"Tell me upstairs?"

She shook her head.

"I don't think I shall even upstairs. If, as I believe, the worst stories aren't true, it's wrong to repeat them."

"Why is it wrong to tell me and let me judge if I am to believe?"

But she wouldn't. "To repeat them gives them a false trueness," she said in that careful undertone. "Oh, I can't explain; but just to put them into words seems to spread a poison."

"You can't trust me to distinguish, to help you to distinguish?"

Again she shook her head. "What I have to think is, if some people, mistaken people, believed such things about us Americans, what would I say if I were asked whether I thought it a good thing that the false stories against us should be repeated? To make horrible pictures in people's brains; and, if the brains are weak, to turn them."

"I am sorry my brains inspire you with such distrust."

"Perhaps it's my own I'm shaky about. But I don't believe any brain can keep steady under some stories. No; mustn't think about them."

"She gets that from Grant," Newcomb decided. He looked across the table. Next the captain's empty place, sat the only person in the saloon unmoved, you would say, by the news—a British naval officer, grave, monosyllabic, and showing just that same face throughout the voyage. Not so much as a hint about his errand to the States and little enough about anything else. Until the fourth night out he had slept or dozed over a book. The only five minutes during which he had appeared really awake had been when some one in the smoking-room repeated Julian Grant's asseveration that the German atrocity stories were "faked." "Every nation tells of its enemy. Only the ignorant and unthinking are taken in."

It was then that the officer dozing in the corner lifted that face of his, with its hard, fine outline like a profile on an old coin, and came to life. The indifference cleared out of his eyes as low-hung, slumbering smoke will clear before the blast.

"If to be taken in by 'faked' stories was all that the innocent had to fear!" In cold accents he told about a Belgian girl. Daughter of an officer in the Belgian Army, a man he knew. When the Germans took Antwerp she was carried off. Fell into the hands of a U-boat captain. When he'd done with her, handed her over to his crew. She didn't die quickly enough. They threw her overboard. "An officer's daughter!" he repeated, as though that were the culminating point of the horror.

Some one repeated the story to Julian. His anger was a thing no one would forget. Believe it? Such stories were told for a purpose. It was "the kind of poison that infects people's wits and loses them their souls. Makes brute beasts out of humans. There are minds that batten on such lies. They get decent people to listen in the fevered, abnormal state all nerves are in nowadays. Foulness that would be choked back down their obscene throats at other times, it's listened to like some message out of Sinai or Olympus. I tell you the German U-boat captains are as good men as ever the hag War breeds. They must be men of character. You daren't give a job like that to a drunken, rotten roué."

Here was Miss Greta at last, never so late before and never so resplendent. Silver sequins and black lace for that last night.

"I'm glad"—she spoke to a lady across the table—"glad to see you've emancipated yourself."

"Emancipated—how?" Lady Neave asked.

"You've broken the tyranny of the Gieve jacket."

"Don't tell me I've—" Lady Neave turned to look at the back of her chair—"yes, gone and forgotten it!" She moved outward on her swiveled seat.

"No! no!" The congressman from Vermont protested there was no need to prepare for anything so grotesque, so melodramatic, as a cold-blooded attempt to sink this poor old tub.

Miss Greta held high her braid-crowned head. "This innocent old tub," she said, "has carried thousands of tons of ammunition; but," she added relentingly, "I don't think Lady Gieve—oh, forgive me! I mean Lady Neave," she bent gracious brows upon her opposite neighbor,—"I quite agree you won't need your packet on this voyage."

No one answered. In the midst of a general animation, the silence that reigned again around Greta spoke loud. She stared about her.

"What has become of the hors d'œuvres?" she demanded. The Dutch steward could not have helped hearing. He went on serving the others. Again she spoke to him, more sharply still.

"Alvays it ees somet'ing! From de fir-rst you come on board," he muttered incoherently.

She turned round in her seat.

"What? What do you say?"

"Vhat I say? You need not be down on me because Zhermany is beat."

Miss Greta stared.

"Germany beaten! You must be mad."

