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THAT WHICH HATH WINGS

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Title: That Which Hath Wings Author: Richard Dehan Release Date: March 12, 2016 [EBook #51428] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8

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"His arm was round her, her cheek was pressed to his, her bosom heaved against him."

THAT WHICH HATH WINGS

A NOVEL OF THE DAY

BY

RICHARD DEHAN

AUTHOR OF "THE DOP DOCTOR," "BETWEEN TWO THIEVES," ETC.

"For a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
and that which hath wings shall
tell the matter."—ECCLESIAS. x., 20.

S. B. GUNDY TORONTO

COPYRIGHT, 1918 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

THESE LEAVES IN DEAR REMEMBRANCE FOR YOUR GRAVE ACROSS THE SEA.

SIDMOUTH, DEVON,

January, 1918.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I.—PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE II.—DAME NATURE INTERVENES III.—FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE IV.—RAYMOND OF THE S. AË. F. V.—THE BIRD OF WAR VI.—SHERBRAND VII.—THE CONSOLATRIX VIII.—MONSEIGNEUR IX.—SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS X.—A SUPERMAN XI.—PATRINE SAXHAM XII.—THE GATHERING OF THE STORM XIII.—THE SUPERMAN XIV.—A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN XV.—THE BITE IN THE KISS XVI.—THE WIND OF JOY XVII.—INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND XVIII.—SAXHAM PAYS XIX.—BAWNE XX.—THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES XXI.—MARGOT LOOKS IN XXII.—MARGOT IS SQUARE XXIII.—A MODERN CLUB XXIV.—DISILLUSION XXV.—THREE MEN IN A CAR XXVI.—A PAIR OF PALS XXVII.—SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY XXVIII.—THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE XXIX.—A SECRET MISSION XXX.—THE REAPING XXXI.—VON HERRNUNG BAITS THE HOOK XXXII.—ADVENTURE IN THE AIR XXXIII.—BAWNE LEARNS THE TRUTH XXXIV.—THE BROWN SATCHEL XXXV.—NUMBER EIGHTEEN XXXVI.—HUE AND CRY XXXVII.—PATRINE CONFESSES XXXVIII.—THE REBOUND XXXIX.—A NIGHT IN JULY XL.—MACROMBIE IS SACKED XLI.—SAXHAM LIES XLII.—SAXHAM BREAKS THE NEWS XLIII.—THE PLUNDERED NEST XLIV.—PATRINE REMEMBERS XLV.—FLOTSAM FROM THE NORTH SEA XLVI.—AT NORDEICH WIRELESS XLVII.—THE MAN OF "THE DAY" XLVIII.—PATRINE IS ENGAGED XLIX.—THE WAR CLOUD BREAKS L.—THE EVE OF ARMAGEDDON LI.—THE INWARD VOICE LII.—KHAKI LIII.—FRANKY GOES TO THE FRONT LIV.—OFFICIAL RETICENCE LV.—NEWS OF BAWNE LVI.—LA BRABANÇONNE LVII.—THE BELGIAN WIFE LVIII.—SHERBRAND BUYS THE LICENCE LIX.—THE WOE-WAVE BREAKS LX.—KULTUR! LXI.—LYNETTE DREAMS LXII.—WOUNDED FROM THE FRONT LXIII.—BAWNE FINDS A FRIEND LXIV.—AT SEASHEERE LXV.—GOOD-BYE, DEAR LOVE, GOOD-BYE! LXVI.—MORE KULTUR LXVII.—THE QUESTION LXVIII.—THE DEVIL-EGG LXIX.—A MENACE; AND GOOD NEWS LXX.—A LOVER'S JOURNEY LXXI.—LIVING AND DEAD LXXII.—LOVE THAT HAS WINGS

That Which Hath Wings

CHAPTER I

PRESENTS TWO YOUNG PEOPLE

In January, 1914, Francis Athelstan Sherbrand, Viscount Norwater, only son of that fine old warrior, General the Right Honourable Roger Sherbrand, V.C., K.C.B., first Earl of Mitchelborough, married Margot Mountjohn, otherwise known as "Kittums," and found that she was wonderfully innocent—for a girl who knew so much.

It was a genuine love-match, Franky being a comparatively poor Guardsman, with only two thousand a year in addition to his pay as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Bearskins Plain, and Margot a mere Cinderella in comparison with heiresses of the American canned-provision and cereal kind.

It had seemed to Franky, standing with patent-leathered feet at the Rubicon dividing bachelorhood from Benedictism, that all his wooing had been done at Margot's Club. True, he had actually proposed to Margot at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament of the previous June, and Margot, hysterical with sheer ecstasy, as the horses gravely played at push-ball, had pinched his arm and gasped out:

"Yes, but don't take my mind off the game just now; these dear beasts are so heavenly! ..."

And theatres, film-picture-shows and variety halls, race-meetings, receptions, balls and kettledrums, polo and croquet-clubs, had fostered the courtship of Franky and Margot; but all their love-making had been carried out to the accompanying hum of conversation and the tinkle of crystal and silver-plate in the dining-room of the "Ladies' Social," where Margot had her favourite table in the glass-screened corner by the fire-place; or in the circular smoking-room with the Persian divan and green-glass dome, that Margot had given the Club on her nineteenth birthday; or in the boudoir belonging to the suite she had decorated for herself on the condition that no other member got the rooms if Margot wanted them, which Margot nearly always did....

There was a big, rambling, ancient red-brick Hall, stone-faced in the Early Jacobean manner, standing with its rare old gardens and glass-houses, lawns and shrubberies, about it, within sight and sound of the Channel, amidst pine and beech-woods carpeted with bilberry-bushes, heathery moors, and coverts neck-high in July with the Osmunda regalis fern. The Hall belonged to Margot, though you never found her there except for a week or two in September and three days at Christmas-tide. The first fortnight with the birds was well enough, but those three days at Christmas marked the limit. Of human endurance Margot meant, possibly. She never vouchsafed to explain.

She also possessed a house in town, but just as her deceased father's spinster sister lived at the Hall in Devonshire, so did her dead mother's brother Derek, with his collection of European moths and butterflies and other Lepidoptera, inhabit the fine old mansion in Hanover Square. Devonshire at Christmas marked the limit of dulness, but Hanover Square all the London season through beat the band for sheer ghastly boredom.... Not that there were any flies on little old London.... Paris and Ostend were ripping places, and you could put in a clinking good time at Monte Carlo.... Margot had tried New York and liked it, except for the place itself, which made you think of illustrations to weird Dunsany legends in which towering temples climb up unendingly upon each other into black star-speckled skies. But the Club and London, with Unlimited Bridge and Tango, constituted Margot's idea of earthly happiness. She never had dreamed of marrying anybody—until Franky had arrived on the scene.

Perhaps you can see Franky, with the wholesome tan of the Autumn Manoeuvres yet upon him. Twenty-seven, well-made and muscular, if with somewhat sloping shoulders and legs of the type that look better in Bedford cords and puttees, or leathers and hunting-tops, than in tweed knickers and woollen stockings, or Court knee-breeches and silks. Observe his well-shaped feet and slight strong hands with pointed fingers, like those of his ancestors, painted by Vandyke; his brown eyes—distinctly good if not glowing with the fire of intellect, his forehead too steep and narrow; his moustache of the regulation tooth-brush kind, adorning the upper-lip that will not shut down firmly over his white, rather prominent, front teeth. Cap the small rounded skull of him with bright brown hair, brushed and anointed to astonishing sleekness, dress him in the full uniform of a Second Lieutenant in the Bearskins Plain, and you have Franky on his wedding-day.

Photographs of the happy couple published in the Daily Wire, the Weekly Silhouette, the Lady's Dictatorial, and the Photographic Smile, hardly do the bridegroom justice. In that without the busby his features are fixed in a painful grin, while in the other there are no features at all. But Margot—Margot in a hobble-skirt of satin and chiffon, with a tulle turban-veil, starred with orange-flowers in pearls and diamonds, and a long serpent-tail train of silver brocade, hung from her shoulders by ropes of pearls, was "almost too swee," to quote Margot's Club friends. Search had been made, amongst the said friends, many of whom were married, for a pair of five-year-old pages to carry the bride's train; but there being, for some reason, a dearth of babies among Margot's wedded intimates, the idea had to be given up.

The wedding was quite the prettiest function of the season. The eight bridesmaids walked in moss-green crêpe de Chine veiled with silver-spotted chiffon. On their heads were skull-caps of silver tissue, each having a thirty-inch-high aigrette supported by a thin bandeau of gold, set with crystals and olivines, the gift of the bride.... Their stockings were of white lace openwork, the left knee of each being clasped by the bridegroom's souvenir, a garter of gold, crystal, and olivines. Silver slippers with four-inch heels completed the ravishing effect.

O Perfect Love! was sung before the Bishop's Address, and the ceremony concluded with The Voice that Breathed and Stainer's Sevenfold Amen. The bridal-party passed down the nave to the strains of the Wedding Chorus from Lohengrin. And there was a reception at the Werkeley Square house of one of the dearest of Margot's innumerable dearest friends, and the happy pair left in their beautiful brand-new Winston-Beeston touring car en route for the old red-brick Hall in Devonshire. Decidedly the honeymoon might have been termed ideal—and four subsequent months of married life proved tolerably cloudless—until Fate sent a stinging hailstorm to strip the roses from the bridal bower.

An unexpected, appalling, inevitable discovery was made in Paris in the Grande Semaine, at the end of the loveliest of June seasons. It utterly ruined—for two people—the Day of the Grand Prix, that marks the climax of the Big Week, when the Parisian coaching-world tools its four-in-hands to Longchamps Racecourse, and the smartest, richest, and gayest people, mustered from every capital of Europe, parade under the chestnut-trees that shade the sunny paddock, to display or criticise the creations of the greatest couturiers.

Margot had put on an astonishing gown for the occasion.... You will recall that the summer dress designs of 1914 were astonishing; the autumn modes promised to be even more so, according to Babin, Touchet, and the Brothers Paillôt. Skirts—already as short and as narrow as possible—were to be even narrower; the Alpha and Omega of perfection would be represented by the Amphora Silhouette. And Margot, revolving before her cheval-glass in a sheath of jonquil-coloured silk lisse, embroidered with blue-and-green beetle-wings, found—to her horror and consternation——

Shall one phrase it that Dame Nature, intent upon her essential, unfashionable business of reproduction, was at variance with Madame Fashion re the Amphora Silhouette? The slender shape was not yet spoilt, but long before the autumn came, no art would mask the wealthy curves of its maternity.

CHAPTER II

DAME NATURE INTERVENES

"I can't bear it!—I won't bear it!" Margot reiterated. With her tumbled hair, swollen eyes, pink uptilted nose, and the little mouth and chin that quivered with each sobbing breath intaken, she looked absurdly babyish for her twenty years, as she vowed that wild horses shouldn't drag her to Longchamps, and railed against the injustice of Fate.

"None of my married friends have had such rotten luck!" she asserted. She stamped upon the velvety carpet and flashed at Franky a glance of imperious appeal. "Not Tota Stannus, or Cynthia Charterhouse, or Joan Delabrand, or anybody! Then, why me? That's what I want to know? After all the mascots I've worn and carried about with me.... Gojo and Jollikins and the jade tree-frog, and the rest! ... Every single one given me by a different woman who'd been married for years and never had a baby! This very day I'll smash the whole lot!"

"By the Great Brass Hat! ..."

Franky exploded before he could stop himself, and laughed until the tears coursed down. So "Gojo," the black velvet kitten, and "Jollikins," the fat, leering, naked thing that sat and squinted over its pot-belly at its own huge, shapeless feet, and all the array of gadgets and netsukis crowding Margot's toilette-table and secrétaire, down to "Pat-Pat," the bog-oak pig, and "Ti-Ti," the jade tree-frog, were so many insurances against the Menace of Maternity. By Jove! women were regular children.... And Margot ... Nothing but a baby, this poor little Margot—going, in spite of Jollikins and Gojo, to have a baby of her own.

"What is one to believe? Whom is one to trust in? ..."

"'Trust in.' ... My best child, you don't mean that you believed those women when they told you that such twopenny gadgets could work charms of—that or any other kind?"

"Indeed, indeed they do! Tota Stannus was perfectly serious when she came to my boudoir one night at the Club, about a week before our—the wedding.... She said—I can hear her now; 'Well, old child, you're to be married on Wednesday, and of course you know the ropes well enough not to want any tips from me.... Still——'"

"That wasn't overwhelmingly flattering," Franky commented, "from a married woman twice your age. What else did she say?"

"She said I must be aware," went on Margot, "that a woman who wanted to keep her friends and her figure, simply couldn't afford to have kids."

"And you——"

Franky no longer battled with the grin that would have infuriated Margot. Something had wiped it from his face.

"I said she was frightfully kind, but that I was quite well-posted—everything was O.K., and she needn't alarm herself.... And she said, 'Oh! if you've arranged things with Franky, jolly sensible of him! Too often a man who is open and liberal-minded before marriage develops gerontocracie afterwards, don't you know? ...' And I told her that you were the very reverse of narrow-minded—and she kissed me and wished me happiness, and went away. And the maid knocked later on to say Mrs. Stannus sent her apologies for having forgotten to leave her little gift. And the little gift was, Jollikins. And my special pals joined in to stand me a farewell dinner, and they drowned my enamel Club badge in a bowl of Maraschino punch, and fished it up and gave me this diamond and enamel one, mounted as a tie-brooch, instead. And every married woman brought me a mascot.... I had Gojo from Joan Delabrand, and Ti-Ti from Cynthia Charterhouse, and the jade tree-frog from Patrine Saxham, and the carved African bean from Rhona Helvellyn, and——"

Franky objected:

"Neither Patrine Saxham nor Rhona Helvellyn happen to be married women!"

"Perhaps not; but Patrine is an Advanced Thinker, and Rhona Helvellyn is a Militant Suffragist."

Franky commented:

"As for Suffragists, that Club of yours is stiff with 'em. Gassing about their Cause.... I loathe the noisy crowd!"

"Then you loathe me! I share their convictions!" Margot proclaimed. "I hold the faith that Woman's Day will dawn with the passing of the Bill that gives us the Vote...."

"My best child, you wouldn't know what to do with the Vote if you had it."

Margot retorted:

"I cannot expect my husband to treat me as a reasonable being while the State classes his wife with infants and imbeciles."

It will be seen that a very pretty squabble was on the point of developing. Fortunately, at this juncture a valet of the chambers knocked at the door to say that a waiter from the restaurant begged to know whether Milord and Miladi would take lunch à la carte, or prefer something special in their own apartments?

"Tell him no!" wailed Miladi, to the unconcealed consternation of Milord, who had a healthy appetite.

"Must keep up your pecker—never say die!" Franky, stimulated by the pangs of hunger, developed an unsuspected talent for diplomacy. "Look here! We must talk over things quietly and calmly. I'll order a taxi, and we'll chuff to that jolly little restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne—where you can grub in the open air under a rose-pergola—and order something special and odd——"

Since Eve's day, this lure has never failed to catch a woman. Margot began to dry her eyes. Then she asked Franky to ring.

"Three times, please.... That's for Pauline; I want another handkerchief."

"Have two or three while you're about it," advised Franky, obeying, returning, and perching on the arm of the settee. "And bathe your eyes a bit, have a swab-over of the pinky cream-stuff, and a dab of powder." He brushed some pale mealy traces from his right-arm sleeve and coat-lapel, ending, "And put on your swankiest hat and come along to Nadier's."

"Could we get anything to eat at Nadier's that we couldn't get here—or in London, at the Tarlton or the Rocroy? ..."

"Stacks of things! For instance—Canard à la presse.... They squeeze the juice out of the duck, you twig, with a silver kind of squozzer, and cook it on a chafing-dish under your nose. Look here! ..." Franky, now desperate, produced his watch. "All the cushiest little tables will be taken if you don't look sharp."

"Not on the day of the Grand Prix!"

Franky retorted, spurred to maddest invention by the pangs of hunger:

"My best child, there are about a hundred thousand wealthy Americans in Paris who don't care a red cent about racing, while with most of 'em—to eat canard à la presse at Nadier's in the Bois de Boulogne in the June season—is a—kind of religious rite!"

So Margot disappeared to dab her eyes and apply the prescribed touches of perfumed cream and powder, and duly reappeared, crowned with the most marvellous hat that ever promenaded the ateliers of the Maison Blin on the head of a milliner's mannequin.

You are to imagine the tiny thing and her Franky seated—not in one of the smart automobiles that wait for hire outside Spitz's, but in a little red taxi, borne along with the broad double stream of traffic of every description that ceaselessly roared east and west under the now withering red-and-white blossoms of the chestnut-trees of the Avenue of the Champs Elysées, inhaling the stimulating breezes—flavoured with hot dust and petrol, Seine stink, sewer-gas, coffee, patchouli, fruit, Régie tobacco and roses—of Paris in the end of June.

All the world and his wife might be at Longchamps, but here were people enough and to spare. Luxurious people in costly automobiles or carriages drawn by shiny high-steppers. People in little public taxis, men and women on motor-bicycles and the human-power kind. People of all stamps and classes, clustered like bees outside the big, smelly, top-heavy auto-buses, soon to vanish from the Paris avenues and boulevards, with the red and yellow and green-flagged taxis, to play their part in the transport and nourishment of the Army of France. People of all ranks and classes on foot, though as of old the midinette with her big cardboard bandbax, the military cadet, or the student of Art or Medicine, the seminarist and the shaggy-haired and bearded man with the deadly complexion, the slouch hat, the aged paletôt and the soiled and ragged crimson necktie that distinguish the milder breed of Anarchist, made up the crowd upon the sidewalks, liberally peppered with the sight-seeing stranger of British, American, or Teuton nationality—the brilliantly-complexioned, gaily-plumaged, loudly-perfumed lady of the pavements; the gendarme and the National Guard, and—with Marie or Jeannette proudly hanging on his elbow—Rosalie in her black-leather scabbard dangling by his side, his crimson képi tilted rakishly—the blue-coated, red-trousered French infantryman, the poilu whom we have learned to love.

The Bois was not seething with fashionable life as it would be towards the sunset hour. The dandy Clubmen, the smart ladies, had gone to Longchamps with the four-in-hands. Polo was going on near the Pont de Suresnes, the band of a regiment of Cuirassiers was playing in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and Hungarian zithers and violins discoursed sweet music on a little gilded platform at the axial point of Nadier's open-air restaurant—which is shaped like a half-wheel, with pergolas of shower-roses and Crimson Ramblers radiating from the gilded band-stand to the outer circle of little white tables at which one can lunch or dine in fine weather under a light screen of leaves and blossoms, beneath which the green canvas awnings can be drawn when it comes on to rain.

The tables were crowded with French people taking late déjeuner, and English, Germans, and German-Americans having lunch. The gravelled courtyard before the terrace was packed with showy automobiles.

If canard à la presse did not grace the meal supplied to Franky and Margot on Nadier's terrace, the potage printanière and écrevisses and a blanquette d'agneau were exquisitely cooked and served. Asparagus and a salad of endive followed, and by the time they had emptied a bottle of Chateau Yquem and the omelette soufflée had given place to Pêches Melba, Margot had smiled several times and laughed once.

She was so dainty and sweet, so brilliant a little human humming-bird, that the laughing, chattering, feasting crowd of smartly or extravagantly dressed people gathered about the other trellis-screened tables under Nadier's rose-pergola sent many a curious or admiring glance her way. And Franky was very proud of his young wife, and theirs had been undeniably a love-match; yet in spite of the good dishes and the excellent Château Yquem, little shivers of chilly premonition rippled over him from time to time. He had got to speak out—definitely decline, in the interests of Posterity, to permit interference on the part of Margot's Club circle in his private domestic affairs.... How to do it effectively yet inoffensively was a problem that strained his brain-capacity. Yet—again in the interests of Posterity—Franky had never previously interested himself in Posterity—the thing had to be done. He refused Roquefort, buttered a tiny biscuit absently, put it down undecidedly, and as the waiter whisked his plate away—conjured crystal bowls of tepid rose-water and other essentials from space, and vanished in search of dessert—he spoke, assuming for the first time in his five months' experience of connubial life the toga of marital authority.

"I think, do you know, Kittums"—Kittums was Margot's pet name—"that it will be best to face the music!"

"Connu!" Margot shrugged a little, widely opening her splendid brown eyes, "But what music?"

"The"—Franky took the plunge—"the cradle-music, if you will have it!"

Margot's gasp of dismay, and the indignant fire of a stare that was quenched in brine, awakened Franky to the fact of his having failed in tactics. The return of the waiter with a pyramid of superb strawberries and a musk-melon on cracked ice alone stemmed the outburst of the pent-up flood of reproach. Entrenched behind the melon, Franky waited. The waiter again effaced himself, and Margot said from behind another handkerchief:

"Oh, how could you! ... I never dreamed that I should live to hear you speak to me in that way."

Over the melon, whose rough green quartered rind had delicate white raised traceries all over it, suggesting outline maps of countries in Fairyland, Franky curiously regarded his wife. He said:

"Why are you and all your friends so funky of—what's only a natural phe—what do you call it? ... What do men and women marry for, if it isn't to have—children? ... Perhaps you'll answer me?"

"What do people marry for?" Margot regarded him indignantly over the neglected pyramid of luscious, tempting strawberries, "To—to be happy together—to have a clinking time!" Her voice shook. "And this is to be a gorgeous season. Balls—balls! right on from now to the end of July—then from the autumn all through winter. Period Costume Balls, reviving the modes, music, and manners of Ancient Civilisations—Carthagenian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Gothic—got up and arranged by the Committees of the Cercle Moderne, here in Paris, and in London by the New Style Club.... Tony Guisseguignol and Paul Peigault and their set are busy designing the dresses and decorations—nothing like them will ever have been seen! And—Peigault says—Tango and the Maxixe are to be chucked to the little cabbages. A new dance is coming from São Paulo that will simply wipe them out.... And now—just when I was looking forward—when everything was to have been so splendid——"

The shaking voice choked upon a note of anguish. Franky had picked up the melon, quite unconsciously, and was balancing it. At this juncture he gripped the green globe with both hands, and said, summoning all his courage to meet the agonised appeal of Margot's tear-drenched eyes:

"Look here. This is—strict Bridge.... Do you loathe 'em—the kiddies—so horribly that the idea of having any is hateful to you? Or is it—not only the—the veto it puts on larking and kickabout and—the temporary disfigurement—you're afraid of—but the—the—the inevitable pain?" He glanced round cautiously and looked back again at his wife, saying in a low voice: "Nobody's listening.... Tell me frankly...." He waited an instant, and then said in an urgent whisper. "Answer me! ... For God's sake, tell the frozen truth, Margot!"

