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."