The steward's face had grown red; his anger was mounting still.

"I get it straight," he said. "Dere vas a great battle. De English and French have beat de Zhermans."

"It is a lie!"

"How do you know that?" asked the calm voice of Newcomb at Greta's side.

"How does one know anything? You wouldn't expect me to consider the possibility of such a thing just because"—her contempt followed the steward for those first yards of his progress toward the side table—"because that sort of creature says so?" She looked round for understanding. Something in the averted eyes of the company nettled her. "He says it, armer Wurm," she went on with her head high, "from the same motives that make others long to believe it. Jealousy."

"Do we understand you to say," Newcomb asked, "that you wouldn't believe news, however authentic, of a German defeat?"

"There couldn't be authentic news of a German defeat. If it came from some one I knew and trusted, if all the people I know and trust combined to say there had been a German defeat, I should know they were wrong."

While she waited for the hors d'œuvres, her handsome shoulders thrown back, her chin high, she pronounced a pæan to Kultur cum militarism. Newcomb construed it as a letting off pent-up steam, a vent for anger against Miss Ellis and against the gathering cloud of enemies. But it was also something more. It had in it an element of fanaticism, mixed with balked passion for force. A reckless joy in the doctrine of stick-at-nothing to serve the end. With such an accent we have heard some one very old, or very young and weak saying, "We bombed them out of the wood," or, "We took Hill 60." It is a singular thing in psychology and yet to be explored, this passion on the part of the physically weaker for those very brute forces in the universe which, but for their opposites, would be the sure undoing of all but the physically strongest, and, in the end, of them as well.

In the midst of her hymn to pro-Teutonism, Ashmole came in, looking more idiotic than usual, staring about out of his big glasses as though he couldn't recognize the table.

"Here we are," Miss Greta hailed him.

The youth paused by her chair an instant and mumbled something unintelligible, his eyes goggling as they swept the saloon.

"They told me the captain was down here."

Greta took hold of Ashmole's arm and tried in vain to pull him into the vacant place. He stood there lost while she whispered. Suddenly he bent and whispered back. They had done too much whispering in these last days for that to strike any one as specially strange. What struck Newcomb was the effect on Miss Greta of whatever it was Ashmole had said.

On the face that had met with brazen defiance the news of a German defeat, was stamped something more than consternation. Ashmole's own nerves were not so shaken, but he saw that.

"It's all right," he said in the act of turning from her; "they won't get us. The lights are all out."

"Lights out, you say!" Greta had risen.

"Every port covered," Ashmole muttered over his shoulder.

"Fools! They must put the lights on. Do you hear? Instantly!" She clutched her chair back. "This isn't the boat they want—"

Nan had risen, too. But that was because she saw Julian at the door of the saloon. Without a word he held up his hand. Equally without sound, she slipped away from the table and went toward the waiting figure. As she reached the door, a dull sound came, with a long shuddering. It passed through the ship from end to end. Instead of the echo of that detonation setting the whole place instantly in motion, it had the effect of stilling for those first seconds such motion as had been. Several hundred tongues ceased wagging. Forks and spoons remained, arrested, half-way to people's mouths. The waiters stood, dish-covers in their hands, or bottles lifted to fill glass. The very engines slowed to listen.

Even after the general movement began in the saloon, it was quiet movement and curiously undramatic; no crying out, no mad rush for the deck.

Some people looked about as if for information. Others tried to smile.

"It's come," said the congressman.

"What—what has come?" demanded Lady Neave through the rising hum.

Out of all the growing murmur and movement Newcomb heard Greta's tense whisper: "That—a torpedo?"

The captain's order traveled with a superhuman quickness:

"Life-belts first! Women and children to the boats!"