CHAPTER III

FAIR ROSAMOND'S CHOICE

The terrace under Nadier's roses—dotted with little tables covered with napery, silver, crystal, and china, surrounded with laughing, chattering feasters—the terrace was no longer a scene out of a comedy of the lighter side of Parisian life.... Tragedy, pale and awe-inspiring in her ink-black mantle and purple chiton, had stepped across the gravel in her gold-buckled leather buskins, to offer to the girlish bride—a piece of human porcelain, prinked in the height of the fashion, and lovely—with her wild-rose cheeks and little uptilted nose, her floss-silk hair and wide, dark, lustrous deer-eyes—Fair Rosamond's choice, the dagger or the bowl....

"Yes—yes.... It is the ugliness of the thing! ..." The little mouth was pulled awry as though it had sipped of verjuice. The tiny hands knotted themselves convulsively, and the colour fled in terror from her face. "The grotesque ugliness.... And the"—the last two words came as though a pang had wrung them from the pale lips—"the pain—the awful pain! And besides—my mother died when I was born!" Margot's voice was a fluttering, appealing whisper; her great eyes were dilated and wild with terror. "Perhaps that is why I am so deadly afraid"—she caught her breath—"but there are heaps, heaps, heaps of married women who fear—that—equally! And they arrange to escape it—I don't know how! ... For I knew—nothing—when I married you! ..." She lifted her great eyes to Franky's, and he realised that it had been so, actually. "I've been ashamed ever to confess that I was—ignorant about these things! ... I've talked a language—amongst other women—that I didn't understand! ..."

There are moments when even the shallow-brained become clairvoyant. Franky's love for her made him see clear. He looked back down the vista of Margot's twenty years of existence, and saw her the motherless daughter of a self-absorbed, cultivated, Art-loving valetudinarian, who habitually spent the chillier part of each year in ranging from French to Italian health-resorts, occupying the spring with Art in Paris—returning to London for June and July, generally spending August and September in Devonshire—to take flight Southwards before the migrating swallows, at the first chill breath of October frosts.

Margot had been educated at home, down in Devonshire, by a series of certificated female tutors. The spinster aunt, the younger sister of her father, extended to her niece for a liberal remuneration a nominal protection and an indifferent care.... And Mr. Mountjohn had died when the girl was sixteen, leaving her unconditionally heiress to his considerable fortune, and the aunt had let Margot have her head in every imaginable way. She had allowed her to take up her residence at the "Ladies' Social" Club three years subsequently, on the sole condition that a responsible chaperon accompanied Margot to Society functions. Hence, Mrs. Ponsonby Rewes, the irreproachable widow of a late King's Messenger, was evoked from Kensington Tower Mansions upon these occasions—by telephone—to vanish when no longer wanted, in the discreetest and most obliging way.

"Poor little Margot! .... Poor little woman!..." Franky could see how it all had happened by the wild light of the great deer-eyes, so like those in the portrait of the girl's dead mother—half Irish, half Greek by birth.

While Franky reflected, the tables had been emptying. People were hurrying away to hear the band of the Jardin d'Acclimatation or to fulfil other engagements of a seasonable kind. Some remained to smoke and gossip over liqueurs and coffee. The light blue wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke curled up towards the awning overhead. Franky mechanically produced his own case and lighted up. And Margot, stretching a slender arm across the table, was saying:

"Give me one!—I've forgotten mine! ..."

"Ought you? ... Is it wise? ..." Franky was on the point of asking, but his good Angel must have clapped a hand before his mouth. He silently gave Margot a thick, masculine Sobranie and supplied a light; and as their young faces neared and the red spark glowed, and the first smoke-wreath rose between the approximating tubes of delicate tobacco-filled paper, his wife whispered as their eyes met:

"You're hurt! But now you know—you're sorry for me, aren't you?" It was a dragging, plaintive undertone, not at all like Margot's voice.

"Frightfully! All the more because"—Franky drew so hard at his cigarette that it burned one-sidedly—"I can't help being thundering—glad!"

"I—see! ..."

She breathed out the words with a thin stream of fragrant Turkish vapour crawling over her scarlet under-lip, it seemed to Franky, like a pale blue worm. And he bit through his Sobranie and threw it on his dessert-plate, saying desperately:

"Not yet. Will you listen quietly to what I've got to say?"

She nodded. Franky launched himself upon the tide of revelation. Nearly everybody who had been eating when he had come into Nadier's with Margot had got up and gone away. And the Cuirassiers band was playing the love-music from Samson et Dalila on the terrace of the Jardin d'Acclimatation, as melodiously as only a French military band can play.

"It's got to do with the Peerage. Only a Second Afghan War-Earldom dating from 1879—tacked on to the Viscounty they gave my great-grandfather after Badajos—but worth having in its way, or the Dad wouldn't have accepted it. And, naturally enough—I want a boy to take the Viscounty when I succeed my father, and have the Earldom when I've absquatulated, just as the kiddy'll want one when his own time comes."

Margot was burning a strawberry-leaf on her plate with her cigarette-end. She asked, impressing another little yellow scorched circle on the surface of rough green:

"Would it matter so very much if there wasn't any boy?"

Franky jumped and turned red to the white, unsunned circle left by the field-cap on the summit of his high forehead.

"It would matter—lots! For my Uncle Sherbrand, a younger brother of my father's, would come in for the Viscounty when I succeeded the dear old Dad. And my Uncle Sherbrand is a blackguard! Got cashiered in 1900, when he was an Artillery officer in a gun-testing billet at Wanwich. Kicked out of the Army—in War-time, mind you!—for not backing up his C.O. And the brute has got a son, too, an apprentice in an engine-shop, if he isn't actually a chauffeur. Probably the young fellow's respectable, and of course it ain't the pup's fault he's got such a sire. But my Dad would turn in his grave at the idea of being succeeded by the brother who disgraced him—and as for his grandfather—the jolly old cock 'ud bally well get up and dance, I should say.... So, you see, I can't—sympathise with you as you want me to do in this, darling! I want you to buck up and be cheerful, and face the music like a brick.... As for what you've told me—about your mother——" In spite of himself, Franky gulped, and little shiny beads of sweat stood upon his cheeks and temples. "That sort of thing doesn't run in families, like rheumatism"—he was getting idiotic—"or Roman noses! Be plucky—and everything will turn out all right. Can't possibly go wrong if we call in Saxham ... Saxham of 000, Harley Street—man my sister Trix simply swears by. Brought her boy Ronald into the world thirteen years ago, and successfully operated on him for appendicitis only the other day! ..."

Margot looked at Franky attentively and bent her head slightly. Had she understood? She must have.... Had she tacitly agreed? Of course....

CHAPTER IV

RAYMOND OF THE S. AË. F.

The Masculine Will had conquered. You had only to be firm with women—bless their hearts! and they caved directly.... Couldn't hold out.... Not built that way.... Franky's sternly-clamped upper-lip relaxed. He beamed as he proposed a noonday stroll in the Bois. In the direction of the bigger Lake, by one of the narrower avenues, or if Margot preferred a look-in at the Polo Club, another avenue, intersecting the Allée de Longchamps and skirting the enclosure of the Gun Club, would take them there in a jiffy, via Bagatelle.

Margot assented to the latter proposition, and, with a little flutter of the lips Franky accepted as a smile, reached for her egret stole, a filmy feathery thing she had removed on entering Nadier's, and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves and pulled down her veil of sunset chiffon, half shaded red, merging into jonquil yellow matching the shade of her marvellous gown. And Franky paid the bill in plump English sovereigns (invariably exchanged as good for louis of twenty francs by the suave and smiling waiter) and tipped the said waiter extravagantly, and took his hat from the second waiter (who invariably starts up by the side of the first when you are going) and tipped him, and got his stick from the third waiter (who came forward with this, and the en tout cas of Madame—a lovely thing in the latest dome-shape, of black net over jonquil colour, with a flounce, and an ivory stick, upon the top of which sat a green monkey in olivines, eating a ruby fruit), and lighted another cigarette, and returned the elaborate bow of the manager with a nod of the cheerful patronising order as he followed Margot through the Rambler-wreathed archway leading by a flight of shallow steps from Nadier's terrace to the wide carriage-sweep that links the broad Allée de Longchamps with the narrower Route de Madrid. And the towering plume of her astonishing hat brought down a shower of red rose-petals as she passed out before him—and Franky, with some of these on his top-hat-brim and others nestling in the front of his waistcoat, was irresistibly reminded of their wedding-day.

Unconsciously, Franky and Margot quitted the broader, more frequented avenue, crowded with people in carriages, people in automobiles, people on motor-bicycles and bicyclettes, and followed narrower pathways, stretching between green lawns adorned with shrubberies and clumps of stately forest trees, and chiefly patronised by sweethearting couples, nursemaids in charge of children, children in domineering but affectionate charge of white-haired ladies, while venerable gentlemen dozed on rustic benches over the columns of Figaro or Paris Midi.

When even these figures became rare, it was borne in upon Franky that he and Margot were not upon a path that led to the Grounds of the Polo Club. Reluctantly, he admitted himself lost.

"Does it matter? ..." Margot's voice was weary. "If you're absolutely set on it, we could ask one of those men in cocked hats and waxed moustaches and red-and-yellow shoulder-cords to give us the straight tip. But I don't feel the least bit keen about the Polo Club any more than the Lakes. These alleys are quiet, and the grass is nice and green. I vote we go on."

"Madame cannot pass this way. It is not open for strangers."

A Republican Guard, a good-looking sous-officier, had spoken, comprehending the tone rather than the English words.

"Why not?" Margot's eyes suddenly brightened. She eagerly sniffed the air of the forbidden avenue. The corporal, indicating with his white-gloved hand other Republican Guards posted at equal distances down the prohibited alley, and at its intersection with another some two hundred yards distant, brought his eyes back to Margot to answer:

"Madame, for the reason that certain military operations are taking place here to-day."

"But my husband is an English officer—" Margot was beginning, when Franky, reddening to his hat-brim, exhorted her to be quiet, and the Republican Guard, civilly saluting, stepped upon the grass and moved away.

"All the same, you are an English officer," Margot persisted, "and what use is the Entente if that doesn't count?"

"Best child, don't be a giddy goose!" Franky implored her. "You don't suppose the Authorities care a bad tomato for an English Loot—what they'd cotton to would have to be a British Brass Hat of the very biggest kind. Look there!—more to your left, little battums!" He indicated yet other Republican cocked hats strung at equal distances down the length of a neighbouring alley, precisely outlining the farther border of the sandwich-shaped halfacre of greensward by which their particular avenue ran. "And there!" His professional eye had noted a big, grey-painted military motor-lorry, numbered, and lettered "S. Aë. F." Behind the driver's seat towered the slender T-shaped steel mast of a Field wireless, whose spidery aerials, pegged to the turf, were in charge of men in képis and blue overalls, while a non-commissioned officer, wearing the telephone head-band of the operator, leaned on the elbow-rest of the tripod supporting the apparatus, his finger on the buzzer-key. Near him his clerk squatted, pencil and pad in readiness, while at a respectful distance from two oblong patches of white in the middle of the green plat of turf, several active upright figures in dark uniforms stood conversing, or walking to and fro.

"Officiers Aviateurs, telegraphists and mechanics of the French Service Aëronautique"—you are listening to Franky—"tremendously well-organised compared with our little footling Flying Corps, tinkered fourteen months ago out of the old Air Battalion of the R. E. These chaps are Engineers—goin' by the dark red double stripes on their overalls and their dark blue képis. Some of their machines'll be out for practice. Despatch-droppin' or bombs. Here's a man with brass on his hat, coming our way.... Takes me for a German soger-orficer I shouldn't wonder!—lots of 'em get their clothes cut in Bond Street. But though you can hide Allemand legs in English trousers"—Franky was recovering his customary cheeriness—"and some of 'em do it uncommon cleverly—you can't deodorise an accent that hails from Berlin."

The officer approaching—a youthful, upright figure walking quickly, with the short, springy steps of a man much in the saddle—proved to be grey-haired and grey-moustached. The double-winged badge of his Service was embroidered in gold upon the right sleeve of his tunic, and upon the collar, a single wing in this case, ending in a star. He carried binoculars suspended from his neck by a rolled-leather thong, and a revolver in a black-leather case was attached to the belt about his middle. There was thick white dust upon the legs and uppers of his high polished black boots, which the grass had scoured from the toes and soles. His bright blue-grey eyes ran over Franky as the slight soldierly salute was exchanged. He said, speaking in excellent English:

"If Monsieur, the English officer, will obligingly mention his name, rank, and regiment, it might be possible to allow him to continue his promenade with Madame, the invention we are testing being the patent of his countryman, and already familiar to the Authorities at the British War Office."

Thus coerced, Franky produced his card, Margot dimpled into smiles, the polite officer saluted again, introduced himself as Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the —th escadrille, wheeled and walked away. But he returned to say, this time directly addressing Margot:

"Should Madame la Vicomtesse desire to witness the test of her countryman's—apparatus, there can be no objection to her doing so. But that Madame should keep clear of the vicinity of the"—he pointed to the two oblong strips of white canvas adorning the middle of the expanse of green,—"the signal, intended for the guidance of the aviator, is of absolute necessity, Madame must understand!"

"There won't be any...?" Margot was beginning, nervously.

"Mais non, Madame. Pas d'explosion," the officer assured her, and stiffened to attention facing eastwards, and scanning the sky with eyes that blinked in the dazzling glare of early noon. For the droning whirr of a plane just then reached them, drowning the sign of the hot south breeze that rustled in the tops of the acacias and oaks, ilexes and poplars, that rose about the arena of open ground....

CHAPTER V

THE BIRD OF WAR

"The avion comes from Drancy." The speaker looked back at Margot as he focussed his binoculars. "It is not one of our Army machines, but a British monoplane built by your countryman and fitted with the invention whose usefulness we are here to test." He continued: "Should the officier-pilote in charge of the—apparatus—and who for the time being represents an enemy—succeed in poising"—he hesitated a bare instant—"for a stipulated number of moments over the target—those two lengths of white canvas approximating on the grass represent the target—he scores a bull's-eye."

He blinked a little, and before Franky's mental vision rose the aggregation of Government buildings near the Carrefour des Cascades, marked "Magazins et depôts" on Bædeker's maps.

"He scores a bull's eye," resumed the speaker. "He has already paid one visit of the requisite duration to an address near the Porte d'Aubervilliers." Franky had a mental vision of the array of big, bloated gasometers pertaining to the Strasbourg Railway Yards. "He has made a similar call at a point indicated between the station of the Batignolles and the station of the Avenue de Clichy"—the well-preserved teeth of the officer showed under the grey moustache as he smiled, and Franky had another vision of the huge Gare aux Marchandises tucked in the angle between the Railway of the Geinture and the Western Railway lines, as the speaker went on suavely "and the target succeeding this will be the last. It is situated on the Champ de Manoeuvres at Issy. The wireless-telegraph operator of my escadrille informs me that two bull's eyes have already been registered—which for your countryman's invention presages well."

Franky, with British plumpness, queried:

"And the invention? Some new bomb-dropping device—planned to get rid of the way the engine always puts on 'em? If the English inventor-fellow has done that, his goods are worth buying, I should say!"

Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant, answered as the droning song from the sky grew louder:

"Of certainty, Monsieur, if his invention prove worth buying, my Government will undoubtedly purchase what has already been unavailingly offered to yours. It is our custom to examine and test, closely and exhaustively, new things that are offered. But what would you? We seek the best for France."

"He isn't flying his aëroplane himself, is he? Or working his own invention, whatever it may be?"

"But no, Madame! One of our* Officiers-Aviateurs* is acting as pilot, a skilled mechanic of our Service occupies the observer's place. Despite the Entente Cordiale—the happy relations prevailing between my country and England—it would hardly be convenable or discreet to permit even an Englishman"—the tone of graceful, subtle irony cannot be conveyed by pen or type—"even an Englishman to fly over Paris, or any other fortified city of France. But see! In the sky to the north-east—above that silvery puff of vapour—arrives now the avion built and christened by your countryman."

Margot asked, narrowing her beautiful eyes as she searched out the darkish speck upon the hot blue background:

"The plane, you mean. What does he call it?"

Raymond answered without removing his eyes from his binoculars:

"Madame, he calls it 'The Bird of War.'"

The tuff-tuff of a motor-cycle sounded faintly in the distance, as the resonant vibrating noise of the aëroplane came more triumphantly out of the hot blue sky. Save for a scintillating white reflection to the north that might have been the crystal dome of the great big Palm House in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and that unavoidable, useful ugliness, the gilded lantern of the Tour Eiffel, thrusting up into the middle distance over the delicately-rounded masses of new foliage upon the right-hand looking east, the glory and shame and magnificence and squalor of the Queen City of Cities might have lain a hundred leagues away, so ringed-in by delicate austere brown of serried tree-trunks, rising above rich clumps of blossoming lilac, syringa, yellow azalea, and pink, mauve, and snowy rhododendron, was the spacious green arena wherein Franky and Margot were destined to play their part.

Now, followed by the wide-winged shadow that the sun of high noon threw almost directly beneath her, darkening drifting cloud, and open city spaces, passing over breasting tree-tops and wide stretches of municipal greensward, the Bird of War drew nearer and more near.... And glancing up as the portentous flying shadow suddenly blotted out the sunlight, Franky realised that the two-seater monoplane was hovering, and buzzing as she hovered, like a Brobdingnagian combination of kite-hawk, dragon-fly, and bumblebee.

He pulled out a pair of vest-pocket field-glasses and scanned her as she hung there, gleaming in the sunlight, at a height of perhaps five hundred feet above the white cloths on the grass. He could make out the Union Jack on her underwings, the huge black raking capitals of her name BIRD OF WAR painted on the side of the tapering canvas-covered fuselage, the diamond-shaped tail swaying between the pendant flaps of the huge triangular elevators, clearly as though these features had been filmed upon the screen. In a curious misty circle, spinning under the fuselage, he suspected lay the secret of her kite-like poise and hover, and behind his immaculate waistcoat he was sensible of a thrill.

If the English inventor had not solved the baffling Problem of Stability, he had come uncommonly near it, by the Great Brass Hat! And the dud-heads at Whitehall had shown the door to him and his invention. "Good Christmas!—how like 'em!" reflected Franky, lowering the glasses to chuckle, and looking round for Margot.

There she was, some twenty yards distant, planted right in the middle of the avenue, lost to the wide in rapt contemplation of the hovering aëroplane.

"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention. He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its engine's open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor's roar.

CHAPTER VI

SHERBRAND

The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe and sound. The aëroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic—the upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle of the raked-up avenue.

"You've had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying.

"Yes.... I have had a spill—thanks to that young lady!"

The dusty young man's tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. "The brake-handle did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic Franky's. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of Margot's lord as he added:

"If I'd killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved it!—running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up at top speed! ..."

"I know," Franky stammered. "I—I see how it all happened. You had to steer slap into the bank—to save my—my wife's life. How can I apologise? ... You see, she was crazy about the aëroplane.... She'd been warned to keep well out of the way—you know what women are! ..."

"Oh, as to that! ..." The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its injuries. "Not much wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky's restraining grip upon his arm.

"You don't go until my wife has thanked you!" Franky's upper-lip was Rhadamanthine. "Margot!" he called, in a tone of authority such as he had never previously heard from his own mouth; "Come here at once, please! I want to speak to you!"

The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice called back:

"Yes.... Oh!—but look at them! ... Can they be going? Why, I believe they are! ..."

The canvas strips had been rolled up by a mechanician of the Service Aëronautique, and stowed away behind the big grey telegraph-car, in the recesses of which the telescopic steel mast and aërials of the wireless had been snugly tucked away. The mechanics in képis and overalls had stowed themselves away inside the camion; the wireless operator, a képi having replaced his headband, was acting as chauffeur. And, occupying the front seat beside a junior officer, who piloted a second, smaller car, Raymond, Capitaine-Commandant pilot of the —th escadrille of France's Service Aëronautique gave the signal for departure with an upward wave of his hand. Then, with some sharp, staccato trills of a whistle and the double honk of a pneumatic horn, the car of the commandant turned and sped down the avenue, followed by the tractor-waggon; and both were lost to view.

"But—they're gone! ... And—and the aëroplane...." Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the tractor's whirring song.

"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate—travelling at eighty miles an hour. Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow," said the motor-cyclist ruefully. "Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the Drancy hangar."

He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at his bleeding chin:

"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I'd tried him twice already, I knew what he'd got to say. The Commander of the Central School of Military Aviation was a brick—I'll say that for him. He sent a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their Service Aëronautique.... Well! the big test's over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or two—or possibly in a year?"

"Oh! You don't mean——"

The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:

"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You're the inventor! The whole thing was your show!"

"Yes, I'm the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a commis voyageur?"

"Can't say. Never thought! ... Fact is—my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her—posted right in the middle of the gravel—I was scared stiff—give you my honour!—you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"

Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.

But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type:

"Once more, I am glad that no harm has happened to the lady. The delay caused by the—mishap can hardly have prejudiced my success. For all I know, the test of my hoverer may have favourably impressed the judges. If it has done otherwise I have no right to blame man, dog, or devil, for a failure that may be my own."

He lifted his goggled cap to Margot with a good air, pulled it down, and was in the act of lowering the visor, when Margot's voice arrested the big-boned hand. That voice Franky knew could be wonderfully coaxing. It pleaded now, soft as the sigh of a Mediterranean breeze:

"Whether the test is successful or isn't, will you promise that we shall hear from you? ..."

"Good egg!" joined in Franky. "Do let us know! ... We're stopping at the Spitz, Place Vendôme." He warmed and grew expansive in the light of Margot's smile of approval. "Drop in on us there," he urged, "as soon as you've found out. Come and dine with us in any case.... No!—we're engaged to-night, but come and lunch at two sharp to-morrow, and tell us all about your hoverer over a bottle of Bubbly. Suite 10, Second Floor. Name of Norwater. Stick this away to remind you," he ended, tendering his card.

"You're awfully good. But at the same time I hardly——"

The voice broke off. A glance at the proffered pasteboard had dyed the inventor flaming scarlet from the collar of his dusty gabardine to the edges of his goggled cap. He dropped the card quietly upon the gravel, and said, looking Franky straight between the eyes:

"Even if I were able to accept I'd have to decline your invitation. My name's Sherbrand—I'm your Uncle Alan's son." He settled himself in the saddle and finished before he pulled up the starting-lever. "Understand—I'd no idea who you were until I saw the name on your card. It has been a queer encounter—I can't say a pleasant one. Let me end it by saying 'Good-day!' ..."

Franky's new-found cousin touched the goggled cap and pulled up the starting-lever. With the customary bang and snort, the motor-bicycle leaped away. Margot had uttered a little gasp at the moment of revelation. Now she turned great eyes of dismay on Franky, and withdrew them quickly. For Franky's eyes had become circular and poppy, his mouth tried to shape itself into a whistle, but his expression was merely vacuous. He continued to explode with "Great Snipe!" at intervals, as he and Margot made their way back to more populous avenues, chartered a fortuitously passing taxi, and were driven back via the Porte Dauphine to Spitz's gorgeous caravanserai in the Place Vendôme, when Margot vanished into her own bower, sending her French maid to intimate to Milord that Miladi would take tea alone in that apartment, and did not intend to dine.

Thus Franky, relieved from duty, presently found himself, in company with a cigar, strolling bachelor-fashion through the streets of Paris. No very clear recollection stayed with him of how he spent the afternoon. At one time he found himself with his features glued against the plate-glass window of a celebrated establishment dedicated to the culture and restoration of feminine beauty, contemplating divers gilt wigs on stands—porcelain pots of marvellous unguents, warranted to eliminate wrinkles; sachets of mystic herbs to be immersed in baths; creams guaranteed to impart to the most exhausted skin the velvety freshness of infancy.

Later he strayed into a sunny, green-turfed public garden, full of white statues, sparkling fountains, and municipal seats whereon Burgundian, Dalmatian, and Alsatian wet-nurses dandled or rocked or nourished their infant charges, and bonnes or governesses presided over the gambols of older babies, who played with belled Pierrots, or toy automobiles, or inflated balls of gorgeous hues.

There is nothing profoundly moving in the sight of a stout, beribboned wet-nurse suckling her employer's infant. But into the company of these important hirelings came quite unconsciously a young working-woman in a shabby brown merino skirt and a blouse of white Swiss. Her shining black hair was uncovered to the sunshine. On one arm she carried a bouncing baby, on the other a basket containing cabbages and onions, and a flask of cheap red wine, which receptacle its owner, having taken the other end of the seat Franky occupied, set down between herself and the young man. She was a healthy, plump young woman with too pronounced a moustache for beauty. But when, having methodically turned the baby upside down to rearrange some detail of its scanty dress, she reversed it and bared her breast to the eager mouth, a strange thrill went through Franky. A dimness came before his vision, and it was as though those dimpled hands plucked at his heart. He suffered a sudden revulsion strange in a young man so modern, up-to-date, and beautifully tailored. He knew that he longed for a son most desperately. And the devil of it was—Margot did not.

CHAPTER VII

THE CONSOLATRIX

Thus, Franky got up and moved away, driven by the stinging cloud of thoughts that pursued and battened on him, and presently found himself following a stream of people up a flight of marble steps, and under an imposing portico that ended in a turnstile and a National Collection of Paintings and Sculptures.

Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold.

A sculptured Hagar mourning by the side of her dying Ishmael caught his eye as he entered the first gallery. Farther on, Eve after the Fall lifted the infant Cain to receive the kiss of Adam, homing to his shack of green branches at the end of the labouring day. And a shag-thighed, curly-horned Pan romped with a litter of sturdy bear-cubs, and medallions and panels of childhood were everywhere.

It was the same in the galleries devoted to painting. A Breton christening-party, depicted with the roughness that hides consummate mastery of technique, trudged along a snowy coast-road towards a little chapel near the seashore. The young mother in her winged starched cap and bodice of black velvet, yet pale from the ordeal of anguish, walked between her smiling gossips, carrying her new-born infant, chrysalis-like in its linen swaddlings, to be made into a good Christian by M. le Curé. And seated on a broken throne of red granite beneath the towering propylæum of a ruined Egyptian temple, whose colonnades of lotus columns, and walls painted with processions of hierophants offering incense to bird or beast-headed deities, and bewigged dancers and musicians ministering to the pleasures of long-eyed kings, receded down long perspectives into distance, a Woman, young and slender and draped in a long blue cloak over a white robe, gazed downwards at a naked Child sleeping upon her knees. And about the downy temples of the Child shone a slender ring of mystic brightness, and another, more faint, haloed the chastely beautiful head of the Mother bending above.

Another canvas, austere and gorgeous, with the marvellous blues and emeralds and rich deep crimsons of old Byzantine ornament in relief against a background of dull tawny gold, showed the same maternal figure, far older and in darker draperies, seated upon a chair of wrought ivory upon a daïs, looking outward and upward with deep eyes of unfathomable tenderness and sorrow, and pale hands lifted in supplication to that Heaven whither Her Son ascended after His Victory over Death. Across the knees of the Consolatrix Afflictorum a mourning mother lay prone and tearless. And at the feet of the Virgin, outstretched amidst the scattered petals of some fallen roses, you saw the nude, beautiful body of a male child of some three years old.

But little of the inner meaning of Bouguereau's great picture filtered through Franky's honest brown eyes to the mind that lay somewhere behind them. But he realised that for the grieving woman who had borne a son and lost him there was no more joy in the world.

The Child of that Woman upon whose knees she leaned her breaking heart had lived to attain to the perfect ripeness of glorious Manhood. But then.... Franky followed the lines of the dark, downward-drifting veil up to the rapt Mother-face with the sorrowful, close-folded mouth and the deep, fathomless eyes, and remembered what had happened to Her Son.

"Beg pardon!" he found himself muttering between his teeth. His hand went up, and he had bared his sleek brown head before he knew. This wasn't a Roman Catholic Church, anyway ... there was no obligation even to appear respectful; France had long ago kicked over the traces of Religion—all French people were Freethinkers in these days. Telling himself this, Franky did not replace the shiny topper. One rapid glance to right and left had shown him that the gallery was nearly empty; the few visitors it contained were too far distant to have observed the action. Except, possibly, one person, a lean, short, elderly man in shabby black, who stood some paces behind, a little to the left of Franky, holding a shovel-brimmed round-crowned beaver with both hands against his sunken chest as he gazed with bright, absorbed eyes at the wonderful rapt face of the Consoler; his lips moving rapidly as he whispered to himself, not breaking off or twitching a muscle because Franky had glanced round:

Franky glanced round again, and this time encountered the oddly young eyes of his neighbour, looking from a brown, deeply wrinkled visage framed in thickly growing, straight black hair, heavily streaked with white.

"Monsieur is a lover of Art?"

Undoubtedly a Frenchman, he addressed Franky in cultured English, with a tone and manner excellently graced. The vivid clearness of his amber-coloured eyes, set in the now smiling mask of walnut-brown wrinkles, was attractive. And Franky answered, unconsciously warming to the look and smile:

"Must say I hardly know. Things that clever, intellectual people go into raptures over, bore me simply stiff. Other things—things they howl down—go straight to the spot, you see. And all I can say when I'm hauled over the coals for liking rubbish is, that the rubbish is good enough for this child."

"I comprehend. Monsieur has the courage of his convictions. It is a quality rare in these days. And—this painting particularly appeals to Monsieur? May one be pardoned for asking why?"

The voice was suave, but it somehow compelled an answer. Franky, with an indistinct remembrance of viva voce examinations awakening in him, cleared his throat and fell back a pace or two.... Well set up and well-bred, well-groomed and well-dressed, his figure, beside that other in the priestly soutane of rusty alpaca, short enough to reveal coarse ribbed stockings of black yarn, and cracked prunella shoes with worn steel buckles, made a contrast sufficiently quaint to provoke a stare of curiosity, had any observer passed just then. But standing together on the beeswaxed floor at the upper end of the long, bright, skylighted gallery, the Guardsman and his temporary acquaintance were as private as it is possible to be in a public place.

Thus, at the cost of a heightened complexion and an occasional stammer, Franky explained himself. The painting appealed to him because it recalled a Bible story—made familiar to Franky by reason of having swotted it at School for Sunday Ques. with other fellows of the Fifth in Greyshott's time. Also, on the wind-up Sunday of his, Franky's, Last Term, having passed for the Army with the dev—hem!—of a lot of trouble—a beastly epidemic of diphtheria and scarlet fever having broken out among the children of the Windsor poor, the Head had preached from the text in Big Chapel. And the text went something like this:

"A Voice in Rama was heard, of lamentation and mourning: Rachel bewailing her children: and would not be comforted because they are not."

The haggard, beautiful, tearless Rachel of the picture hadn't bucked at the disfigurement and the pain and the danger of child-bearing. She had welcomed them for the sake of the kid.... It was a thundering pity he hadn't lived—in Franky's opinion; "woman jolly well deserved to have been let keep that clinking fine boy to rear."

"I comprehend." The clear eyes flashed into Franky's, the withered brown mask was alight with sympathetic intelligence. "To Monsieur, an English officer and a member of the Protestant Church of England, that woman who leans her bursting heart upon the knees of the Mother of Consolation is Rachel." He quoted:

"'Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus el ululatus: Rachel plorans filios suos: et noluit consolari, quia non sunt.'"

"That's it!" Franky nodded, admitting candidly: "Though I always was a duffer at Latin, and we weren't taught at School to pronounce it—quite in that way."

Said the clear-eyed old man, whose dark wrinkled throat displayed no edge of linen above the plain circular collar of the soutane, only a significant border of purple from which two widish lappets of the same colour depended beneath the peaked and mobile chin, and who might have been a prelate of sorts, had it not been understood of simple Franky that the State had abolished the Catholic religion and banished all priests, monks, and nuns from France.

"The Italianate Latin puzzles you.... It is—slightly different to the Latin they taught you at Eton? Hein? When I lived in England—not so long ago—I counted several brave Eton fellows among my acquaintances. And their mental attitude with regard to the language of Virgil, Horace, and Tacitus was precisely that of Monsieur."

He chuckled, and his oddly young eyes twinkled quite gaily as he pulled out a battered little silver snuff-box and helped himself, wrinkling his thin hooked nose with evident enjoyment. As he dusted the pungent brown grains from his lappets with a coarse blue-checked cotton handkerchief, an amethyst ring on the wrinkled hand flashed pink and violet in the light.

"To Monsieur who is doubtless familiar with the Scriptures in Tyndall's translation, I might suggest that the Latin of the Ancient Romans should be pronounced in the Roman style! But Monsieur will pardon this tone of the pedagogue. I will not 'bore you stiff' with a classical disquisition. Permit me to thank you for your amiable compliance with the request of an old man, and to wish you good-day."

He combined apology, farewell, and dismissal in a courtly little bow, and as though undoubting that the other would pass on, plunged again into the picture. But Franky lingered to say, awkwardly:

"Perhaps ... If you don't mind...."

"Hein? ..."

The keen eyes reverted to his embarrassed face instantly.

"What if I do not mind? ... There is something you desire to ask me?"

"Well, yes!" Franky admitted. "Don't quite pipe why, but I rather cotton to hearing your version.... Of the meaning of that picture, you know! ..."

"Yes—yes! I understand! ..." The vivid eyes flashed piercingly into Franky's, and leaped back to the great glorious canvas within the stately frame. "To you who were once a boy at Eton that woman who has no more tears to shed is Rachel of Rama.... To me, once Seminarist of the Institut Catholique, as to others of my holy faith and sacred calling—she is France—our beloved France, who leans upon the knees and against the bosom of the Catholic Church in her bereavement—mourning with anguish unutterable her children who are dead.... Dead to Faith, dead to the Spiritual Life—members separated from the Body of Christ by their own choice as by the act of Government. Lost!—unless the ray of Divine Grace find and touch them in their self-made darkness, and they repent, and turn themselves to Christ again!"

Franky said, with wholly lovable banality:

"Rather sweepin', but natural conclusion, from a religious point o' view. Still, when a whole nation gets up like one man and bally well chucks a Religion, there must be something jolly off-colour and thundering rotten about that Religion, don't you know?"

"A whole nation!"

The bright eyes held Franky's sternly. He lifted his right arm, and the withered hand still shut upon the battered snuff-box shot up two fingers in vigorous protest. "Pardon, Monsieur—you are very seriously mistaken. France was never more Catholic at heart than now. How strange!—when but twenty-one miles of salt water divide Calais from Dover—when the Entente Cordiale has established between your country and mine nominally close and intimate relations; that so complete an ignorance as to the French Nation, its Government, its mode of thought, its moral, religious, and social conditions, should be found prevailing in Great Britain to-day!"

"My dear sir, you're off the bull—completely off!" protested Franky—Franky whose second sister was married to a Frenchman, Franky who knew Paris as well as the inside of his week-end suit-case, by Jove!

A deprecating shrug and a supple outstretched hand cut short the speaker.

"Pardon, Monsieur l'Anglais—I know what you would say to me! There is much force in the argument.... It is très sensée—and there is truth in it, and yet it is false—to be guilty of a paradox. The aristocracy of Great Britain, like her plutocracy, set high value upon much that comes from France. British gold is poured into my country in return for the newest and most fanciful modes in costume, millinery, and jewellery. And not only do your beautiful women adorn themselves with the inventions of our bold and original genius for ornament, but for your menus, your pleasures, the novels and plays that paint in intoxicating colours the joys of unchaste love and illicit passion, for the sensuous poetry that is garlanded with the flame-hued flowers of Evil, you are ready to praise and pay us lavishly, as though no nobler growth than this rank luxuriance sprang from the intellectual soil of France. Our vices—alas!—with the appalling diseases that spring from them, and the combinations of drugs that alleviate these—all find with you a ready market. And you attend our race-meetings at Longchamps and Auteuil, where English jockeys ride French and Irish horses—and you believe, you!—that you know the social life of France. No!—but you are ignorant—profoundly ignorant! May GOD be thanked that you misjudge us thus cruelly. For if my country were no better than Great Britain and other foreign nations believe her to be, it were time indeed for a rain of fire from Heaven!"

Hardly raising his voice above a clear whisper, the emotion and vehemence with which he spoke, and the swift and fiery gesticulations with which he illustrated utterance, made the sweat start out in beads upon his wrinkled forehead and cheeks. He wiped these off with the blue checked handkerchief, saying:

"Pardon! I grow warm when I speak of these things. I recognise that if in the judgment of other nations France is a courtesan drunk with lechery, or at the best un esprit follet, she has brought this judgment upon herself. Flippancy, the desire to faire de l'esprit under any circumstances—the bold and brilliant gaiety that is her exclusive and most beautiful characteristic—these have caused her to be misunderstood. But whatever else she be, she is not Pagan nor Agnostic. To believe that is to wrong her cruelly, Monsieur!"

Franky, by now hopelessly at sea, endured the hailstorm of swift, vehement sentences with an expression of amiable vacuity, his stiffly pendent hands plainly yearning for the refuge of his trousers pockets, his mind rocking on the waves of the stranger's passionate eloquence like a toy yacht adrift on the bosom of the Atlantic. And the resonant Gallic voice went on:

CHAPTER VIII

MONSEIGNEUR

"The masters of France to-day are hostile to Christianity. They are Freemasons (Freemasonry in England is not Freemasonry as it is understood here); they are Freethinkers, Socialists, Internationalists, and Hedonists, the avowed enemies of the Catholic Faith. Hence, churches, seminaries, and schools have been closed by Government, communities of religious men and women have been uprooted and exiled. Priests have been banished, ecclesiastical and private property has been appropriated and confiscated, churches have been desecrated, the symbols of Christianity and religion everywhere torn down. In France upon Good Friday the standard of the Republic waves proudly, while the flag of every other Christian nation hangs at half-mast high. And yet—the great mass of the French people are—Catholic and nothing but Catholic! The light may be hidden, but the fire of devotion still burns in millions of faithful hearts gathered about the Church's altars, beating beside the hearths of innumerable homes in France. Blood—torrents of blood—would not quench that sacred fire. When the Day of Expiation comes, as it will come, most surely, the Catholicism of France will prove her salvation yet!"

With the final sentence, the hand that had been lifted in gesture dropped to the side of the speaker. The flashing glance took in Franky from the top of his sleek bewildered head to the tips of his beautiful patent-leathers. He said with a smile of irresistible amusement:

"Monsieur, I fear I have fatigued you. Let me thank you for your admirable patience. Au revoir, or if you prefer it—Adieu!"

Another of the quick little bows, and he had covered himself and passed on rapidly. Franky reflected, staring after the short black figure in the caped soutane with the worn purple sash and shabby beaver shovel-hat, as it receded from his view.

"Fruity old wordster, 'pon my natural! Toppin' fine talker! Wonder who he is? Head of a Public School, swottin' an address for the beginning of the Midsummer Half term—a Professor of Divinity gettin' up a lecture—the Archbishop of Paris rehearsin' a sermon. Whichever they call him, why don't he pitch his language at a man of his own size?"

And he went back to the Spitz through the boulevards that were surging with the afternoon life of Paris, and heard from Pauline that Miladi had retired to bed. She had already dispatched a billet of excuses to Sir Brayham, with whom Miladi and Milord were engaged to dine downstairs that evening, explaining that a headache prevented her from accompanying Milord. He—Milord—must be sure to make no noise in changing for dinner, as Miladi, after a crisis of the nerves of the most alarming, was now sleeping like an angel, having taken a potion calmante of orange-flower syrup with water, not the veronal so heartily detested of Milord....

"Sleepin' like an angel, is she? ... Good egg!—though I thought angels never went to bed—flew about singing all the giddy time. Righto, though! I won't disturb her ladyship.... When she wakes, give her my love...."

And Franky entered his dressing-room on cautious tiptoe, lighted a cigarette, rang the bell for his valet, and began to reflect.

It was to have been a dinner of eight people—Brayham the host, with Lady Wathe, skinny little vitriol-tongued woman!—a man unknown who was to have sat next Margot; Commander Courtley—ripping good fellow old Courtley! no better sailor walked the quarter-deck of a First-Class Cruiser—damn shame those Admiralty bigwigs denied such a fellow post-rank; and Lady Beauvayse, formerly Miss Sadie Sculpin of New York—pretty American with pots of boodle, married to that ghastly little bounder who'd stepped into the shoes a better man would be wearing if his elder brother (handsome fellow who married an actress, Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity—good old Jollity!) hadn't got pipped in that scrum with the Boers in 1900-1901.

Lessie, Lady Beauvayse, the widder called herself on the posters and programmes. Come down to second-rate parts in Music Hall Revue—gettin' elderly and stout. Must see red when she happened to spy the present Lord Beauvayse's pretty peeress in the stalls or boxes.... Wonder why the P.P. made such a pal of Patrine Saxham? Niece of Saxham of Harley Street—handsome as paint, proud as the devil, and an Advanced Thinker—according to Margot. Remembering the gift of the jade tree-frog, Franky involuntarily wrinkled his nose.

With Lady Beau and the Saxham girl, there would be a party of seven, counting the man unknown.... Might go on afterwards to the Folies Bergère or the Théâtre Marigny—or perhaps the Jardin de Paris. Why hadn't Jobling answered his master's bell? Why had he deputised a waiter to enquire whether his lordship wished his valet? Did he think waiters were paid to do his, Jobling's, work for him? Or did he, Jobling, suppose he was kept for show?

The strenuous stage-whisper in which Franky addressed the recalcitrant Jobling penetrated the door-panels of the adjoining bower, as such whispers usually do. But Margot was really sleeping—the orange-flower water had had a few drops of chloral mingled with it. Milord had never prohibited chloral, as Pauline had pointed out. But unsuspicious Franky, unrigging (as he termed the process), while the tardy Jobling prepared his master's bath and laid out his master's "glad rags," plumed himself upon having made a notable advance in the science of wife-government. Even the blameless potion of orange-flower testified to his masculine strength of will.

CHAPTER IX

SIR THOMAS ENTERTAINS

You are invited to follow Franky, and sit with him at his friend Tom Brayham's circular board, decorated with great silver bowls of marvellous Rayon d'Or roses, that seemed to exhale the harvested sunshine of summer from their fiery golden hearts.

You remember the famous dining-room of the big Paris caravanserai, with its archways supported by slender pillars of creamy pink Carrara marble, wreathed with inlaid fillets of green malachite and lapis lazuli, and its electric illuminants concealed behind an oxidised silver frieze. And possibly you need no introduction to the deity—plain and middle-aged—in whose honour Brayham—the Hon. Sir Thomas Brayham, an ex-Justice of the King's Bench Division—in the remote mid-Victorian era a famous Q.C.—made oblation of luscious meats and special wines. The clever, sharp-tongued, penniless niece of a famous Minister for Foreign Affairs, she had made a love-match at twenty with Lord Watho Wathe, a handsome and equally impecunious subaltern in a famous Highland regiment, who was killed upon Active Service twenty years later, while travelling upon a special mission to the Front Headquarters during the South African War of 1900.

Two years later his widow conferred her hand upon Mr. Reuben Munts, of Kimberley and South Carfordshire, a diamond-mining magnate who had made his colossal pile before the War. She had never borne her second husband's name, and when he died, leaving her sole mistress of his millions, Lady Wathe resumed her place in Society, thenceforwards to sparkle as never before.

"The 'Chronique Scandaleuse' in a diamond setting" some phrase-maker clever as herself had aptly termed her. Without her riches, stripped of her wonderful diamonds, Society might have found her to be merely a little chattering woman, avid of the reputation of a humorist and raconteuse, unflagging in her relish for stories, not seldom of the broadest, related at her own expense or at the cost of other people, and over-liberally garnished with nods and becks, darting glances, and wreathed smiles.