"Plenty of time for everybody to get a life-belt," was another form that ran from mouth to mouth. Whether that insistence calmed the people, certainly it was a strangely well-behaved company that made its way, in spite of the ship's increasing list to starboard, along corridors and up companionways. Scarcely a breach in the general self-control till, on the lifeboat-deck, parties were broken up, and all men told to stand back. Though the great majority accepted the order in silence, it broke the courage of some among the women. Certain men tried persuasion. There were dumb partings; there was agonized resistance. Two or three evidently meant to stand out to the bitter end against being saved, or lost, apart from their men-folk. For a minute the morale of the crowd was in grave danger. A young wife's recurrent sob: "I can't! I can't!" rose to wildness with, "They'll have to kill me first!"

Newcomb, looking vainly about for Nan Ellis, saw a different face. Oh, yes, it belonged to that voice he had been hearing under all the rest, patient, gentle, tireless—the voice saying now in its foreign-sounding English "It is for your husband's safety that you go first." More than the words, the motherly kindness on the blunt-featured face of the old German lady, prevailed upon the distracted girl. She let go her husband's arm and clung to Mrs. Mohrenheim.

Newcomb saw now that it was Mrs. Mohrenheim who was helping the ship's officers to marshal and send forward the women and children to those who had charge of the boats. It looked as if the task would have been too much for the officers but for Mrs. Mohrenheim. An extraordinary vigor, an exalted persuasiveness, had transformed the heavy figure and the homely face. Something she had given no hint of during the voyage came out of hiding and "took charge."

In spite of the increased listing of the ship, through all his own excitement and personal fear, which Newcomb afterwards confessed, his habit of mechanical mental registry kept him vividly aware of what went on within his range.

Already, while Mrs. Mohrenheim was still dealing with that first and most unwilling of the young wives, Newcomb had seen Miss Greta pass. It hadn't taken her long to fling on a serge skirt and her fur-lined ulster. Above the life-belt fastened round her bulky figure was a brown canvas ruck-sack hoisted high against her shoulder-blades. She was fastening the buckles as she hastened toward her appointed boat, put a little out of her stride by the ever-stronger list to starboard. All the same, Miss Greta, beyond a doubt, would be among the first, Newcomb told himself, to take her appointed place, and hers would be the first boat launched.

"You will carry the child for this lady?"

Mrs. Mohrenheim had thrust a baby into Newcomb's arms.

"They say it's this way—this way!" The baby's mother, holding a little boy by the hand, hurried the child and Newcomb up the deck. The barrier of officers, stewards, and crew opened to let them through.

Yes, Miss Greta was already in the boat. The woman with the little boy was helped in, and Newcomb handed over the baby. The men at the pulleys began to lower the boat. Miss Greta was calmly tying a motor-veil round her cap.

Up on the bridge the captain, against a star-strewn sky, calling down orders, gave an impression of such tragic and awful loneliness that Newcomb was aware of a relief at seeing him joined by another figure. The two stood speaking while you might count seven or eight; then the captain pulled off his coat and exchanged with the captain of the watch. The captain of the watch came running down, putting on his chief's coat. He took charge of the next boat that was being lowered. That was the boat that tilted and hung for some seconds over the water at an angle of forty-five degrees. The angle increased to the perpendicular, and the boat whirled round, dropping the people into the oily water. The calm night air struck icily on Newcomb's sweat-beaded forehead. A horror of violent death had pierced the numbness that followed on his first panic. On the way back to the diminishing crowd of women he peered into men's faces.

"Do they realize?" he kept repeating to himself.

"Where were you when it struck us?" he heard some one ask an officer.

"Chart-room," was the curt reply.

Another voice as Newcomb passed said: "Not the periscope; but I saw the shark-fin wake of the torpedo."

Newcomb walked with difficulty, like a drunken man; it was this damned list. The most violent tossing in a hurricane was preferable. You'd have the plunging dive and recovery, which had something gallant in it, almost playful, like a giant gamboling. But this persistent violation of equilibrium got on a man's nerve.

"The lights have gone out on the starboard side," some one said.

Newcomb pulled out his watch. Stopped! He held it to his ear. No, it was going. And all this had happened in those few beggarly moments!

"What's that yelling about?" he asked irritably of a couple of men who, half-doubled, came up the slant by the wireless-room passage.

"Boat on the other side—smashed like an egg-shell against the hull."