Upon this night of the Grand Prix—won, you will remember, by Baron M. de Rothschild's "Sardanapole"—the little lady's jests fizzled and coruscated like Japanese fireworks. Her gibes buzzed and stung like wasps about a lawn-set tea-table, when new-made jam and fragrant honey tempt the yellow-and-black marauders to the board. And yet from the soup to the entremets, Franky listened in dour and smileless silence, unable to conjure up a grin at the sharpest of the Goblin's witticisms, or swell the guffaw that invariably followed the naughtiest of her double-entendres.

"Off colour, what? ..." his crony Courtley queried in a sympathetic undertone, catching a glimpse of Franky's cheerless countenance behind the bare, convulsed back and snowy heaving shoulders of Lady Beauvayse, who occupied the intervening chair.

"Putridly off colour.... Walked in the Bois, and got a touch of the sun, I fancy!" Franky whispered back too loudly, drawing upon himself the Goblin's equivoque:

"The sun or the daughter, did you say, Lord Norwater? Dear me!" the Goblin shrilled; "you're actually blushing! You've revived a long-lost Early Victorian art."

"Was blushing really an art with the ladies of that dim and distant era?" asked the friendly Brayham, not in the least comprehending Franky's discomfiture, yet desirous of diverting the Goblin's glittering scrutiny from her victim's scarlet face.

"It was the art that concealed Heart—or assumed it!" Lady Wathe retorted, with a peal of elfish laughter, turning her tight-skinned, large-eyed, wide-mouthed ugliness upon the speaker, and nodding her little round head until the huge and perfectly matched diamonds of the triple-rayed tiara that crowned her scanty henna-dyed tresses flashed blinding sparks of violet and red and emerald splendour in the mellow-toned radiance of the electric lights.

The Goblin had meant nothing, Franky assured himself, as the angry blood stopped humming in his ears, and his complexion regained its normal shade. The bad pun that had bowled him over had possibly been uttered without malicious intent.... Yet Lady Wathe rented a gorgeous suite upon the floor below the Norwater apartments, and one of her three lady's-maids might have been pumping Pauline.... What was she saying? ... Why was everybody cackling? ...

The Goblin was launched upon a characteristic story. Its dénouement—worked up with skill and related with point—evoked peal upon peal of laughter from the guests at Brayham's table, with the sole exception of Franky, whom the anecdote found sulky and left glum. He said to himself that if Lady Beauvayse, née Miss Sadie J. Sculpin of New York, sole child and heiress of a Yankee who had made millions out of Chewing Gum, chose to forget her position as the wife of a British Peer, and mother of his children, by Jove! and scream at such nastiness, it was her look-out. If the big red-blond man who sat on Franky's right shook with amusement, as he recapitulated the chief points of the story for the benefit of the girl who sat next him, it was his affair. But that the Saxham, an unmarried girl, who oughtn't to see the bearings of such a tale, should openly revel in its saltness, made Franky feel sick—on this particular night.

He realised that he detested the Saxham girl, one of Margot's chosen Club intimates, more fervently than even Tota Stannus or Joan Delabrand; more thoroughly than Rhona Helvellyn; only little less heartily than he hated Cynthia Charterhouse. Big, bold, galumphing, provocative—in fact, so much IT that you couldn't overlook her—he found her more unpleasantly attractive than usual, in a bodice that was no more than a fold of shimmering orange stuff above the waist—tossing the panache of ospreys that startlingly crowned her, offering up her persistant illusion perfumes for the delectation of the appreciative male.

Only look at her, ready to climb into her neighbour's pocket. Leaning her round white elbows on the guipure table-cloth, half-shutting those long greeny-brown Egyptian eyes of her, wreathing her long thick white neck to send a daring challenge into the face of the laughing man. A big man, bright red-haired, blue-eyed, and broad-chested, showing every shining tooth in his handsome grinning head....

"She's screaming, isn't she, dear Lady Beau?" Thus the Saxham to her employer, friend, and ally, across the silver bowls of Rayon d'Or roses, her naked shoulder brushing the coat-sleeve of her neighbour, the big rufous man. And Lady Beau gushed back:

"In marvellous form to-night.... Don't you think so, Count? Do agree with us!" and the big man agreed, with the accent of the German Fatherland:

"She is kolossal.... Wunderlich! ..."

"Who's the German next me—big beggar Lady Beau and Miss Saxham are gushing over?" Franky presently telegraphed to Courtley behind the charming American's accommodating back. And Courtley signalled in reply:

"Von Herrnung. German Count of sorts—Engineer and Flieger officer. Son of an Imperial Councillor, and cousin to Princess Willy of Kiekower Oestern—really rather an interestin' beast in his way. Made a one-stop flight to Paris from Hanover in April, with an Albatros biplane. Previously won an event in the Prinz Heinrich Circuit Competition." He added: "We can't decently blink their progress in military aviation. It's one o' them there fax which the brass-hats at the War Office pretend to regard as all my eye. Yet they know the Fatherland—or if they don't they oughter! Good-lookin' chap this. Not over thirty, I should guess him. Always dodging in and out of the German Embassy. The Goblin frightful nuts on him.... Goin' to steer him through the next London Season—suppose he's lookin' out for a moneyed wife!"

"Hope he gets her!" Franky mentally commented. But he looked with new interest at his big blond German neighbour, mentally calculating that with all that bone, brawn, and muscle, von Herrnung couldn't tip the scale at less than sixteen stone.

Small-boned himself and of stature not above the medium, Franky appreciated height and size in other men. And von Herrnung was undeniably a son of Anak. The noiseless, demure waiters who paused beside his chair to refill his glass or offer him dishes were dwarfed by his seated presence to the proportions of little boys.

Once, when there was a momentary bustle at the principal entrance to the now crowded restaurant, and a party of men, ceremoniously ushered by M. Spitz in person, passed up the central gangway between the rows of glittering tables, shielded by glass-panelled screens framed in oxidised silver, and crowded now with gossiping, laughing, gobbling patrons—men and women of varied nationalities, representing the elite of the fashionable world, von Herrnung rose and remained imperturbably standing at the salute, his eyes set and fixed, his head turned rigidly towards the personage, semi-bald, stout, with a prominent under jaw and a hard official stare rendered glassier by a frameless square monocle, and showing beneath the open front of a loose military mantle a star upon the left side of his evening dress-coat, and the glitter of an Order suspended from a yellow riband about his thick bull-neck.

"The German Ambassador, Baron von Giesnau," Lady Wathe returned to a question from Lady Beauvayse, as the portly official figure creaked by, leaving a whiff of choice cigars and a taint of parfum très persistant, lifting three fingers of a white-gloved hand in acknowledgment of his countryman's salute, and von Herrnung unstiffened and dropped back into his chair. "No! ... I'm not sure where the Emperor is...." She added, with one of her laughs and a shrug of her thin vivacious shoulders: "Ask Count von Herrnung—he's sure to know!"

"Gnädige Gräfin," von Herrnung returned when interrogated, "I am not able to answer your question." He shrugged his broad shoulders and showed his white teeth. "Unser Kaiser is—who shall say where? At the Hof ... possibly at Homburg.... Stop! ... Now I remember! Seine Majestät is at Kiel...." He continued, arranging with a big white hand displaying a preposterously long thumb-nail a corner of his glittering, tightly rolled moustache: "At Kiel ... ach, yes! he has been there since the 25th of June. Entertaining the British and American Ambassadors, visiting the Commander-in-Chief of your British Squadron, superintending the armament of one of our own new battle-cruisers,—seeing put into her those great big Krupp guns that are to sink your super-Dreadnoughts by-and-by!"

The deliberately-uttered words of the last sentence dropped into a little pool of chilly silence. He had spoken with perfect gravity, and the Englishmen who heard him stared before they grinned. Then the women shrieked in ecstasies of amusement—the Goblin's laugh overtopping all.

"For he hates us! ... You can't think how he hates us! ..." she crowed, writhing her lean little throat, clasped by seven rows of shimmering stones, wagging her Kobold's head, crowned by its diadem of multi-coloured fire. "Tell us how you hate us, Tido! ... Do—pray do!"

"I hate you, ach yes! ... All German officers are like that—particularly the officers of our Field Flying Service," gravely corroborated von Herrnung. "We have many pleasant acquaintanceships with men and women of British nationality, but your race—the Anglo-Saxon branch of the great Teutonic oak-tree, it is natural that we should hate! For that Germany must expand upon the west and north-west as well as south and east, or suffocate, is certain. She must wield the trident of Sea Power; she must transform the map of Europe. She must exploit and disseminate German trade and German Kultur; therefore, as the British, more than any other nation, stands in the way of German development, we look forward to the Day when we shall exterminate you and take our right position as masters of the world!"

The women screamed anew at this. The men were now laughing in good earnest. Franky found it impossible to restrain the convulsions that shook him in his chair. Purple-faced Brayham tried to speak, but broke down wheezing and spluttering. The Goblin shrilled:

"Tell them, Tido.... Please tell them! ... Do—ha! ha! tell them how you're spoiling for a scrimmage with us! Show them your thumb-nail, pray do!"

Thus adjured, the big German solemnly extended his left hand for general inspection. The pointed, carefully-manicured thumb-nail was at least two inches long. Its owner said with perfect gravity:

"This is the badge of a Society of England-haters, chiefly Prussian military officers, young men of noble birth, bound by an oath of blood. This mark we carry to distinguish us. It is a sign of our dedication, to remind us of the purpose for which we are set apart." He added: "Count Zeppelin himself set the fashion of the uncut thumb-nail. It will be cut when the Day comes, and it has been dipped in blood!"

"In blood—how beastly!" said the Saxham girl, curling the corners of her wide red mouth contemptuously. "What a horrid crowd your noble young Prussian officers must be! And when is the dipping to come off?" Her voice was deep and resonant as a masculine baritone, and of so carrying a quality that Franky started as though the words had been spoken at his ear.

"Gnädige Fräulein," von Herrnung answered, "I have already told you. When the Day comes for which we are preparing. When the great German nation shall abandon Christianity—cast off the rusty fetters of Morality and Virtue—call on the Ancient God of Battles—and beat out the iron sceptre of World Power with sword-blows upon the anvil of War."

"When we're all to be exterminated, he means!" Lady Wathe gasped behind her filmy handkerchief. "Tido, you're too absolutely screaming! Do say why your noble young Prussians keep us waiting? ..." And von Herrnung answered composedly:

"Because we are not yet ready. We shall not be perfectly ready before the spring of 1916."

His hard, bright glance encountered Franky's, and he lifted his full glass of champagne and drank to him, smiling pleasantly.

Of course the German was rotting, reflected Franky. If he wasn't, the combined insolence and brutality of such a menace, uttered at the table of one of the Britons in whose gore von Herrnung and his comrades yearned to dip their preposterous two-inch thumb-nails, took the bun, by the Great Brass Hat! He was perfectly cool, as his muscular white hands—for the dinner had arrived at the dessert stage—manipulated the silver knife that peeled a blood-red nectarine. What a splendid ring, a black-and-white pearl, large as a starling's egg, and set in platinum, the fellow sported on the little finger of that clawed left hand. What was he asking, in the suave voice with the guttural Teutonic accent?

"You were in the Bois, I believe, Lord Norwater, early in the midday. Did you see any avions of the Service Aëronautique? Did the invention they were testing come up to expectations? .... Did the English aërial stabiliser answer well? ..."

Franky knew, as he encountered the compelling stare of the hard blue eyes, that he objected to their owner. He returned, in a tone more huffy and less dignified than he would have liked it to be:

"Can't say.... I was merely walking in the Bois with a lady. Wasn't on the ground as—an investigator of the professional sort."

"So!" Von Herrnung's face was set in a smile of easy amiability. The shot might have missed the bull for anything that was betrayed there. "And the name of the inventor? It has escaped my memory. Possibly you could tell me, eh?"

"Certainly," said Franky, planting one with pleasure. "He happens to be a cousin of mine. Would you like me to write down his address?"

"Gewiss—thanks so very much. But I will not trouble you!"

Nobody had heard the verbal encounter. Lady Wathe was holding the table with another anecdote punctuated with staccato peals of laughter, tinkling like the brazen bells of a beaten tambourine. Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, a Paris celebrity, belonging to the most ancient if not the most venerable of professions, had promenaded under the chestnuts at Longchamps that morning, attired, as to the upper portion of her body, in a sheath of spotted black gauze veiling, unlined—save with her own charms. And a witty Paris journalist had said that "the costume was designed to represent Eve, not before nor after, but behind the fall"; and Paillette, who was there, working up her "Modes" letter for Le Style, had answered——

Everybody at table was leaning forward and listening, as the Goblin quoted the riposte of Paillette.

Von Herrnung, showing his big white teeth in a smile, chose another nectarine from the piled-up dish before him, seeming to admire the contrast between his own muscular white fingers and the glowing fruit they held. But Franky saw that he was angry as he neatly peeled the fruit, split the odorous yellow flesh, tore the stone out crimson and dripping like a little human heart, and swallowed both halves of the fruit in rapid succession, dabbing his mouth with the fine serviette held up before him in both hands. Then, with an air of arrogant self-confidence peculiar to him, he said loudly, addressing the whole company:

"Madame Paillette certainly deserves the Croix d'Honneur for so excellent a bon-mot. As for Mademoiselle Nou-Nou, I do not myself admire her, but my brother Ludwig, when he was alive, paid intermittent tribute to her charms." He added: "He was killed in the charge by a fall with his horse in the Autumn Manoeuvres of last year, while the Emperor was being entertained by command at a shooting-party upon a forest property of my father's that is about fifty kilometres from Berlin."

CHAPTER X

A SUPERMAN

"Do tell what the Kaiser said when he heard of the accident!" came in the voice of Lady Beauvayse, pitched now in a high, nasal tone that was a danger-signal to those who knew her, like the mischievous twinkle in her beautiful eyes. "I guess he must have been real upset!"

"Ja, ja, gewiss," returned von Herrnung, slightly shrugging his broad, square shoulders. "Of course the Emperor was greatly grieved for my father's loss. But naturally the programme had to be carried out. There is another day's Imperial shooting; the business is concluded—very satisfactorily—and Seine Majestät takes leave..... But of course he sent to my mother a sympathetic message, which greatly consoled her. And his Chief Equerry, Baron von Wildenberg, represented him at my brother's funeral. And shortly afterwards he graciously conferred upon my father the Second Class of the Order Pour le Mérite."

"How nice! But what for?" demanded the downright American, with astonishment so genuine that Brayham strangled with suppressed chuckles, and the bearded mouth of Commander Courtley assumed the curve of a sly smile.

"What for?" exclaimed von Herrnung. He stiffened his big body arrogantly, reddening with evident annoyance, and thickly through his carefully-accentuated English the Teutonic consonants and gutturals began to crop. "Gnädige Gräfin, because that so coveted decoration is the reward of special service rendered to the Emperor. And my father in his-personal-sorrow-conquering that it upon the amusements of Imperial Majesty-might-not-intrude—had the noblest devotion and courage exhibited—in the opinion of the All-Highest."

"My land!" exclaimed Lady Beauvayse, stimulated by the undisguised enjoyment of Brayham, Courtley, and Franky, "if that don't take the team and waggon, with the yella dog underneath it, an' the hoss-fly sittin' on the near-wheel mule's left ear!" She added: "No wonder your Kaiser thinks himself the hub of this little old universe—being nourished from infancy on flapdoodle of that kind." She added, dropping the saw-edged artificial accent, and reverting to the agreeable, drawling tones familiar to her friends: "But, last fall, when King George and Queen Mary were allowing to spend the day with us at Foltlebarre Abbey, and see the Gobelins tapestries after Teniers that were restored by our great American dye-specialist, Charlotte B. Pendrill of New York—and I had a dud head with neuralgitis, and couldn't have bobbed a curtsey without screaming like peacocks before a wet spell—Lord Beauvayse just sent a respectful note of excuse over by fast car to the place in our county where their Majesties were spending a week-end, and got a kind, cosy little line by return, making an appointment for a more convenient day."

"Es mag wohl sein," said von Herrnung stiffly, repeating an apparently favourite phrase. "It may be so—in Great Britain. But in Germany the trivial happenings of ordinary existence are not permitted to interfere with the Imperial plans."

"Mustn't spoil Great Cæsar's shoot by letting a natural sorrow dim your eye, in case you're unexpectedly informed of a family bereavement," said Brayham to Lady Beauvayse. "So now you know what to expect in case the Kaiser should take it into his head to pop in on you at Foltlebarre somewhere about July."

"I surmise I'd expect a visitor of mine, whether he's the Kaiser, the King, or the President," retorted Lady Beauvayse, "to be a gentleman!" Her beautiful eyes blazed with genuine ire as she gave back von Herrnung's dominating stare. She continued, reverting more purposefully than ever to the exaggerated New York accent, mingling cutting Yankee humour with bitter irony in the sentences that twanged, one after another, off her sharp American tongue: "And I guess, Count von Herrnung—though between your father and Amos J. Sculpin of Madison Avenue, New York, and Sculpin Towers, Schenectady, there's considerable of a social gulf—if your Emperor had been a house-guest of my parpa's, and my elder brother"—she lifted an exquisite shoulder significantly ceilingwards—"had happened to get the hoist—parpa'd just have said: 'Your Imperial Majesty, I am unexpectedly one boy short, and far from feeling hunkey. My cars are waiting at my door to convey you right-away to your hotel. Look in on us after the interment, when Mrs. Sculpin has had time to get accustomed to her mourning. And as my chef had orders to serve a special dinner in honour of your Majesty, I shall be gratified by your taking the hull menoo along—outside instead of in!'"

The Goblin cackled. Ecstatic Brayham shrieked:

"Magnificent, by Gad! He ought to know your father!" Franky and Courtley yielded unrestrainedly to mirth, as did the Saxham girl. While her teeth, dazzling as those of a Newfoundland pup, gleamed in her wide red mouth, and her long eyes glittered between their narrowed eyelids, von Herrnung gave her a quick sidelong glance of anger. She caught the look, and suddenly ceased to laugh, as the young Newfoundland might have stopped barking. She said below her breath:

"Vexed? ... Why, you're really! ... And Lady Beau wasn't joking about your brother.... She wouldn't dream of such a thing! .... She's tremendously kind and sympathetic. Was he—your brother—nice? ..."

"Most women thought so."

"Would I have thought so? What was he like?" the girl persisted.

Von Herrnung turned in his chair so as to face her, answering:

"You see him now, with one difference. He was as black as I am red."

The blue eyes of the man and the long agate-coloured eyes of the young woman encountered. She said slowly in her warm, deep voice, less like a feminine contralto than the masculine baritone:

"I like—red men—best!"

"So! Then it was lucky that, instead of me, my brother Ludwig died!" said von Herrnung, so loudly that Lady Wathe's quick ear caught the final words. She shrilled out her laugh:

"But you're a wretch, Tido!" She shrugged her thin vivacious shoulders under their glittering burden. "A heartless wretch!"

"Of course I was regretting my brother, yes!" said von Herrnung. "But I do not pretend that his death did not improve what you English would call my worldly prospects. That is the cant of Christianity—particularly the sentimental Christianity of England. One world is not enough for your greed of possession. You must eat your cake here and hereafter. But for the robust super-humanity of Germany, this world is both Hell and Heaven. It is Hell for the man who is stupid, weakly, poor, and conscience-ridden. It is Heaven for the man who has knowledge, power, health, wealth, the craft to keep his riches, and the capacity to enjoy to the fullest the pleasures they can procure him, with the courage to free himself from the bonds of what Christians and Agnostics term Morality, and live precisely as Nature prompts. So when my brother fell in the charge," continued von Herrnung, with perfect seriousness, "he opened for me the gates of Heaven. Since then I am a god!"

"A mortal god," called out the chuckling Brayham; "for you've got to die, you know, when your number's up."

"When the time comes, of course I shall die," acquiesced von Herrnung, "in the vulgar sense of the word. But not so those who come after. Our bacteriologists will have discovered the microbe of old age and its antitoxin, and then we shall die no more."

"Dashed if I know the difference between the vulgar way of dying and the other style!" Brayham snorted apoplectically, feeling in his waistcoat-pocket for the box of digestive tabloids that showed in a bulge. "Dashed unpleasant certainty—however you look at it! And a man who weighs eighteen stone at fifty has got to look at it, every time his tailor lets out his waistcoats, and his valet asks him to order more collars because the last lot have shrunk in the wash."

"Ah, yes, to die is a hellish bore!" agreed von Herrnung, contemplating his obese and purple host with a cruel smile. "But I and my friends have no Hell, and we have done away with the myth of Heaven. To dissolve and be reabsorbed into the elements—that is the only after-life that is possible for a Superman."

"You'd hardly call it Life, would you?" came unwillingly from Franky. For von Herrnung's eyes seemed to challenge his own.

"'Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,' what?" quoted Courtley, to whom von Herrnung transferred his smiling regard.

"I venture to hope that my clay may serve a more patriotic purpose than stopping a draught-hole," said the German, carefully fingering the tight roll of glittering red hair upon his upper-lip. "It may be baked into a sparking-plug for the aëro-motor of one of our Zeppelin dirigibles—the mysterious Z. X., for instance, in whose trial trip from Stettin across the Baltic to Upsala in Sweden you were so keenly interested some months ago. Or some of my body's chemical constituents may pass into the young tree beneath which my ashes will be deposited. If beech or spruce, then I may furnish ribs or struts for an Aviatik or a Taube. But the best way of continuing to exist after one is dead is to leave plenty of vigorous sons behind one. To perpetuate the race"—he continued speaking to Lord Norwater, who had flushed and moved restlessly—"that is the high and noble obligation Duty imposes upon the German Superman."

"You'll have to hurry up your matrimonial arrangements, Tido," interposed the Goblin, with her cackle, "if your family is to tot up to a respectable number before the year 1916."

"You mean that I may get killed in our great War of Extermination? That is possible," agreed von Herrnung. "Our Flying Service is not a profession conducive to long life. Many of our keenest officers remain unmarried for that reason. The Emperor would prefer each of us to marry, or at least adopt a son. For myself, I would like to steal one of your splendid British boys and rear him up as a true German——"

Something sharp and keen and burning stabbed through Franky's brain to his vitals. It would have been a relief to have insulted von Herrnung. He set his teeth, fighting with the desire, as the guttural voice went on:

"I would teach him to hate you...." The speaker sucked in his breath as though he relished the idea exceedingly. "You cannot think how he would hate you!—my German-British Superman."

"By-the-by, the literary genius of Dreadnought type who invented the Superman," began Courtley, who had been peaceably nibbling salted pistachios, "can't pronounce his name for ginger-nuts, but it sounds something like a sneeze——"

Von Herrnung said stiffly:

"You doubtless speak of our great Nietzsche, whose triumphant thought has crushed all other mental systems."

"Quite so. Must be the chap!" said Courtley. "That is, if he died a lunatic.... But possibly I'm mixing him up with some other philosopher of the crushing kind?"

"No, no. It is true," corroborated von Herrnung. "The brain of Nietzsche gave way under the terrific strain of incessant creation. How should it be otherwise?" He became ponderous, even solemn, when he descanted upon the literary idol of Modern Germany. "How should it indeed be otherwise?" he demanded. "And was it not the fitting crown of such a career—the appropriate end to such a life-work?—to evolve the Superman—and die!"

"Quite so, quite so!" Courtley agreed. He smoothed his well-trimmed beard with his broad hand, and his eyes assumed a meditative expression. "Rather tantalising—always hearing about Germany's Supermen and never seeing any. What sort of chaps are they? I'm really keen to know."

"You have not to go far," returned von Herrnung. His fine florid complexion had suffered a deteriorating change. Savage anger boiled in his blood. He had thrown the iron gauntlet of German military preparedness in the faces of these cool, well-bred, smiling English, and brandished the iron thunderbolt of German intellectual supremacy—and with this result—that they took his deadly earnestness as jest. "Kreutzdonnerwetter! these English officers.... The pig-dogs! the sheep's heads! ..." He swallowed down the abusive epithets he would have liked to pitch at them, and stiffened his huge frame arrogantly as he stared in Courtley's simple face:

"Aber—you have not far to go, to visualise the type conceived by Nietzsche. I and my comrades—we are Supermen!"

"Thanks for explaining, frightfully!" said Courtley with artless gratitude, as Brayham purpled apoplectically and even the Goblin tittered behind her fan. "Shall know what to ticket you now, you know. Thanks very much!"

"You have read Nietzsche?" the sailor's victim queried.

Said Courtley, with his best air of frank simplicity:

"His works were recommended to me by my doctor, when I had a bad attack of insomnia, about a year ago. Ordered a volume of 'Thus Spake Zara Somebody.' Half a chapter did the business. No insomnia since then. Sleep like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the pillow—never read another word. But heaps of friends in the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow the book presently, depend on it. For we'll all be too scared of Germany to sleep—in the year 1916."

Laughter broke forth. Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her tearful eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief:

"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn what pulling a leg means?"

"Ach ja! I should have understood!" He had stared, frowned, and reddened savagely. Now, with a palpable effort, his equanimity was regained. He turned with a smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady Beauvayse breathed in Courtley's ear:

"You perfect pet! How I love you for that!"

"Man simply suffering for a set-down. Good egg, you!" murmured Franky in the other ear of the Commander.

"Felt sorry for him. Had to do something—common humanity!" rejoined Courtley, eating more and more pistachios. "Seems as over-crammed with their Kultur as a pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut. Vain too, but that's the fault of the women. Lord! how they gush at those big, good-looking blighters. See the Saxham!—ready to climb into his waistcoat-pocket and stop there. Would, too, if she wasn't built on Dreadnought lines herself."

She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as he offered her a light from his cigar. For with the arrival of coffee and liqueurs, the fragrance of choice Havana and Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang of Mocha, the heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and flowers. The screens of frosted glass were rearranged,—the ladies had produced their cigarette-cases,—of gold with the monogram of the Goblin set in diamonds; of platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler tortoiseshell, bearing in fanciful golden letters the name "Patrine"——

"Patrine..."

"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case from the front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice. Von Herrnung had leaned towards her, boldly exploring with his eyes the bosom where the trinket had been hiding, and read the golden letters. He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes, saying:

"'Patrine' is your name.... Now I know it I will not forget it! Tell me!"—he spoke in lowered tones—"why do you carry your cigarette-case just in that place?"

She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly lifting her big white shoulders. "Simply for convenience—when I'm in evening kit. Dressmakers don't allow us poor women pockets in these days."

"It may be so!" As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated roughness that he had found useful in dealing with many women, he took the cigarette-case from her, momentarily covering her hand with his own. As his curving fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince at the contact. Her black brows drew together, her sleepy agate eyes shot him a hostile sidewise glance.

"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety. And she answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk, and laughter of the others:

"No! ... Only—I hate to be touched, that's all."

He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache, and his large, well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.

"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But—about your cigarette-case—you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more subtle. You carry that thing there—under your corsage—to make live men envious of an object that cannot feel!"

"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"

The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big, warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood—you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature—her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.

CHAPTER XI

PATRINE SAXHAM

Who was the girl—the woman rather—who diffused around her so powerful a magnetic aura, whom prodigal Nature had dowered with such opulence of bodily splendour, that cheap, tawdry clothes and ornaments borrowed from her a magnificence that conjured up visions of the Salammbo of Flaubert, gleaming moon-like through her gold and purple tissues—of Anatole France's Queen of Sheba treading the lapis-lazuli and sardonyx pavements of King Solomon's palace in her jewelled sandals of gilded serpent-skin, darting fiery provocations from under the shadow of her painted lashes towards the Wise One rising from his cushions of purple byssus, between the golden lions of his ivory throne?

What a voice the creature had! thought von Herrnung. Soft and velvety like that dead-white skin of hers. The tortoiseshell case he held in his big palm still glowed with the rich vital warmth of her. His blood tingled and raced in his veins; his hard, brilliant stare grew languorous, and his mouth relaxed into sensuousness. He said almost stupidly, so keen was his enjoyment:

"You English ladies smoke a great deal, I think."

"Why should we leave all the pleasant vices to the men?"

She asked the queer question, not defiantly, but bluntly. Her strange eyes laughed a little, as she saw Franky wince. "Lord Norwater hates me. Well, that's about the limit!" she told herself. "And I helped on his love-affair for little Margot's sake!" "I beg your pardon, Lord Norwater! You were saying something? ..."

"You're an Advanced Thinker, aren't you, Miss Saxham? At least, my wife tells me so," Franky began. "Well, I'm not! But I've got my doubts as to whether vice is pleasant, for one thing—and for another, whether the general run of women in these days aren't quite as vicious as the men?"

"He wants to be nasty.... Poor boy, what have I done to him?" passed through the brain topped by the bizarre diadem. But before its wearer could reply, von Herrnung interposed:

"Naturally they are vicious—if they desire to please men. A dash of vice—that is the last touch to perfect an exquisite woman. It is the chilli in the mayonnaise, the garlic and citron in the ragoût, the perfume of the carnation, the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite in the kiss! ..."

"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!" thought Franky, whose attack of propriety had reached the acute stage. Patrine Saxham repeated slowly, and with brows that frowned a little:

"'The bite in the kiss'...."

"You pretend not to understand..." said the guttural voice of von Herrnung, speaking so that his wine- and cigar-scented breath stirred the heavy hair that hid her small white ear. "But you are wiser than you would have me believe. Are you not? Tell me!—am I not right?"

He bent closer, and she broke a web that seemed in the last few moments to have been spun about her, invisible, delicate, strong, making captive the body and the mind. Her odd agate-coloured eyes laughed into his jeeringly. Her wide red mouth curved and split like a ripe pomegranate, showing the sharp white teeth that, backed by a vigorous appetite and seconded by a splendid digestion, had done justice to every course of Brayham's choice menu.

Men always waxed sentimental or enterprising towards the close of a rattling good dinner. Patrine didn't care, not a merry little hang! They might say and look what they liked, as long as they kept their hands off. At a touch, the quick revulsion came.

"You are amused.... I understand...." Von Herrnung spoke between his teeth, in a tone of stifled anger. "Always to rot; it is your English fashion.... When you encourage a man to make love to you, you are rotting. When you say sweet things to him—possibly you are rotting too?"

She turned her face away from him, striving to control her irresistible laughter. In vain; it took her as a sudden gale takes a pennant at the masthead—seized and shook her—as von Herrnung could have shaken her had they been alone. He turned savagely from her; she heard him speak to Brayham, who responded with what-whattings, his fleshy hand to his deafest ear. Von Herrnung repeated his utterance. Brayham goggled in astonishment. Courtley murmured to Franky:

"Hear what the blighter's saying.... No keeping him down, is there? ... Buoyant as one of his own Zeppelins!"

They looked and listened. Brayham's thick bull-neck was shortening as his shoulders climbed to his mottled ears. They caught a sound between a snort and a bellow. Then Lady Wathe's diamonds flashed all the colours of the rainbow as she turned vivaciously to her friend.... Count Tido wanted to propose a toast, the custom in dear, sentimental Germany.... Why shouldn't he? Rather amusing. She begged him to go on. Said von Herrnung:

"To-night the laugh goes much against me. I have been most frightfully rotted. Now, in my country it is the custom when a guest has been made game of that those who have laughed at him must drink a toast with him—to show there is no ill-will."

"Never heard of such a custom—and I've lived in Germany a good deal."

This from Brayham. The German persisted:

"Still, it is a custom, and it may be you will gratify me?" He went on, now addressing the company generally: "Here at the Spitz they have a Tokayer that is very old and very excellent. If I might order some? It would be amusing if you would all join me in drinking to The Day! ..."

The speaker, without waiting consent, beckoned to one of the attendants. Brayham, his cockatoo-crest of stiff grey hair erect, stared, as at a new and surprising type of the human kind.

But the words Brayham might have uttered were taken out of his mouth. A swift glance had passed between the English Naval officer and the rather stupid, titled young Guardsman occupying the seat left of von Herrnung. And while the Commander coolly intimated to the advancing waiter by a sign that his services were not needed, Lord Norwater, lobster-red and rather flurried, turned to von Herrnung and said, not loudly, yet clearly enough to be heard by every guest at the table:

"Stop! Sorry to swipe in, Count, but you'd better not order that wine, I think!"

"You think not?" asked von Herrnung, with coolest insolence.

"I—don't think so. I'm dead-sure!" said Franky, getting redder. "We Britons laugh at brag and bluffing, and the gassy patriotism shown by some foreigners we're apt to call bad form. We abuse our Institutions and rag our Governments—we've done that since the year One—far as I can make out. And when other people do it we generally sit tight and smile. We've no use for heroics. But when the pinch comes—it ain't so much that we're loyal. We're Loyalty. We're IT!"

With all his boggling he was so much in earnest, and with all his earnestness so absurdly, quaintly slangy, that the listeners, men and women of British race, whose blood warmed to something in his face and utterance, were forced to struggle to restrain their mirth. Some inkling of this increased the speaker's confusion. He cast a drowning glance at his bulwark Courtley, and Courtley's eye signalled back to his, "Good egg! ... Drive on, old son!"

"You're a foreigner here, of course ..." Franky pursued before the German could interrupt him. He appeared oblivious to his own analogous case. Perhaps for the moment the Hotel Spitz in the Place Vendôme, Paris, and its gorgeous namesake in the London West End, were confused in his not too intellectual mind. He went on: "We're ready to make allowances—too rottenly ready sometimes.... But I read off the iddy-umpties to Full Stop, a minute back.... Count von Herrnung, when you ask English ladies and Englishmen—two of 'em in the Service—to drink that toast with you—you must know you're putting your foot in your hat!"

"Especially," said Courtley, as Franky collapsed, dewy all over and wondering where his breath had gone to—"especially as—a friend of mine happens to have heard that toast proposed rather recently during a Staff banquet at a military headquarters in Germany. And the words, are—not—quite exactly flavoured to suit the British taste."

"'To the Day of Supremacy. On the Land and on the Sea, under the Sea and in the Air, Germany Victorious for ever and ever!'" said von Herrnung, who had got upon his legs, and loomed gigantic over the lace-covered, flower-decked table, now in the after-dinner stage of untidiness, with its silver-gilt and crystal dishes of choice fruit and glittering bonbons disarranged and ravaged, its plates littered, its half-emptied wine-goblets pushed aside to make room for fragrant, steaming coffee-cups in filigree holders, and tiny jewel-hued glasses of Maraschino Cusenier, and Père Kermann. There was a rustle, and a general scraping-back of chairs. Courtley had also risen, and Lord Norwater. A susurration of excitement had passed through the long, lofty, brilliant dining-room. People were getting up from the tables—the pink-and-yellow sheets of Paris Soir, the late edition of the Daily Mail, and another of the Liberté, were fluttering from hand to hand.... And the shrill voice of Lady Wathe was heard.

CHAPTER XII

THE GATHERING OF THE STORM

"Sit down, Tido!" said Lady Wathe. "What is the matter with everybody? What are they talking about? Tell a waiter to get us a paper! What do you say, Sir Thomas? Of course! Stupid of me to forget. To-day was to be the official summing-up of the evidence in the Perdroux Murder Case. A French Jury won't guillotine a woman—you said they wouldn't, Sir Thomas, from the beginning. But of course the verdict's 'Guilty' for Madame! ..."

Brayham, with a King's Bench cough, admitted that he had few misgivings as to the ultimate upshot. Upon the waiter's return without a newspaper, affirming a copy not to be procurable, judicial inquiries elicited from the man that the general furore for news was less due to popular interest in the famous cause célèbre than to popular thirst for details with reference to the Assassinations at Serajevo. Which brought from Lady Wathe the shrill query:

"Sarajevo—where's Sarajevo? Ask him about the Verdict—I simply must know!"

The Verdict had been "Not Guilty," according to the waiter.... The Goblin screamed:

"But she is!—she is! Good heavens, my dear Sir Thomas! Isn't it murder to riddle an editor to death in his own office, before his subordinates, with bullets from a revolver you've hidden in your muff?"

Brayham summoned up his best King's Bench manner to answer:

"If he dies—and a jury don't happen to decide that you're innocent—the evidence is against you, my dear ma'am!"

Lady Wathe's vivacious gestures provoked astounding coruscations from her panoply of jewels. She had been certain from the first that there would be no capital sentence. But "Not Guilty." ... Surely it should have been Mazas for life. Or New Caledonia—didn't they send murderesses to New Caledonia?

Brayham, with a tone and manner even more deeply tinged with the King's Bench, begged leave to correct—arah!—his very dear friend's impression that the blameless and much-tried lady, now probably—aha—arah!—supping in the company of her husband and her advocate in her own luxurious dining-room, might, without libel, be called a murderess. Like—aha!—many other highly-strung women, Madame Perdroux had had recourse to the revolver as the ultima ratio. But the Verdict pronounced by the President of the Paris Court of Assize that afternoon had—arah!—purged——

"Bother the Verdict!" snapped the Goblin.

Brayham, incensed at this irreverence, replied with acrimony. The pair wrangled as Paris had wrangled since March 16th, while the great, crowded restaurant buzzed with the name of an obscure town in Eastern Europe—"Sarajevo, Sarajevo"—tossed and bandied from mouth to mouth.

We have learned to our bitter cost the appalling significance of this crime of Sarajevo, which had dwarfed in the estimation of the keen-witted Parisians the most sensational cause célèbre ever tried before a French Criminal Court.

The Perdroux trial and its probable result had split Paris into hostile factions. The Press had attacked or defended, lauded or vilified the chief personages of the drama with tireless energy for weeks. The Verdict of "Not Guilty" would have caused fierce rioting upon the boulevards this sultry night of July. Blood would have been spilt between the partisans of Madame Perdroux and her opponents, but for this unexpected bolt from the blue.

Berlin had had the story of the assassinations with its breakfast-rolls and hot creamed coffee. Now, in the blue-white glare of the great electric arc-lamps of the Paris boulevards, men and women leaned over one another's shoulders to get a whiff of the big black letters on the displayed contents-bills; at every kiosk and bookstall the newspaper-vendors were sold out; much-thumbed copies of the papers were bought by knowing speculators, to be sold and bought and sold again.

The Kaiser at Kiel was racing his own clipper when the operator of the Imperial private wireless read a story from the notes of the singing spark that smote him pale and sick. When his anointed master heard the gory news, his chief regret seems to have concerned the untimely decease of the partner of his "life-work." "It will have," he said with bitterness, "to be begun all over again!"

One wonders, in the blood-red light of four years of dreadful carnage, seeing Hell and its dark Powers still unchained, and raging on this War-torn earth of ours—what would have been the nature of the edifice reared by these two Imperial craftsmen, had the younger not been removed by a violent and sudden death?

Did the prospect of unlocking—with one touch on an electric button and the scrawl of a wet pen—the brazen gates of Death and Terror ever strike cold to the heart of the rufous Hapsburg Archduke? Madness, we know, is in the blood of his evil-fated House. But, when the shots from a Bosnian High School student's revolver pierced Franz Ferdinand's brain and body, was he sane enough to realise that the crime of the Anarchist had saved his own name from foul, indelible, and hideous infamy? We shall know when the trumpet of the Archangel sounds the Last Réveillé, and the grave gives up its dead, and the Sea spews forth its victims, and the secrets of that deeper abyss, the human heart, are revealed in the sheer, awful Light that streams from the Throne of God.

CHAPTER XIII

THE SUPERMAN

People had for some time been rising, passing out through the oxidised silver-framed glass doors of Spitz's big brilliant dining-room; beyond these the vestibule was now full to the walls, so that its palms and tree-ferns rocked amidst the billows of a heaving human sea. Many guests lingered in conversation, standing in groups near the vacated tables. The glitter and blaze of jewels, adorning bizarre coiffures, bare and powdered throats, bosoms, arms, and backs,—the dazzling display of brilliantly-hued toilettes, made an ensemble marvellously gay. And now, returning as they had arrived, but unattended by M. Spitz, came the party of notables from the German Embassy, talking together in loud, harsh, Teutonic accents. Von Herrnung, erect, stiffening to the salute as previously, remained in the rigid attitude until the Ambassador had passed. But this time the official finger beckoned. He turned, pushed back his chair, and in a stride, joined the squat, elderly figure. The yellow-white, heavily-featured face with its stiff brush of white hair above the square brain-box turned to him, the deeply-pouched, shrewd grey eyes looked past him to the table he had left. The coarse mouth under the white moustache with the brushed-up points, uttered a few emphatic words. Then, with a slight nod, the representative of the All Highest at Berlin passed on. The swing-doors opened and shut behind him and his following. And von Herrnung rejoined his party, saying with a queer, excited breathlessness:

"The ladies will pardon.... His Excellency had something to say!"

The ladies were rising, looking for their theatre-wraps. He deftly lifted the barbaric garment of green velvet and sable-edged ermines from the back of Miss Saxham's chair, and, opening it, held it to receive her tall, luxuriant person, mentally commenting:

"With such hips, such a bosom, and such shoulders, the jade must be twenty-eight or nine." And remembering how boldly she had said to him that she liked red men, he thought: "Amusement here.... Nothing needed but time and opportunity—which this Bosnian affair reduces to a minimum." "Gnädiges Fraulein will you not put on your mantel?"

She told him that she was too hot. He insisted, with all the Teuton's dread of chill:

"But it will be cooler in the vestibule, and cooler still when we are driving. Do we not go on to a theatre? I think Lady Wathe has told me so?"

She shrugged her splendid shoulders.

"Nothing so proper. The Jardin des Milles Plaisirs, on the Champs Elysées. We're all dead nuts on seeing the new dance from São Paulo. The thing that has exploded Tango and Maxixe, you know. Look!—the others are moving. Don't let's lose them! No! I won't take your arm. Please carry my wrap with your coat."

"I will put my coat on. Then I shall better carry your mantel."

An attendant deftly hung von Herrnung's thin black, sleeveless garment over his broad shoulders, and gave him his white silk wrap and soft crush felt. He slipped a coin into the man's palm, its small value being instantly reflected in the features of the receiver, and moved towards the swing-doors with Patrine. She said, as a slight block momentarily arrested their progress:

"What are they all jabbering about? Who has been assassinated? What has happened at this place with the crack jaw name? ..."

"Sarajevo..." came in von Herrnung's guttural accent.

"Sarajevo.... Not that I know where it is," said the deep warm voice, that was more like a young man's baritone than a young woman's contralto. And von Herrnung answered, with a renewal of that tingling thrill:

"Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia in Eastern Europe. When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909, she made her seat of Government at Sarajevo. The Slavs grumbled. They wished for union with Servia—that little nation of pig-breeders! ... They themselves—the Bosnians—are stupid peasants, dümmer Teufels!—Schafskopfs! They cultivate their land with the wooden ploughs that were used at the date of the Trojan War.... But this does not interest you at all, I think?"

"How do you know it doesn't interest me?"

"Because dress and jewellery and amusement are the chief things in your life, gnädiges Fräulein. You are not even interested in der Politik, or in the higher Kultur. The social progress of your own country is nothing to you. You are too——"

"Too frightfully stupid.... Thanks!"

"I did not say too stupid," von Herrnung contradicted. "But if you were stupid, you are too hellishly handsome for that to matter in the least."

To be called hellishly handsome pleased her. Her eyes gave him a flashing side-glance. As a surge in the crowd pressed her curving hip against his tall, muscular body, she took his offered arm with a rough, brusque grace. They were near the swing-doors when she spoke:

"Tell me about the Sarajevo business.... Who is the official swell the Trojan ploughmen have hoisted—as Lady Beau would say?"

"I will tell you. It has happened only this morning——"

She felt the man's powerful muscles thrill and become rigid with suppressed excitement under the hand that rested on his arm.

"Two personages of the highest rank have been horribly assassinated. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Kronprinz of the Imperial House of Austria, and his wife; you have heard of the Gräfin Sophie Chotek, created Duchess of Hohenberg? Virtually she was Erzherzogin—Archduchess—but the wife of the Archduke by a mariage de la main gauche. A morganatic marriage—such unions have been heard of in your virtuous England."