People were drowning on both sides of the sinking ship.

"It's often safest on board," someone said.

"Yes; you stick to the ship."

There was now a dense crowd of men round the companionway. All but a handful of women had been distributed to the boats, but the handful kept on being renewed. Newcomb saw why. Grant and Miss Ellis, among others, were bringing up the people who remained over, in the second and third class. And among these huddled groups still the squat figure and the beautiful-ugly face of old Mrs. Mohrenheim moved, consoling, heartening.

"Yes, he will come after," she said. "Surely you will think about your children." More than once she had taken her text from a bystander's face. "Look at him, poor man! He can save himself if he has not you to think about. You would not risk his life? No, no. Komm, then, komm." The woman was passed along.

The mere getting to the boats was a trial of courage. Newcomb himself had no love of the horrible chute that now pitched sharply down to that dark, oily glitter that was the sea, but he offered to convoy the late-comers wherever a boat might be.

"No, you two." Mrs. Mohrenheim summoned Grant and Nan Ellis. Slowly they made their way forward with the little group of clinging children and bewildered women. Some crawled on hands and knees up the steep acclivity to where a boat swung from the davits. An officer passed the groups without stopping. He came hurrying, sliding, half squatting, with one leg stretched slanting down, the other crooked up, with the knee turned sharply out.

"You, now," he said to Mrs. Mohrenheim as he rose to his full height beside her.

"There are two ladies more." She pushed them forward.

The officer steadied them as they passed, and turned again to Mrs. Mohrenheim.

"You."

"There are those by the door; one is young." She turned unsteadily.

The officer clutched her. "I tell you,"—Newcomb barely caught the words—"it's now or never. There aren't boats enough!"

"I know," said Mrs. Mohrenheim.

She drew back and stretched out a hand to a muffled figure holding to a stanchion above where she stood. It was Professor Mohrenheim. Newcomb realized now that the figure had been there from the first.

"We have been together for forty years," the old woman said. "Too long to be parted now." Her husband bent down and took her hand. Now he had drawn her up beside him.

A man with bare feet and a blanket round him rushed on deck as word came, blown along from group to group, "The captain says every one for'ard, and each for himself."

Down by the bridge they were launching a collapsible raft.

The last Newcomb, or any one, saw of the Mohrenheims, they were standing together. They held to each other and to the stanchion.

Grant followed the girl down the swinging ladder to the raft.

Some one was crying:

"Get away! Pull out! For God's sake, get away!" Another, equally unrecognizable in the dimness, called out:

"She's going down! We'll be drawn in!"

As they pushed off, they saw the electric lights on the Leyden go out one by one.

Of the people on the raft more than one watched the death-throes of the ship with wet eyes, as though she were something sentient, human. Her angle of subsidence had changed sharply. The bow sank, leaving the stern nearly upright. Her mast was gone. For an instant her funnel lay along the water, and then with a dull roar as of the engines breaking loose and crashing down to the bottom, the rest of the Leyden sank out of sight.

The end of the great ship had come with a horrible quietness, in contrast to the cries of men struggling for their lives in the wash among the wreckage.

The captain had gone down with the ship. When those in charge of the raft heard that some one had seen him jump clear, they sent up a rocket. By that addition to the starlight, for a few instants a single, half-empty lifeboat could be seen rocking violently on the swell. Several men were clinging to the gunwale. As raft and boat were swept nearer, the officer in charge of the raft raised a shout. He had recognized the captain climbing into the boat, and hauling up after him the limp body of one of his companions.

The captain's first care, when he came alongside, was to relieve the congestion on the raft. He ordered the chief engineer to transfer eight or ten. The chief engineer remembered his helpers. Grant and Newcomb were told off. Yes, the captain said, they must bring the only woman into the lifeboat.

When the transference had been effected, another rocket was sent up in order that the surviving boats might come together.

"Look!" The girl grasped Grant's arm.

The captain, too, turned his head.

"By God!" he said.