They had passed the swing-doors now, and mingled, with the crush in the vestibule. Patrine said, signalling with a pair of long black suéde gloves and a vanity-bag of gilded metal chain-mail:

"There's Lady Beau. Behind the second column right of the entrance. And here's Captain Courtley coming to hurry us up!"

Courtley, smiling and unruffled as ever, dodged under the huge roseate elbow of an immense lady in Oriental kincob tissues. He gave his message, turned and dived back again. The rich, womanly baritone of Miss Saxham said, addressing von Herrnung:

"Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas Brayham have gone on in Lady Wathe's auto-brougham. Lord Norwater has done a bunk. Pretended he had an appointment; he's been frightfully fed up with all of us this evening. Lady Beauvayse says her chauffeur is on the string all right, but about a million cars are ahead of him. Why did your Austrian Archduke and his wife go to that place in Bosnia if it wasn't healthy for Royalties? Fancy!—they went to their deaths this Sunday morning! Why does one always forget it's Sunday in Paris?"

"That English Sunday of yours," exclaimed von Herrnung, "is very good to forget, I think!"

She gave her deep, soft laugh. He went on rapidly:

"Of the Archduke and the Duchess I tell you, since you have asked me.... They inspected the troops—regiments of the Austrian garrison. Then they drove in their automobile along the Appel Quay, towards the Sarajevo Town Hall. They are passing beneath the shade of an avenue of tamarind and oak trees when a bomb is thrown at them by a man hidden among the branches.... The Archduke is very prompt—he wards off the bomb with his arm. He is not then hurt, nor is the Duchess. But his Adjutant—in the car behind them—is wounded in the neck. When they arrive at the Town Hall the Mayor commences the address of welcome. To him Franz Ferdinand says angrily: 'Halt den Mund! ... Shut up, you silly fellow! What the big devil is the use of your speeches? I came to Sarajevo on a visit, and I get bombs thrown at me.... It is too damned rotten for anything! ..."

"Yes, yes! ... Go on!" She bit her lips, fighting a nervous impulse to laugh.

"So the Imperial cortège drove away, and a student threw at the Archduke another bomb. It did not explode, so he shot him with an automatic revolver, an American Browning. The Duchess tried to cover him with her body, and the assassin shot her also. The Archduke begged her to live for their children, but both victims died as they were being taken to the Governor's house.... They have arrested the assassins, he who tried to kill, and the fellow who succeeded.... They are both young, and men of Serb race. They are rebels all—they hate their Austrian rulers. Sarajevo is swarming with fellows of the same breed...."

"What will the Austrian Government do to them, now they've caught them?"

"To the regicides," von Herrnung returned harshly, "Austria will do—nothing that very much matters. It is not an important thing to destroy two trapped rats. But I think there will be an ultimatum from Vienna to the Servian Government; and if the terms of that are not complied with, then the Emperor of Austria may give the signal for his monitors upon the Donau to open fire upon the capital of Belgrade."

Patrine asked negligently, as a new surge of the crowd thrust her tall, lithe figure away from her companion's, forcing her to tighten her hold upon his arm:

"'Monitors?' ... I used to think monitors were big schoolboys and schoolgirls. Senior pupils told off to keep order. I was one myself once.... Chosen because I was bigger, and noisier, and naughtier than any other girl in my class...."

"Ha, ha, ha! ... Prächtig! ... That is capital!" She could feel the laughter shaking his big ribs. "That is just what they are—those monitors of the Donau. Each is a big girl who keeps order von anderen Sorte. But they have turned-up noses, not Egyptian and beautiful like yours!"

He added, with the calculated roughness that had previously pleased her:

"You shall now put on your mantel. For the car, I see, is open." He shrugged his broad square shoulders closer into his overcoat and pulled up the collar about his throat, saying ill-temperedly: "Always does one find it with the English. It is lächerlich—that passion for the air."

"Lovely, did you say? ..."

Ignorant or careless that he had said "ridiculous," Patrine suffered him to wrap her mock ermines about her, seeing above the frieze of waiting figures that filled in the lower part of the picture framed by the portico, the emerald-green bird-of-Paradise plume of Lady Beauvayse whisk into the big white Rolls-Royce, past the neat black-haired head of Courtley, and the peaked cap and pale Cockney profile of Morris, the chauffeur. She threw back a jest as she passed out:

"I'm glad you think it lovely. It's one of the nicest things about us—that we're keen on soap and water and can't do without lots of fresh air."

She was in the car before his outstretched hand could touch her. He followed, letting Courtley precede him because he wished to sit opposite, and the great Rolls-Royce purred out of the jam beneath the illuminated glass archway, and in a moment was out of the Place Vendôme and moving with the stream of vehicles down the Avenue of the Champs Elysées. In the mingling of moonlight and electric light the tawdry paste jewels of Patrine's preposterous diadem rivalled the costly splendours of the jewelled fillets adorning Lady Beauvayse's coiffure, her panache of white osprey flared above her broad, dark brows as insolently as though they crowned a Nitocris or a Cleopatra. But—and here was a titillating discovery—the strange face with its broad brows, wide, generously-curving cheeks, and little rounded chin, did not belong to a woman of thirty, or even twenty-five. She was much younger than the German, who plumed himself upon his flair for the accurate dating of women, had at first credited. It would be amusing—he told himself again—hellishly amusing, to cultivate this curious hybrid, half hoyden, half femme-du-monde.

Sarajevo—still Sarajevo. You caught echoes of the crime of that morning in the tongues of twenty nationalities upon the Paris boulevards that night. People in automobiles and open carriages, people in the little red and blue flagged taxis, people crowding the auto-buses and Cook's big open brakes, the army of people on foot, endlessly streaming east and west along the great splendid thoroughfares, tossed the name of the Bosnian capital backwards and forwards, as though it had been a blood-stained ball.

A gay masculine voice called from a knot of chatterers standing near the wide illuminated archway of electric stars and crowns and flowers under which streamed a variegated crowd of pleasure-seekers as the big Rolls-Royce deposited its load:

"Nom d'un chien! What a pack of assassins these Serbians! ... And yet—what if the whole show were got up by Rataplan at Berlin? ... His bosom friend, you say—the big Franz Ferdinand? Zut! what of that? ... Sometimes one finds inconvenient the continued existence of even a bosom friend."

CHAPTER XIV

A PARIS DANCE-GARDEN

By "Rataplan" was meant the Kaiser, Patrine comprehended, as her companion glanced over his shoulder at the candid speaker, muttering something that sounded like a German oath. But Lady Beauvayse was twittering through a filmy screen of verd-blue chiffon, now discreetly enveloping her lovely Romney head:

"We're going to hunt up Lady Wathe and Sir Thomas. Take care of Miss Saxham, Count von Herrnung, in case we get separated in the crush.... Don't forget our programme, Pat. A whiff of Café Concert ... Colette Colin is billed to sing some of her old songs and the very newest of the new ones.... Then we're coming to the Pavilion de la Danse to see the São Paulo sensation.... La Rivadavia and Herculano, and all the rest of the crowd.... Meet you there.... So long! Mind, you're not to get lost!"

"In London you often hear La Colette," said von Herrnung, as he paid the lean-jawed functionary in the gold-laced light-blue uniform—the usual notice of free entry having vanished from the entrance—and passed with his companion into the gravelled promenade of the open-air concert-hall. "But to-night you will hear no songs of old France, no Chansons Pompadour nor Chansons Crinoline. She comes to this place from her own theatre to oblige an old comrade. There is Nou-Nou in that box with some smart women and the Turk who wears our Prussian Order of the Red Eagle with the Star and Crescent of the Medjidie. He is Youssouf Pasha, the Sultan's Envoy-Extraordinary. Nou-Nou has brought him to hear La Colette. Shall we not sit here?"

"Who is Nou-Nou?" Patrine asked, as she settled her tall, luxuriant person on one of the little green-painted iron chairs.

"Who is Nou-Nou?" her companion echoed. "You saw her to-day at Longchamps in her black confection. Everybody was looking.... She is wonderfully chic—Nou-Nou! May I be permitted to light a zigarre? ..."

"Do! ... But—why is she so much the rage? She isn't even pretty, your Mademoiselle Nou-Nou." Patrine said it with her bright gaze fastened on the famous Impropriety who had paraded under the chestnuts of Longchamps in the sheath of black gauze unlined, save with her own notorious attractions—both irresistible and fatal, judging by their recorded effects upon excitable Parisian viveurs and gommeux. She saw a triangular and oddly-crumpled face, rouged high upon the cheek-bones in circular patches, a pair of almost extinguished eyes, indicated by streaks of blue pencil, and caught a sentence screamed at the stout Turk in a voice like a hoarse cockatoo's. Boldly erect upon the skull adorned by a scanty thatch of lemon-yellow balanced a black feather, long and attenuated as the wearer. Nou-Nou's stick-like, fleshless arms, the cadaverous and meagre torso unblushingly revealed by the transparent casing of her upper person, might have enthralled a keen student of anatomy. But of feminine charms, in the accepted sense of the word, she possessed not one, it seemed to Patrine.

"Do not look at her too hard, or she may send round and invite you to supper," warned the laughing voice of von Herrnung speaking close to her ear. "She has all the vices—the good Nou-Nou!"

"Including the vice of indiscriminate hospitality," Patrine laughed; but a little uncontrollable shudder rippled over her as she withdrew her eyes from the painted, crumpled visage, leering with half-extinguished eyes from under the canary-coloured wig.

"That is so. Tell me—you and Lady Beauvayse seem great friends—quite inseparable...." He leaned nearer, his bold eyes closely scrutinising her face. "How comes it that she leaves you alone in a Paris dance-garden: with me, whom you have met to-night—for the first time?"

"She knows I can take jolly good care of myself, wherever and with whomsoever I may happen to be!" Her black brows frowned; it was evident she resented his criticism. "And—what are you getting at? What's the matter with poor old Paris? You know—perhaps it sounds odd!—but I've never been in Paris before.... And I love it! Down to the ground—it suits me! It's so gay and brightly-coloured and pagan. The public buildings and parks are dreams; the shops—too entrancing for anything! And this place, with its jabber and music and stagy illuminations, trellises where real roses mix up with artificial ones—ornamental beds of geraniums and calceolarias and thingumbobs bordered with smelly little oil lamps, gilt band-stands, concerts, and lovely trees in blossom.... Is it so luridly awful? To me, it's rather sweet! Of course the dancing—everybody knows the dancing is pretty well the limit. But one has seen such a lot of Tango in London—the bloom will be pretty well rubbed off!"

"Yet some lingers. You have still something to learn from Herculano and La Rivadavia! ..."

"Do I strike you as such a perfect daisy of inexperience?" Something in his tone stung, for the full white cheeks coloured faintly. "You didn't talk to me at dinner as though I were one!"

"How could I help that?" he asked, with the roughness that had previously intrigued her. "Am I to blame that you look like Phryne or Aspasia when you are only Mademoiselle de Maupin—before she set out upon her travels? For you have only got as far as Paris with your friend Lady Beauvayse. Why does she bring you? I am curious to know."

"Because I am her paid secretary and amanuensis." Patrine brought the words out with a rush; it was clear that she thought the candour a necessity, but hated it. "She can't get on without one, and her husband, Lord Beauvayse—awful little bounder!—won't stand her having a man. Don't great ladies have secretaries in Germany? Can't you see me doing Lady Beau's correspondence in my fearful fist—enclosing cheques to people who solicit donations for charities with a committee and Hon. Treasurer—tearing up the begging letters full of howlers in the spelling-line—smelling of bad tobacco and beer or gin? Then I have to keep her posted in her engagements, go to shows, and functions, and kettledrums with her when she hasn't a pal handy—that's where my share of the fun comes in. Just as I'm visiting Paris, as I dare say I shall visit other centres of lively iniquity—in the character of the sheep-dog that doesn't bow-wow at the wrong man!"

"You should bow-wow at me." His teeth were hidden, but his eyes were crinkled up with soundless laughter. "For I am a very wrong—a very wicked man!"

"How sad!" Her brows were still frowning, but her wide red mouth was beginning to curl up at the corners. "Couldn't you reform? Is it too late?"

"I hope so!" he answered her. "For if I were good I should possess no attraction for a woman of your type. And to charm you I would give my soul—if I had a soul!"

"Great Scott! You're candid.... Modest too.... And complimentary!"

"I am candid, because I cannot help myself."

Three comedians had come upon the stage. She told him not to talk to her. She wanted to see the turn; she liked music-hall stuff. He obeyed, mentally congratulating himself on having ascertained her social status, something better than a typist, hardly on the same level with his sister Gusta's dame de compagnie.

While his bold eyes read the book of her provoking beauty, the performance on the stage, backed by the deep green palmate foliage and white or ruddy candelabra-like blossom-sprays of the chestnuts, framed by a broad band of electric lamp-flowers, was culminating to its final gag. A preposterously fat man attired in the historic low-crowned hat, Union Jack waistcoat, brass-buttoned blue tail-coat, leathers and hunting-tops of the traditional John Bull, another comedian in the legendary costume of M. Jacques Prud'homme, and a truculent-looking personage whose Teutonic French accent, spiked silver helmet with the Prussian eagle, First Imperial Guards cuirass and tunic, breeches and spurred jack-boots, in combination with a well-known moustache with upright ends, a huge Iron Cross, and a great many other property decorations, left no doubt as to the political bent of the scrap of pantomime.

It was an ordinary bit of comic knockabout, to which the tragic circumstances of the day lent a peculiar tang. One has seen it before, played by the three comedians, in the green-baize aprons, brown duffel knee-breeches, and shirt-sleeves sported by the waiters of low-class Paris or Munich brasseries.

In the centre of the stage, instead of a bright-hooped beer-barrel on a wooden cellar-stand, was a revolving globe representing the World. And each of the three comedians, being armed with a tumbler, a spile-awl, and a spigot-tap, proceeded, with appropriate patter, gesture, and grimaces, to insert his spigot, draw, and drink. John Bull turned the globe to the United Kingdom, and tapped the big black patch in East Middlesex. Creamy-headed London porter filled his glass. He held it up, nodded a "Here's to you!" and toped off. M. Prud'homme punctured France in the rich vine-growing district of Epernay. Champagne crowned the goblet, and he drank in dumb show to Gallia, the land of love, laughter, and wine. It was then the turn of the Teuton. He bored, and Brandenburg yielded a tall bock of foaming blonde lager. He sucked it down with guttural Achs of delight.

But this was not all. John Bull exploited the East Indies. A stream of rubies and emeralds filled his glass. He bored deep in the Union of South Africa—diamonds and gold-dust heaped the vessel. Fired by his success, M. Prud'homme inserted his spigot into wealthy Bordeaux, whipped it out, applied his lips, and drank deep. He corked the oozing spot and tapped Algerian Africa. Coffee rewarded him, fragrant and richly black. He next exploited Pondicherry, Chandernagore on the Hooghly, French Equatorial Africa, and New Caledonia. Nothing came. He tried Cochin China, and drew off a glass of yellow tea at boiling-point. Encouraged to drink the strange beverage by the appreciative pantomime of his British neighbour, he swallowed it, with results of a Rabelaisian nature, at which everybody laughed heartily, including Patrine.

It was now the turn of the Teuton. He drew German beer from Togoland, Cameroon; German South-West and South-East Africa yielded an indifferent brand of the beverage. German New Guinea in the Pacific, the Solomon, Caroline, and other islands, with Asian Kiao-Chao, merely wetted the bottom of the glass with a pale fluid, German beer by courtesy. "Sapperlot! Der Teufel! Kreuzdonnerwetter!" He tasted, spat, stamped, and sputtered forth strange expletives, M. Prud'homme's terror at these unearthly utterances being provocative of more humour of the Rabelaisian kind. Then he decided to try again, excited to envy by the spectacle of the stout Briton drawing gold from Australia, gold from Canada, gold from New Zealand and the West Indies, and gold from Ceylon, gold from the Crown Colonies in China, gold from the Gold Coast, gold from Rhodesia and Nigeria, gold from everywhere; filling the capacious pockets of his blue brass-buttoned coat, of his tight breeches, of his nankeen waistcoat, until he bulked enormously, a Bull of Gargantuan size.

Such wealth roused respect in Prud'homme, who esteems the yellow metal. He embraced the Briton, heartily congratulating him. This roused the Teuton's ire. He seized the spigot and once more plunged it into Germany, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony—each of the States yielding beer, beer, BEER. He went on, tapping, filling, and guzzling.... Twelve full tumblers and he had begun to swell most horribly. Fifteen—and his rotundity equalled that of John Bull. But one State remained untapped. He swilled down the twenty-fourth bock, drawn out of Lubeck—plunged the spigot into the Reichsland—once Alsace-Lorraine——

And the big glass crimsoned with a sudden spurt of blood.

It was over in an instant, the comedians had skipped nimbly from the scene, the globe had developed a pair of very thin human legs and followed them off at a proscenium-wing, before many of those who had witnessed, clearly understood. Only the men and women of Gallic race among the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience answered with a deep, inward thrill to the ruby gush that told how the blood of France still ran red in the throbbing arteries of the beloved, reft, alienated province, in spite of her forty-five years of separation, in defiance of the loathed laws, customs, language, service, all the gyves rivetted on her by the Teuton, her conqueror. Now round after round of applause signified their comprehension. But the comedians did not answer the call.

Von Herrnung, who had worn the same contemptuous smile for every phase of the clumsy by-play, relaxed his stiff features. A stout tenor from the Opera appeared and sang a Spring song by Tchaikovsky, following it with the exquisite Serenade of Rimsky Korsakov, "Sleep, Sad Friend."

The tenor was recalled. Colette Colin succeeded him. She sang "Notre Petite Compagnon" and "La Buveuse d'Absinthe" to the accompaniment of a pale, lean, red-nosed man with a profile grotesque as ever adorned a comic poster; who touched the piano-keys as though they were made of butter; and had a way of sucking in his steep upper-lip and cocking his eye at the star as he waited on her famous efforts, that made Patrine shake with suppressed laughter on her green iron chair.

The last ironic line of Rollinat's ballad, marvellously uttered rather than sung, died out upon a stillness. A storm of approval broke. Men and women stood up applauding in their places, and the singer came back, to sigh out the bitter-sweet lyric of Jammes, "Le Parle de Dieu." Then, while her name still tossed on the surges of human emotion, backwards and forwards under the electrics, Colette Colin, the pet of Paris, the eclipser of the famous Thérésa, was gone. Something of the yearning anguish of Jammes, who sees Religion as a dusty collection of ancient myths and folk-tales; to whom Faith is mere superstition, but who would give his all to be able to pray once more as in childhood, had given the girl lumps in the throat as she listened to Colette Colin. Though, unlike the sad, Agnostic poet, Patrine had no tender, sentimental memories in connection with a mother's knee.

Not from Mildred Saxham had she learned her first childish prayer, but from a procession of nurses; beginning with "Now I Lay Me Down" and "Gentle Jesus," instilled by Hannah, a Church of England woman, continuing with the Lord's Prayer, insisted on by Susan, a Presbyterian; culminating in the "Our Father" "learned the childer" by Norah the Irish Catholic, a petition which—minus the final line—was just the same as the Lord's Prayer. Also the Creed in English, and a surreptitious "Hail Mary" which brought about the sudden exit of Norah from the domestic scene.

For teaching Patrine and Irma about God and Heaven and all that, was sufficiently interfering, said Mrs. Saxham, but when it came to Popery, rank Popery, it was time the woman went. So Norah ceased to be, from the point of view of the little Saxhams—and He who had risen above the horizon of childish intelligence, a Being vaguely realised as all-powerful and awful, great and beneficent, stern and tender, sank and vanished at the same time.

But the Idea of Him remained to be merged in the personality of the child Patrine's dada. Dada, so handsome and jolly, and nearly always kind to his rough little romping Pat. The boy, Patrine's senior by sixteen months, had died in infancy. Captain Saxham was always gloomy on the deceased David's birthday. Mildred reserved a nervous headache of the worst for the anniversary, the kind that is accompanied by temper and tears.

She was indifferent to Patrine, who resembled the Saxhams. But she was devoted to Irma, her own image bodily and mentally. Thus nothing interfered with Patrine's adoration of her father. The handsome, genial, ex-officer of cavalry was his daughter's god, until Mildred tore away the veil of Deity, broke the shrine and cast down the idol, one day when Patrine was fourteen years old.

The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was "not even faithful"—that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.

Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.

"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"

"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.

Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of Gentlemen—an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.

For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.

An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:

BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.

The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father's life?

She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.

She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred—seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, si paisible....

CHAPTER XV

THE BITE IN THE KISS

But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps:

"Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish mantilla. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...."

"Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?"

"Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre—too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair—not yellow, nor yet orange—nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And—all the women would be crazy with jealousy—and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then—you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"

"Hellish again." She gave her low, deep laugh, prolonging it a trifle stagily. "What do you bet me I don't—do what you said?"

"Bleach and dye...?"

"That's it." She nodded. "To the colour of—what was it? 'Beech-leaves in winter.' ..."

"Against a snow-bank." He added: "The snow is your wonderful skin. And I will bet you four hundred and twenty marks—that is twenty pounds English. Is it agreed? ... Do you not say—Done? ..."

"Twenty pounds...." She shrugged her big white shoulders. "My dear man, I haven't got twenty pounds in this blessed old world!"

He hesitated; finally said with reluctance:

"I will lend you twenty pounds—it will cost you twenty pounds to have your hair done here in Paris.... But you will be sehr schön—the money will be well spent. No? ..."—for she had shaken her head, frowning. "It is offered—why will you not accept?"

"Because I won't.... There are some things I draw the line at. Borrowing money's one of them."

"Then I will bet you my magpie pearl—you may have seen it"—he displayed the ornamented little finger—"against that not-very-good diamond you wear on your left hand."

She burst out laughing and repeated through her laughter: "'Not very good.' I call that insulting.... When it cost me fifteen francs in the Palais Royal. Well, done with you!"

"It is done! But you have not done with me." Von Herrnung's tone had a new note of triumph. He urged: "You go back to London—when? ... The day after to-morrow.... Gut! ... I have myself to visit London upon business—I shall see Isis with her beautiful new hair. One thing more. An address where I may call and see it. Be quick! We turn down here! ..."

Patrine protested, peering with narrowed eyes through the dusk-blue twinkling semi-darkness. "But no! ... That big marquee-thing at the end of this avenue—with all the festoons of lights and the ring of promenade about it—surely that's the Pavilion de la Danse?"

"Halt den Mund!" His hand closed peremptorily on her arm: he hurried her down the trellised vine walk that invited on the left of them, as light measured footsteps padded on the gravel, and a man ran past calling, as it seemed, to somebody ahead:

"Miss Saxham ahoy! ... Lady Beauvayse——"

"He's calling me. It's Captain Courtley...." Patrine persisted.

"Let him call! Are you not with me?" Von Herrnung's tone was masterful. "You shall go to him when you have given me that London address!"

She was amused and yet annoyed by his persistency.

"Oh, all right! 'The Ladies' Social Club, Short Street, Piccadilly, West.' That's where I'm generally to be found when I'm in town."

"Sehr gut! Tell me once again, then I shall not forget, no!"

"Write it on your cuff!"

"It is written in a safer place," he told her. "We Prussian officers are trained to remember without writing things down. A face, an address, a conversation, the outlines of a country. Though for reconnaissance there is nothing like die Photographie." He added: "When we meet in London I shall be able to tell you everything you wore to-night."

"Really! ... How flattering! ... You've made a mental inventory?"

They were retracing their steps to the avenue recently quitted. He walked with noiseless strides behind the tall, supple figure as it moved between the trellised vines and roses, gowned with its flaunting diadem, robed in the insincere splendours of the opera-mantle already described.

"As you say. I shall be able to tell you that the back of your mantel was cut in a V-shape nearly reaching to your waist-line. Shall I tell you why?"

"If you're keen to...." She felt a scorching breath between her shoulders and quickened her pace, making for the avenue. But he moved with her, his voice came thickly: "Because your back is so superbly beautiful you cannot bear to hide it from men!"

"Ah-h!"

She whirled about, glaring like an angry leopardess, her strong white arm upraised to strike. Face, throat, and bosom glowed with painful crimson. Between her violated, insulted shoulders, his furious kiss still burned and stung.

"How dare you touch me!" she gasped. But he had shot past her even as she turned. He was running towards the avenue, calling gaily:

"Were you looking for us, Lady Beauvayse? Here we are!"

"Cad, cad!" she stammered. "Insufferable! beastly!" Then, because a scene was quite out of the question, she went forward with head held high, and resentment heaving her broad bosom, to meet Lady Beauvayse.

"Pat! You needle in a haystack," cried her friend, "where did you get to?"

"Nowhere. We missed you at the Café Concert," Patrine began.

"And then," von Herrnung explained, "we happened to take the wrong turn. But we have not gone far before we are recalled."

"—To the path of probity," suggested Lady Beauvayse, adding: "And in this instance the path of probity leads to the Pavilion de Chahut." She explained to Patrine: "Chahut is the modern version of the can-can—famous in the days of the Second Empire; when the great cocodettes of the Court of the Tuileries—rivals of Cora Pearl and Skittles and other naughty persons—did high-kicking under the rose here, and they called the place Mabille."

It was not easy to get near the Pavilion, so dense and variegated a crowd had congregated before its illuminated entrance. But the entrance fee was doubled. Gold must be paid to see the famous São Paulo dance. Thus many would-be pleasure-seekers of the less affluent kind turned back disappointed from the row of gilt turnstiles under the blazing archway, compelled to content themselves with the outer promenade.

Breasting the human eddy caused by these, Patrine and her party passed the barrier, climbed a flight of shallow gilt marble stairs carpeted with pink plush and decorated with roses and tree-ferns and reached the elevated promenade. Set within the circumference of the outer one, it commanded a complete view of the circular ball-room, to whose level descended from it at intervals yet other flights of broad gilt stairs, similarly carpeted and flower-decked for the convenience of those who wished to join the dancers, or return from the ball-room to the level of the promenade.

The revels were in full swing. Standing upon the brink, looking down as into a cockpit, you saw Patrine, superb in her false diadem and mock ermines, leaning her bare white hand upon a velvet-covered rail. At first she could only make out a giddying whirl of arms and heads and shoulders. Presently, the picture began to clear.

To the wail, clang and clash of strange, discordant, exotic music, rendered by an orchestra of coloured performers, two wide circles of dancers rhythmically spun. The floors they danced on were set at different levels, and rotated automatically,—each floor revolving in a different direction. Coloured lights, flung at intervals from reflectors in the ceiling, conveyed to Patrine the impression of staring down upon the whirling planes of a huge gyroscopic top.

Only the central space of shining parquet was void within the double circle of gyrating dancers. A crash from the orchestra and three couples, oddly costumed, leaped suddenly out upon the floor. Patrine could not make out where they had come from. They appeared, and there was a slight commotion. A hedge of applauding spectators, four or five deep, formed about the central, stationary patch of parquet. The music changed, the six Brazilians began the famous dance.

They were not beautiful to look at it seemed to Patrine, the men, familiarly styled by voices in the crowd as Lauro, Pedro, and Herculano, being undersized, sleek-headed, lithe and sallow, attired in faultlessly fitting evening dress-coats, white vests, black satin knee-breeches, black silks, and buckled pumps. They wore shallow collars of curious cut, lawn-frilled shirts and wide black neckties. Their female companions were swarthy as Indians, even through their paint, and plain of feature. But their superb hair and eyes, the rounded grace of hip and waist and limb, the slenderness of throat and wrist and ankle, testified, like their tiny feet and high-arched insteps, to a strain of Spanish blood.

"La Rivadavia, Alexandrina, and Silvana," the eager spectators named them. They wore transparent sheaths, and brief, oddly bouffante overskirts, like flounced muslin lamp-shades with a boldly suggestive forward tilt. They began the dance with some familiar Tango figures. The poses, the approaches, the hesitations, were well known to Patrine.

"Nothing very new.... But—the music made by those buck niggers! 'Bizzarramente' isn't the word for it. One expects to see gombos covered with serpent-skin, trumpets of elephant-tusk, skull-rattles, and all the paraphernalia of Obeah in the orchestra, instead of those huge, superb brass wind-instruments, cymbals as big as table-tops and ten-foot silver trumpets, like poor de Souza's.... Raised in the States, but wasn't he a Brazilian by birth?" It was the voice of Lady Beauvayse, and von Herrnung's answered from behind Patrine:

"It may be so. But the Blechinstrumente and the Blasinstrumente—for the biggest of those they have to go to Germany. Nowhere else can they be made as there.... Bravo! ... Bis—bis!"

He applauded.... Everybody was applauding. The gyroscopic whirl of dancers had become stationary. All now were eager spectators. And the three couples from São Paulo had reached the culminating point of a uniquely curious and exotic figure. Savage and violent, sinuous and creeping; suggestive of the nocturnal gambols of enamoured jaguars, in the deep primeval forests of Brazil.

"Horrid! One expects them to lash tails and roar.... I've got what Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch called 'cold clams walking up my backbone.'" Lady Beauvayse shuddered and made a pretty grimace. "All the same I think I'll go down and look at them a little closer. Ah-h! ... Good grapes! Why, he simply picked her up by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and shook her.... I've just got to see that done over again!"

She was gone, with a whisk of the emerald bird of paradise and a waft of parfum très persistant. Captain Courtley vanished in her wake. Patrine made no motion to follow them.

The tense excitement, the pungent exhalations rising from the crowded ball-room were affecting her brain. She felt giddy, and the steady pressure of the crowd behind her was thrusting her to the very verge of the promenade. She yielded automatically, unconscious of danger near.

You are to see her there, poised on the verge of the rose-carpeted precipice, her hand gripping the velvet-covered railing, her wide nostrils distended, her broad bosom heaving as she inhaled the sultry, vitiated atmosphere, heavy with a myriad perfumes, tainted by a thousand breaths. Her stare, lifeless as the enamelled, glittering regard of some Princess-mummy of Old Egypt, was fixed upon the artists, of whom two couples had retired, as though in despair of competition with the chief favourites, leaving La Rivadavia and her comrade Herculano in possession of the floor.

And the passions expressed by the rhythmical, sinuous movements of these dancers grew moment by moment less human, and more bestial. Art of the most consummate was displayed and degraded. Beauty and Truth shone pre-eminent in the hideous display. Now the woman sank towards the ground, with supple limbs outstretched and her wild head thrown back in fierce surrender. Her white fangs gleamed, her dumb mouth seemed to roar. And as her conqueror crept stealthily towards her, the play of his great muscles could be seen beneath his civilised attire, as though his supple body had been clothed with the tawny-golden, black-dappled hide of the Brazilian jaguar.

As Herculano crouched and sprang, La Rivadavia's muscles visibly tightened. She bounded high, turned in the act.... Their gleaming fangs clashed in mid-air. And from the massed spectators came a hiss of excitement, "Th-h-h! ..." like the hissing of a thousand snakes.

"Great Scott!" Patrine heard herself saying. "Great—Scott!"

She no longer heard von Herrnung harshly breathing behind her.... He had moved to the leftward. His tall, broad-shouldered figure now stood against the railing some dozen feet away. His well-cut face, seen in profile, was purplish-red to the crisp, scarlet waves topping his high square forehead. The big white hands that held the glasses glued to his eyes, jerked, and as he pressed against the railing Patrine knew that he was shuddering. Now he looked at her, and his ravaged face was terrifying to the girl.

"Will you not..." he began, thickly.

She quivered, cast a look about; saw the ugly emotion under which he laboured reflected in every face within her range of vision, as round after round of plaudits rose to the roof of the pavilion, escaping through the wide-open spaces between its gilded, rose-twined pillars into the night. The rafters vibrated with demands for a repetition of the popular sensation. The dancers accepted the encore.

If von Herrnung beckoned now, asking Patrine to go down with him amongst the acrid exhalations of that cockpit of variegated lights, thronged with excited men and strangely-bedizened women, rent by devastating emotions, drunk with strange excitements, would Patrine say Yes or No? ...

Ouf! but it was hot. How thick the air was with those illusion perfumes. And from whence was that cool breeze blowing that suddenly freshened the heavy air? ...

CHAPTER XVI

THE WIND OF JOY

Patrine drew back from the edge of the promenade. A stout, swarthy Frenchman, a Southerner evidently, whose full brown face streamed with little rills of perspiration, stepped nimbly into her vacated place. His female companion instantly took his. The same movement was repeated—the packed bodies seemed to melt before her. In a few more steps she had merged from the crowd, upon the outer edge of the elevated promenade.

There was another velvet railing there, and steps leading down to the promenade upon the ground-level. Against the background of starlit sky and illuminated gardens stood the tall figure of a man. He was broad-shouldered and lightly built, the poise and balance of his figure admirable. But for the gleam of his living eyes in his tanned face, and the movements of his head as he turned it from side to side, evidently seeking somebody, he might have been a statue of Mercury cast in light-hued bronze.

For he wore loose, waist-high leggings strapped at the ankles, and a belted gabardine of thin light brown material, while a cap with an upturned brim and ear-flaps dangled from his sunburnt hand. And a uniformed official, all lacquered moustaches and gold-laced blue cloth, stood gesticulating a few paces from him, keen on defending from so unceremonious an intruder the integrity of the Upper Promenade.

"Monsieur cannot possibly descend into the ball-room ... the costume of Monsieur is not appropriate. It offends against good taste. It outrages the proprieties.... It is peu convenable even that Monsieur should be here."

Patrine heard the protest, saw it driven home by swift expressive Gallic gestures, caught a gleam of mirth in the eyes of the oddly-garbed intruder, and the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth. No doubt the suggestion of the proprieties in connection with the traditions of Mabille had evoked it. She liked his face; it was lean and hard and rather hatchety, with a brave outlook of clear light eyes under the marked eyebrows, thick and straight and silvery-fair against his sunburnt skin. To her woman's eyes, Fatigue was stamped upon it and anxiety, and a kind of rueful impatience, as he apologised for the necessity of the intrusion in fragmentary but excellently accentuated French. He came in search of a friend, who was here and must be found; it was imperative...

"There is to-morrow!—there is always to-morrow!" the official stated with a wave.

"That's just the point.... To-morrow! ..." The stranger's forehead was ploughed with lines of anxiety. He spoke in English now—the well-bred, modern, clipped English of the public school and the University. "No! you don't understand"—for the official had vigorously disclaimed all knowledge of the strange, barbarous tongue in which the other addressed him. "And I don't believe I'd ever make you. If I could only hammer into you what sort of a hat I'm in!"

He knitted his brows; pulled himself together for a crowning effort. Patrine spoke, not as a stranger yielding to a sudden, helpful impulse, but quite simply, with a little, joyful catching of her breath:

"Could I explain for you, do you suppose?"

"A—thanks! You're awfully good!"

He turned to her eagerly, if with a certain embarrassment.

"If you would.... There is a man here I have to get word to. And—what French I have is simply technical.... You hardly find it in modern dictionaries—the argot of the engine-shop and the Flying School."

"Now I understand...." She smiled in his perplexed face, drinking in deep breaths of the fresh fragrant air that blew about them as they stood together behind the thick wall of bodies that hid the cockpit from their view. A deep dimple von Herrnung had never seen showed low down in one of her pale cheeks. Their whiteness was slightly tinged with delicate pale rose. And her eyes had lost their brilliant enamelled hardness. They shone like dusky stars as she went on: "Now I know why I thought of wide green spaces and a breeze blowing to me over gorse and heather as I looked at you. Sub-conscious memories of Hendon and Brooklands and Upavon. For you're a Flying Man!"

"Just that!" His ruefulness was banished. "And now you know how I come to be in Paris with the clothes I stand up in and not another rag.... Two of us flew the Channel yesterday morning.... If the weather holds decent, we should be on the wing again by four A.M. And my mechanic's given me the slip. To say he's taken French leave would be appropriate under the circumstances. Left a line—the cool—beggar!—to say I'd find him here."

"Too bad!" she said, as fresh furrows dug themselves into the tanned forehead. "Not fair to leave you in the cart like that. No wonder you followed—hot upon his track."

"Combed the whole place—everywhere they'll let me in. But my aviator's kit's against me. I've seen some rummy get-ups. But they draw the line at Carberry's overalls."

One hand rested easily on his hip, in the other hand he swung the eared cap with goggles. A pedestal in the moonlight would have suited him. It occurred to her to ask:

"What was he like—your runaway mechanic?"

"I hardly ... Oh! ... Little black-avised Welshman—barely tips the scale at eight stone. Has to be a light-weight, because I weigh all of eleven. And with the hovering-gear—but that can't interest you."

"Indeed it does. What of the hovering-gear?"

His face darkened and hardened. He said:

"It's an invention of mine. And after no end trying—our own people at Whitehall simply wouldn't have anything to do with me—the chiefs of the French Service Aëronautique consented to give it a test."

"Sporting of them, wasn't it?"

He agreed:

"No end sporting. So I bucked the tiger over the Channel with Davis—to find that an officer and mechanic of the S. A. were told off to try the hoverer over the selected area. For us to engineer the thing ourselves wasn't 'l'etiquette militaire.' That's the French for Government red-tape."

"Bother etiquette! I'm beginning to sympathise with Davis!"

His vexation broke up in laughter.

"That's what she did. She sympathised with Davis and carried him off here."

Patrine said, a light breaking in on her:

"Why, of course, there would be a girl.... He'd hardly come to a place like this alone, would he?"

Some query in his look made her add hastily:

"What was she like?"

"Like.... The girl who's carried off Davis? ..." He reflected a moment. "Pretty and plump and fluffy, with a pair of goo-goo eyes! She's daughter or niece or something"—he boggled the explanation rather—"to the German chap who hired us the hangar at Drancy—if you can give that name to a ramshackle shed in a waste building-lot! And Davis—thundering good man, but once on a spree..." He whistled dismally. "If I could only get my claws on him! ..."

Here the uniformed official returned to the charge:

"Monsieur has found his friend—Monsieur has explained the situation. To enter the Salon de Danse with Madame is not permissible—in the costume Monsieur displays. No doubt Madame will understand!"

Patrine said, with a slight catch in her breath, as though some drops of chilly pleasant perfume had been suddenly sprayed on her:

"He supposes ... he thinks ... that I'm ... your friend!"

"I'll explain." He reddened, turning to the official, saying in the French of the British schoolboy, laborious, devoid of colloquialisms:

"Monsieur, vous n'avez pas compris. Madame elle—elle n'êtes qu'une étrangère. Pour mon ami, je ne lui vois. Si vous permettre d'entrer, peut-être——"

"Rototo! Voyez, man blousier, j'connais bien la sorte! Sufficit! Assez! Ça m' fait suer, comprends?" The gold-braided arm described a magnificent sweep, the large white kid-covered hand indicated remote distance—"Sortez! ..."

The Briton, thus invited to retire, looked at Patrine.

"I can't quite follow, but it's plain he's telling me to hook it. The rest is—pretty—strong?"

She nodded, biting her lip.

"Frightfully rude. Not that I know much Paris slang. But a friend of mine—" She broke off to listen, as from under the functionary's waxed moustache rattled another sentence:

"A l'instant, ou j'appelle l' sergent d'ville!"

"He's talking about sending for the police now!" She added hastily: "Don't let him do that! Offer him a tip!"

The magic word must have been comprehended of the braided functionary. He ceased to fulminate. He waited, his avid eye upon the pair. The lean hatchety face of the aviator had flamed at Patrine's suggestion. He said:

"Don't you think I'd have tipped him in the beginning—if I'd had the wherewithal? But expenses have been frightful!—the waste lot with the shed I've stalled the machine in costs as much as a suite of rooms at a decent middle-class hotel would. Had to fork rent in advance too. Proprietor's a German as well as a jerry-builder, and when I've paid his goo-goo girl for our coffee and rolls to-morrow morning"—the speaker exhibited a disc of shiny metal bearing the classical capped and oak-wreathed head of the Republic, value exactly twopence-halfpenny—"I'll have just one of these blessed tin things left."

"How rotten!" In the gilt metal vanity-bag, Patrine's inseparable adjunct, lurked, in the company of a mirror, powder-puff, and note-book, a tiny white silk purse. In the purse nestled two plump British half sovereigns, the moiety of Patrine's salary for the previous week. "Would you jump down my throat if I asked you to let me finance you?" she pleaded, an eager hand in the depths of the receptacle. "Why not?"

"Because I'm a decent man!" If he had been previously crimson he was now scarlet as a boiled lobster. "Thanks all the same, though! I can't wait here, even to catch Davis.... I must bike back to Drancy, where I've left the Bird—the machine—in the German's shed... Not a soul to keep an eye on her! ... My heart's in my mouth when I think of what might hap—" He bit off the end of the sentence and went on: "But if you'd be so awfully kind as to take charge of this, in case you ... There's a message written on it...." He offered her a soiled, bent card.

"I understand. If I should chance to come across your Davis.... A little man ... looking like a Welshman.... But you haven't told me whether he's dark or fair!"

"Black as a crow," he told her. "Not dressed like me!" His well-cut mouth began to twist upwards at the corners.

"Quite a swell, in a silk-faced frock-coat, white vest and striped accompaniments. A silk hat, too, rather curly brimmed, but still, a topper. I suppose a friend of the lady's rented Davis the kit."

"Of the lady's? ..." She remembered. "Yes, yes! Of course! ... The German's appendage.... Why! ... Look! ... Those two people who have just passed the turn-stile at the other end of the Promenade.... If there's anything in description, here comes Davis with the goo-goo girl!"

"By—gum! You've nailed me the pair of them." As the aviator's long strides bore him down in the direction of the little sallow, black-avised mechanic in the capacious silk-faced frock-coat, and his high-bosomed, florid, flaxen-haired enchantress, and before the moustached guardian of the Promenade could renew his indignant protest, Patrine had dropped the little sovereign-purse in his deep, rapacious hand. And at that instant the music ended with a crashing succession of barbaric chords. The São Paulo dance was done.

"Merci millefois, Madame! ..."

Patrine turned from the hireling's thanks to see the high head and powerful square shoulders of von Herrnung forging towards her, towering above the polyglot, variegated crowd. He hailed her with:

"So you met a friend? Is that why I found myself deserted?"

She answered coldly:

"I did not desert you—and I did not meet a friend."

His face, still suffused with a purplish flush, pouched and baggy about the eyes, told of the maelstrom of unhealthy excitement the dance of the jaguars in the jungle had set whirling in his brain. She guessed that he had taken advantage of their separation to descend into the ball-room, and that as one of the spectators in the front rank he had revelled in the final thrill. He persisted:

"Was? But what means it? I have lost you.... I think you must have gone down into the ball-room after your friend.... I follow and you are not there. I come back to find you.... Who was that dirty bounder I saw you talking to?"

"He wasn't a dirty bounder!" His rudeness enraged her. "He was a nice, clean, first-class, top-hole, plucky English boy!"

He sneered:

"'Boy' ... Men of forty are boys, in the mouths of you English ladies. You borrow the term from women of the street-walking class."

"Then I'll call him a man. The best kind of man going! English—from the top of his nice head to the very tips of his toes."

"How can you tell if he was not a friend of yours? What do you know of him?" He fixed his eyes compellingly on hers.

She answered:

"Nothing but that he flew the Channel yesterday—with Davis—to test his invention—and he has got to be on the wing for home at four."

"So! He has told you all this, and you do not know his name, even? Perhaps it is on that card you hold in your hand?"

She started, and the card fluttered from her twitching fingers to the carpet.

"Allow me...." Von Herrnung stooped as though to retrieve the bit of pasteboard. "Curious! It has gone! ... It is not there!" he said.

"I think you have your foot on it." Her eyeballs ached, she felt weary, and flat, and stale. "Please lift up your foot and let me see if it is there," she urged, and grown suddenly obtuse, he lifted up the wrong foot. She was trying to explain that he had done so when they were rejoined by Courtley and Lady Beauvayse.