CHAPTER XXVI

The submarine had risen and stood away to southward. So intent had the occupants of the lifeboat been to discover some sign of their companions that the discovery of themselves by the submarine flash came with a shock of surprise. In the light of that pale ray, which had picked them out of the darkness, they saw in that first moment no more than one another's faces—a memory to last them all their days.

"They're hailing us," the captain said with bitter mouth.

"Who is hailing us?" The idea of rescue was still in the forefront of his mind.

"Submarine."

How the captain knew, Newcomb had no idea. But certainly the insignificant, low-pitched shadow—obscure mother of the light-ray ... she was moving! And she was moving in the direction of the Leyden's grave.

A voice came from her at last, uttering not the German they thought to hear, but words yet more unfamiliar.

"He says," interrupted the Dutch captain, "we're to come 'longside."

"Shall we?" The chief engineer still could conceive orders as coming only from the autocrat of the ship at the bottom of the sea.

"No choice." The captain's voice sank lower on an oath. He leaned forward, and conferred with the men at the bow. Newcomb had noticed that the captain still wore the coat of the captain of the watch, and he saw now that when the grizzled head that had been bent in conference with the engineer, was lifted, it wore a landsman's cap—a checked deerstalker.

Clearly the engineer had been placed in command of this little expedition over the intervening blackness to learn their fate—a blackness that seemed to open to the long ray of the flash-light. To the unnautical mind, the shortened ray seemed to draw the lifeboat in and in, till the conning-tower stood clear to the straining eye; in and in, till to the right of the main origin of light dim figures took shape; in and in, till just before the oarsmen had brought the lifeboat alongside the shelving body, topped with its low deck, suddenly the light ray was extinguished. Lifeboat and submarine swung an instant in an equal blackness. Out of it a voice, again in those strange accents. No answer till an English tongue spoke from the lifeboat, "We can understand a little German."

And then, just as eyes were beginning to grow accustomed to the dark, which, after all, was darkness only by comparison, the compact figure standing out on the conning-tower against the star-sown sky turned on the light of an electric torch he held in his hand. He trailed the sudden radiance along the lifeboat, raking her fore and aft. The light lingered an instant at the stern. But the question he asked was: "Name of your ship?"

He was told.

"Dutch?"

Holland-American, she was.

"Tonnage?"

"That was given, too."

"Are you the captain?"

"No. Chief Engineer Van Zandt."

An order was issued in German, and the interrogatory went on:

"Where is the captain?"

"Hard to say," some one answered gruffly.

"He's where a British captain can usually be found," said another.

"In these days that 'usually' means at the bottom," retorted the commander of the submarine. "Have you got any papers?"

"Papers?"

"Yes, yes, Dummheit; where are the ship's papers?"

"We'd better ask you," retorted a voice at the stern.

"You'd better keep the tongue civil!" came sharply back, with the first betrayal of flaw in the perfect English.

Two figures coming up on the conning-tower brought with them the diffused light of some open hatchway as they took their stand behind the commander. He showed clearly now, a firm, square-built presence, a beardless round face above the muffler. He said something over his shoulder, and one of the two men just come up, stepped briskly to the commander's side. During those few seconds it seemed mere chance that the torch still lit up the stern of the lifeboat—lit the small, white face with its parted lips and shining eyes, a face so destitute of fear, so charged with sheer burning curiosity, that any sane person might be forgiven for staring hard at what could only be a crass incapacity on a girl's part to comprehend the situation.

"How many boats did you launch?" the brusk voice went on with the catechism.

The engineer decided to say eight.

"That all? Why didn't you launch more?"

"No time."

"No time! That shows you're lying." He turned again and conferred with the little group behind him.

"Ja, ja—auch meine Meinung." He wheeled round. "All right," he called out; "shove off!"

Nobody in the lifeboat moved.

Grant's voice was heard for the first time after the second of stark silence:

"What are you going to do with the people in this boat?"

"Finished with you. Shove off!"

That loosed tongues. The boat was full of angry voices. Grant's alone, steady, quiet, but heard above them all, said:

"It's a mistake, then?—Wait a moment!"—he rose and steadied himself in the gentle swell—"I say!—it's a mistake, then, that we're a hundred miles from land?"

"Not much mistake about that," the voice came back.

"Are we to wait while you overhaul the other boats?"

"Why should you wait?"

"You mean to round the others up and give us a tow?"

"Oh, do I?"

Again the commander repeated that action of his, tilting the torch so as to show up the pale oval with the eager eyes.

Newcomb readily owned afterward that the sharp collision of emotions in those minutes during the interview put out of the question any sober thinking or coördination of impressions. All that came later. But in the flux of feeling he knew even at the time that his peculiar loathing of the man wasn't altogether due to the devilish work he had finished, or fear of what was yet to come. Even in the thick of shifting dreads and hates Newcomb knew that moment by moment, ever since the colloquy began in the background of his torn mind, a consciousness was shaping which told him that this man would have cut the parting shorter but for some special stimulation of his contemptuous interest in the lifeboat. And to what could such stimulation be due but to the spectacle (Newcomb admitted its crowning strangeness) of the way in which one person in the boat was taking what most would count a catastrophe to shake the soul.

Did the fact of the absence of hatred in the face of the only woman in the boat account for the something which Newcomb had little expected to find in a German U-boat captain—that slight tendency to attitudinize in the midst of his grim business, to assume the "gallant commander" air, as no man does in exactly the same way for his fellowmen. This ghastly suggestion of flirtatiousness, following hard as it did on the heels of murder, and making its obscure demand over the very grave of the sunken ship, stirred Newcomb to a pitch of fury hardly sane. And how the thought flashed through him—how was Grant taking this girl's mockery of him, mockery of all her protectors, of decency itself? And behold Grant was "taking it"—this thing done on the floor of ocean—as a man may whose head is among the stars. Poor devil! he didn't even see it, didn't even sense what the commander's insolent use of the torch showed in that circumscribed field of intense light—the girl's eyes still wide and curious.

Instead of natural loathing, of every form of moral condemnation, she was staring at the submarine commander with breathless interest, with an eagerness that might flatter any man alive.

Grant had made his way down the lifeboat, holding to this one's shoulder, steadying himself by that one's arm, his face drawn with anxiety, but for all that a figure of hope, of conciliation.

"I say," he called out, "we haven't got any provisions in this boat, and we're—you know how far we are from land."

"Bad management," commented the German, his eyes slipping past Grant again to the face at the stern.

"Even if it is bad management, you're not going to abandon eighteen fellow-beings in an open boat in mid-Atlantic, not civilians, to die of starvation?"

That didn't seem to deserve an answer.

"Who's in charge of your boat?" was the curt demand.

Grant hesitated.

"I am," answered Van Zandt.

"Well, don't you know how to shove off when you're told to?"

"Stop!" Julian flung up an arm. "It's an impossible barbarity! Look!" He swung round. "You haven't seen—there's a lady in the boat!"

"Oh, is there?" The flash of white teeth showed in that diffused light spreading upward from the hatch. "The lady has only herself to blame."

"To blame? How is she to blame?"

"She disobeys the order."

"What order?" Grant couldn't yet see he had nothing to hope from the man. "You can't abandon us," he hurried on, "not a woman, anyway, to the torture of slow starvation."

"I'm not sure that I can." The captain's hand had gone up as though to stroke the absent mustache. When the hand came down, it showed his teeth again as he half turned toward the men behind him.

At those words, "I'm not sure that I can," the reaction in the lifeboat was so great that, with the snapping of the tension, Grant had wavered dizzily, and Nan sprang up with a cry—a cry that Newcomb took for relief till he saw her gesture toward Julian Grant. But nearer hands laid hold on him as he called out in hoarse triumph, "What did I tell you fellows!" and fell into the place they made for him. The commander turned from some humorous interchange with his officers.

"Yes, it's a fact, I can't bring myself to abandon the lady." He took up that position again near the edge of the conning-tower. With heels together he made a sharp inclination from the hips. "I have a cabin below, not luxurious, but more comfortable than—" he broke off with a curt gesture. "I place it at the lady's disposal."