"Say, did you see she wore a head-band with a rubber mouth-hold at the back of her neck? And waist-fixings under her frillies so's Herculano could swing her around his head. My land! that man has jaw-power to whip Teddy Roosevelt, and she's got vim enough for a nest of rattlesnakes.... Used up, Pat? ... If you aren't, you look it!" The speaker yawned prettily: "I'm about ready to be taken back to by-by, though it's only two o'clock."

Von Herrnung escorted the wearer of the green bird of paradise as they went through dark alleys and illuminated avenues back to the archway with the blazing crowns and stars. Courtley accepted the offer of a lift back to the hotel. The German declined, saying that he preferred to walk, as the car was closed.

"Pardon! ..." His voice had arrested Morris on the point of starting the Rolls-Royce. His handsome face had appeared in the frame of the car-window. "Excuses! but this belongs to Miss Saxham!" His cuff shone white in the semi-darkness, the great magpie pearl on his little finger gleamed maliciously as he dropped the missing card upon Patrine's lap, and drew back, uncovered and smiling, as the car moved away. Later on, when she was safe in her room, she looked at the card, and read upon it in plain black lettering:

+———————————————————————-+|                                               ||  ALAN SHERBRAND,                              ||                                               ||  PILOT-INSTRUCTOR AND BUILDER OF AËROPLANES,  ||  FANSHAW'S SCHOOL OF FLYING.                  ||                                               ||  THE AËRODROME,                               ||  COLLINGWOOD AVENUE,                          ||  HENDON, N. W.                                ||                                               |+———————————————————————-+

Something was scrawled in violet pencil on the upper blank space. Being a girl with notions about squareness, Patrine would not at first read, remembering that it was his private message to Davis, whom Chance had brought within his master's reach. But later still, or earlier, when, after a brief interval of silence, the traffic of Paris began to roll over the asphalt, principle yielded to impulse. She switched on the electric light above her pillow and read:

"This Sarajevo business spells War. Must get back at once to Hendon. I trust to your Honour not to fail me. You know what this means to

"A. S."

So the young Mercury in gabardine and overalls was a professional, a teacher; a pilot who helped men to qualify for the certificate given by the Royal Aëro Club without breaking too many bones. She had seen the big painted sign in the Collingwood Avenue, Hendon, that advertised Fanshaw's Flying School.

"I trust to your Honour," he had written to his mechanic. The word would have seemed big, and awful, and imposing, spelt like that, with a capital "H," if the writer had been a gentleman.

Disillusioned, she tore the card into little pieces and sank into a heavy sleep before the broad yellow sunshine of Monday outlined the pink velvet brocade curtains unhygienically drawn before the open windows. And she dreamed, not of the magic wind that had blown upon her that night, nor of the Mercury-like figure in the suit of Carberrys, but of the supple bodies that had bounded and whirled, and of the gleaming panther-fangs that had clashed in mid-air. Then the dominant figure became that of von Herrnung. Again the red mouth under the tight-rolled red moustache alternately flattered, insulted, and cajoled. Again she felt that violation of her virgin flesh, its moist, hot touch upon her naked shoulder. Its kiss bit and stung.

She awakened late from those poisoned dreams to a riotous blaze of colour and a breath of musky fragrance. On the coffee-stand beside her bed lay a great sheaf of long-stalked roses; deep orange-hearted, with outer petals of ruddy flame. She plunged her face deep into the flowers. The corner of a large square envelope thrust from amongst them. She caught it between her teeth and pulled it out.

It was from von Herrnung, written on paper bearing the device of the Société Aëronautique Internationale in the Faubourg St. Honoré. It was brief enough.

"That I offended yesterday, Isis will pardon. The address I promised is—'Atelier Wiber, 000, Rue de la Paix.' The good Wiber demands no fee for making Beauty yet more beautiful. All has been arranged.

"Devotedly,

"T. v. H."

CHAPTER XVII

INTRODUCES AN OLD FRIEND

Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., M.V.O., Consulting Surgeon to St. Stephen's and the Hospital of St. Stanislaus and St. Teresa, sat busily writing at the big leather-topped table in the consulting-room, that, with the well-stocked library adjoining, occupied the rearward ground-floor of the Harley Street corner house.

The hands of the table-clock pointed to eleven A.M. Since nine the doctor had sat at the receipt of patients, the crowd in the waiting-room had melted down to half a dozen souls. Fourteen years had gone by since Saxham, late Temporary Captain, R.A.M.C., attached Headquarters Staff, H.I.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, had taken over the lease and bought his practice from the fashionable physician who had been ruined by the war slump in South African mining-stocks.

The broken speculator's successor had struck pay-reef from the outset. Society had taken Saxham up and could not afford to drop him again. He was harsh and unconciliatory in manner—a perfect bear, according to Society—but quite too frightfully clever; and as yet no speedier rival had outrun him in the race.

Now as the July sunshine, its fierceness tempered by the short curtains of pale yellow silk that screened the wide-open windows, came streaming in over the fragrant heads of a row of pot-grown rose-trees, ranged on the white-enamelled window-seat, it shone upon a man to whom both Time and Fortune had been kind. The admirable structure of bone, clothed with tough muscle and firm white flesh, had not suffered the degrading changes inseparable from obesity. Nor had the man waxed lean and grisly in proportion as his banking account grew fat. His scholar's stoop bowed the great shoulders even more, disguising the excessive development of the throat and deltoid muscles. The square, pale face, with the short aquiline nose and jutting under-lip, was close-shaven as of old. The thickly growing black hair was streaked with silver-grey and tufted with white upon the temples. His loosely fitting clothes of fine silky black cloth were not the newest cut, neither were they old-fashioned. They were suited perfectly to the man.

While Saxham minutely copied his prescription, the patient who sat facing the window in the chair on the doctor's left hand had not ceased from the enumeration of a lengthy catalogue of symptoms, peculiar to the middle-aged, self-indulgent, and tightly-laced. At the close of a thrilling description of after-dinner palpitations, she became aware that her hearer's attention had strayed. Following up his glance she ran him to earth in one of three tinted photographs that stood in a triptych frame upon his writing-table, and glowed with an indignation that tinged with violet a plump face coated with the latest complexion-cream.

"How very charming your wife is—still!"

The speaker, her recent character of patient now merged in that of visitor, plucked down her veil of violet gauze with a gesture that betrayed her wrath. But her voice was carefully honeyed to match her smile—as she continued:

"You have been married quite an age, haven't you?"

The anniversary of her own second honeymoon was due next week. She went on answering her own query:

"Nearly fourteen years, I think?"

Saxham answered, not glancing at the silver table-almanac but at the threefold photograph frame:

"To be precise, just fourteen years and six weeks. We were married on the 6th of June, 1900."

"You have a good memory—for some things!"

The undisguised resentment in her tone pulled Saxham's head round. He surveyed her with genuine surprise. She bit her lips and tossed her head, waggling her tall feather, jingling her strings of turquoise and amber, coral and onyx, kunzite and olivine, big blocks of which semi-precious stones were being worn just then, strung on the thinnest of gold chains. Each movement evoked a whiff of perfume from the scanty folds of her bizarre attire. Her frankly double chin quivered, and her redundant bosom, already liberally displayed through its transparent covering of embroidered chiffon, threatened to burst its confining bands of baby-ribbon, as the Doctor said:

"Is it not natural that I should have a particularly clear recollection of the greatest day of all my life—save one?"

"You're quite too killing, Owen!"

She laughed tunelessly, clanking her precious pebbles.

"Of course, we all know you're fearfully swanky about your wife's beauty. I saw her yesterday at Lord's—sitting under the awning on the sunny side, with the Duchess of Broads and Lady Castleclare. Your boy was with them, jumping out of his skin over Naumann's bowling for Oxford. Really marvellous! Your poor dear Cambridge hadn't a chance! Tremendously like you he grows—I mean Bawne. Really, your very image!"

"I should prefer," said Saxham, stiffly, "that my son resembled his mother."

"Ha, ha, ha! How quite too romantic!" She threw back her head, its henna-dyed hair plastered closely about it and fastened with buckles of jade, set with knobs of turquoise. A kind of stove-pipe of enamel green velvet crowning her, was trimmed with a band of miniature silk roses in addition to the towering violet plume. The plume, carefully dishevelled so as to convey the impression of a recent wetting, threatened the electric globe-lamp springing from a standard near. Her crossed legs liberally revealed her stockings of white silk openwork, patterned with extra-sized dragon-flies in black chenille, and her laugh rattled about Saxham's vexed ears like Harlequin's painted bladder, full of little pebbles or dried peas. "In love with your wife—and after fourteen years and six weeks!" Her fleshy shoulders shook, and her opulent bosom heaved stormily. She passed a little filmy perfumed handkerchief under her violet gauze veil and delicately dabbed the corners of her eyes. "You remind me of my poor David. I was always the one woman on earth, in his opinion. To the last, he was jealous of the slightest reference to you!"

"To me? Why should he have been?"

Mildred—for this was Saxham's faithless bride-elect of more than twenty years previously—swallowed her wrath with an effort, and went on with the mulish obstinacy of her type:

"Perhaps it was absurd. But men in love are unreasonable creatures, and David was perfectly mad where I was concerned. He worshipped me to the point of idolatry! He never could quite believe that I did not regret my—my choice—that my heart did not sometimes escape from his keeping in dreams, and become yours again, Owen! He never really cared for Patrine, because she has a look of you.... Absurd, considering that she was born two years after you disappeared into South Africa.... Though of course I could not truthfully say that I did not—think of you a great deal!"

It seemed to the silent man who heard, that Mildred offended against decency. His soul loathed her. She went on:

"Her brother—my darling boy who died—was the very image of David!" Her tone was even womanly and tender in speaking of the dead boy. "But Patrine—a year younger—Patrine is really wonderfully like you, with her commanding figure and almost Egyptian profile, those long eyes under straight eyebrows—and all those masses of dead-black hair!" As Saxham writhed under the category she gave out her irritating laugh again. "Ah!—I forgot! When Patrine was in Paris with Lady Beauvayse for the Big Week—Lady Beau took her to the Atelier Wiber—the famous hairdresser's establishment at 000, Rue de la Paix—where they specialise in Chevelures des Teintes Moderne—all the newest effects displayed by stylish mannequins—and really the change is astonishing—her sister Irma and I hardly knew Patrine when she came to see us at Kensington—looking superb, with hair—one might almost call it terra-cotta coloured—showing up her creamy-white skin."

"Do you tell me that Patrine has bleached her splendid hair and stained it with one of those vile dyes that are based on aniline—or Egyptian henna at the best?"

Mildred retorted acidly:

"It was a very expensive process.... Five hundred francs—but I understand that Lady Beauvayse was so good as to insist on paying Wiber's charges herself."

Saxham answered brusquely:

"I would have given ten times the money to know my niece's hair unspoiled. Whoever paid, the process will prove an expensive one to Patrine when she finds herself excruciated by headaches, or when the colour changes—as it will by-and-by!"

Mildred shrugged:

"She can have it re-dipped, surely? Or let it return to its original black!"

"There are many chemical arguments against human hair so altered returning to its original colour," came from Saxham grimly. "As these women who have made coiffures of orange, pink, crimson, blue and green, fashionable, had previously found to their cost. Do you not realise that from mishaps of this kind resulted the chromatically tinted heads one sees at public functions? Bizarre and strange in the electric lights, hideous in the sun."

"Ha, ha, ha!" Mildred's laugh rattled about the Doctor's ears like a shower of walnuts. "I shall certainly bring Patrine to call upon you, if her hair happens to turn peacock-green or pinky-crimson. I would not miss seeing your face for all the world! But seriously, my dear Owen, when a girl is as handsome as my girl and has no dot to back her, she must make herself attractive and desirable to eligible men."

"By trying to make herself look like a Parisian cocotte, she renders herself neither attractive nor desirable—to the kind of man whom I should like to see married to my niece. The cleanly kind of man, with wholesome tastes, a sound constitution, and an upright character."

"My dear Owen, you might be composing an advertisement for a butler or a chauffeur!"

Mildred ostentatiously controlled a yawn as the Doctor continued:

"As to a provision for Patrine on her marriage, you know that I shall gladly give it. Of course, upon condition——"

"Yes, yes, I know what your condition would be!" Mildred's finger-tips, adorned with nails elaborately veneered and dyed, drummed a maddening little tattoo on the table-ledge. "That she marries the 'right kind of man, with wholesome tastes,' and all the rest of it. The question is—would Patrine be able to endure him? She is—let us say—more than a little difficult to get on with—and essentially an independent, up-to-date girl."

"If Patrine would have subdued her ideas about independence and given up this idea of taking a place as salaried companion, I would have welcomed her, and so would my wife!"

"Patrine is—as you are very well aware—something very different to a mere companion. She is reader and secretary to Lady Beauvayse. Her Club subscription is paid, she moves there amongst gentlewomen, and is treated at Berkeley Square exactly like a favoured guest. You should see the presents Lady Beauvayse absolutely showers upon her—and she gets all her expenses and a hundred a year."

Saxham was silent. Patrine might have had all this and much more, if she would have accepted the home he offered. Not only because she was his niece, but the girl was dear to him. His wife loved her, and in her strange, wild way Patrine returned some measure of Lynette's tenderness.

"She is worth loving," Lynette had told her husband. "She has a generous, brave, independent nature and a deep heart. She is not easily won because she is so well worth winning. Ah! if the Mother were only with us, how well she would understand and help Patrine!"

But Mildred had risen to depart. Saxham rose too, not without alacrity, and taking her offered hand, pressed it and let it fall to her side.

"Well, good-bye. My kind regards to Captain Dyneham." He referred to the second legal possessor of Mildred's once coveted charms. "When can I dine with you at Kensington, do you ask? I fear I have very few opportunities for sociality. Some day! ... Tell Patrine to come and see me. Half-past one o'clock to-morrow. Lunch after my scolding—and a chat with Lynette."

"You are extremely kind to Patrine." Mildred's tone was sweetly venomous. "But I fear just at present she has little time to spare. Men in love are so exacting. Dear me, what a feather-brained creature I am! ... Haven't I told you about Count von Herrnung?"

"You have told me nothing," said Saxham, "and you know it. Who and what is the man?"

Mildred said with a great air of dignity:

"He is a distinguished officer of the Prussian Flying Service, the son and heir of a high official in the German Foreign Office. He holds the rank of Count by courtesy. I assure you I never met a more agreeable young man."

"Even were he all that you say, and more, and even while I regard the German Army as a marvel of organisation and efficiency—I should not, knowing the type of man that is the product of their military system, desire my niece to marry a German officer."

Mildred mocked:

"'Marry'—who said anything about marriage? ... When they have not known each other for a month. Not"—her tone became sentimental—"that I am a disbeliever in love at first sight. No one could doubt that Patrine is attracted, and he—the Count"—she dropped her eyelids—"is simply too fearfully gone for words. Absolutely dead-nuts!"

"'Gone.' ... 'Dead-nuts.' ..."

"I give you my word. Entangled hopelessly. 'What a captive to lead in chains,' I said to Patrine—he is quite six feet in height or over, and has the most perfect features; simply magnificent eyes, the most fascinating manner, and the build of a Greek athlete. He is staying at the 'Tarlton,' and I must say Lady Beauvayse is extremely sympathetic. For since they came back from Paris together the Count has been taking Patrine about everywhere. She can hardly have had a glimpse of my gay girl.... Dinners, theatres, the opera, and heaven knows what else, they have crowded into the week!" The smiling speaker shrugged her ample shoulders. "To say nothing of cabaret suppers and dances. He even promises to take her to the famous 'Upas Club.' Wonderful, by all accounts. They say the French Regency came nowhere near it. Dancing in the Hall of the Hundred Pillars, a simply wonderful three A.M. supper, and champagne of the most expensive brands, served up in gold-mounted crystal jugs."

"Can it be possible? ..." broke from Saxham. "Are you mad, that you countenance this German in taking Patrine to such an infamous place?"

"'Infamous!' Really, Owen, your notions are too old-fashioned for anything." Her laughter broke out, and her chains and bangles jingled an accompaniment. "Do," she urged, "come out of your shell. Dine with us on Thursday. We have a box for the 'Ministers' Theatre. We'll go on, you and I, George and Irma, from there to the cabaret supper at the 'Rocroy.' We can't afford the 'Upas,' the subscription is too fearfully prohibitive. But the entertainment at the 'Rocroy' is really chic—the dancing is as good—everyone says—as they have it at Maxim's. Do come! Of course, you can trust us not to blab to your wife! Mercy! how severe you look!" Her tone changed, became wheedling, her made-up eyes languished tenderly. "Odd! how we poor, silly women prefer the men who bully us. Come! One chance more. Dine Thursday and see 'Squiffed' at the 'Ministers'—try a whiff of Paris at the 'Rocroy' after midnight, 'twill buck you up like nothing else—take my word! Won't you?"

"I will not!"

"Why not?"

"I have told you why not. Because these places are centres of corruption, schools for the inculcation and practice of vice in every form. Men and women, young or old, those who take part in or witness one of these loathsome dances, hot and reeking from the brothels and voodoo-houses of Cuba and the Argentine are equally degraded. I had rather see my niece Patrine dead and in her coffin than know her capable of appreciating such abominable exhibitions, pernicious in their effects, as I, and others of my profession have grave reason to know!—ruinous in their results to body, mind, and soul!"

"Intolerable!"

Her plump, middle-aged face was leaden grey beneath her violet veil as she screamed at him:

"You have insulted me! Horribly—abominably! ... How dare you tell me that I frequent infamous places, and encourage my daughter to visit schools of vice! And it is not for Irma you are so rottenly scrupulous, but for Patrine, your wife's favourite! Who will do as she pleases, and marry whom she prefers without 'by your leave' or with mine! She is a mule for self-will and obstinacy—another point of resemblance to yourself! ..."

He had recovered his stern self-possession. His face was granite as he said:

"I have not insulted you, but if you will set no example to your daughters in avoiding these evils, it is my duty to expostulate."

She reared like an angry cobra, then spat her jet of scalding venom.

"I take leave to think my present example quite harmless to Irma and Patrine. Now yours—of a few years ago—was certainly calculated to damage the bodily and worldly prospects of your son." She added, as Saxham silently put out his hand to touch the bell: "No! please don't ring. I know my way out. Good-morning.... Pray remember me to Bawne and your wife!"

CHAPTER XVIII

SAXHAM PAYS

Thus, having shot her bolt, Mildred departed. The Dop Doctor standing in the open doorway, watched the gaily-accoutred, middle-aged figure in the peg-top skirt and bouffante tunic of green taffeta patterned with a violet grape-vine, moving down the white-panelled corridor.

Saxham watched her out of sight before he shut the door and went back to his chair. There he sat thinking.... No one would disturb the Doctor until he touched his electric bell.

Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the thought that in the niches of Heaven are safely stored our ancient idols. To Owen Saxham it was gall and verjuice to remember that for love of this woman, weak, vain, silly, spiteful, he, the man of intellect and knowledge, had gone down, quick, to the very verge of Hell.

Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had been slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. Her neck had been long and swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet long and narrow. He had desired her with all the indiscriminating passion of early manhood. He had planned to pass his life by her side. He had hoped that she might bear him children—he had wrought in a frenzy of intellectual and physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen profession, that Success might make life sweeter for Mildred—his wife.

She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in that seeming. Then the shadow of a tragic error had fallen blackly across his path. From the omission to copy in his memorandum-book a prescription made up by himself in a sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown v. Saxham. His acquittal restored to him freedom of movement. He left the Court without a stain on his professional reputation, but socially and financially a ruined man.

Friends and patients fell away from Saxham—acquaintances dropped him. Mildred—his Mildred—was one of the rats that scurried from the sinking ship. She had thrown him over and married David, his brother. Her betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning Saxham's cup of woe. Those vertical lines graven on his broad white forehead, those others that descended from the outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the corners of that stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles of the lower jaw, were chiefly Mildred's handiwork. They told of past excess, a desperate effort to drown Memory and hasten longed-for death on the part of a man who had quarrelled with his God.

The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had been cast out. An ordeal such as few men are called upon to endure had purified, cleansed, and regenerated the drunkard. Friendship had taken the desperate man by the hand, plucked his feet from the morass, led him into the light and set his feet once more on firm ground. His profession was his again to follow. Love, real love, had come to him and folded her rose-white wings beside his hearth.

Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had passed, and now—the July sunshine had no warmth in it, though it streamed in through the open window over the tops of the pot-roses. The Dop Doctor's head was bowed upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as though he strove with a mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his elbows leaned, the boards beneath the thick carpet on which his feet rested, creaked as the long shudders convulsed him at intervals.

It had seemed to Saxham—in whom the seed of Faith had germinated and put forth leaves in one great night of storm following upon years of arid dryness—that Almighty God must have forgiven those five worse than wasted years.

Fool! he now cried in his heart. The Divine Mercy is boundless as the ocean of air in which our planet swims, and for the cleansing of our spotted souls the Blood of the Redeemer flowed on Calvary. But He who said in His wrath that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, does not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He has taken to His Heart again—the immutable laws of Nature. Nature, of all forces most conservative, wastes nothing, loses nothing, pardons nothing, avenges everything.

The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried on the invisible wings of Air forever. Thus, the deformed limb, the devouring cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the degrading vice, are perpetuated and reproduced as diligently and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the noble quality, the wit that charms, the genius that dominates. Nay, since Nature turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or Shakespeare or Molière or Cervantes, it would appear that she prefers the fools.

So it is. Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner. The ugly vice, the base appetite, have been eradicated by prayer and mortification, by years of self-control and watchfulness. Free will, moral and physical force, self-command and self-respect are yours again. And with sobs of gratitude the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.

Saved. Cured. Great words and true in Saxham's case as in many others. But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their eyes have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the prairie, or the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they will hear, when they least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp that once bit them to the bone. Or supposing that they have forgotten in reality—so cleverly has the world pretended to!—with what a pang of mortal anguish Memory awakens. When you recognise the devil that once entered and possessed you, looking out of the eyes of your child.

When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the third leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his son's blue eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.

To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most terrible penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five sodden, wasted years.

Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a drunkard's hand—his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom in a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life, verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.

But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.

Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter question:

"How could I have forgotten—Bawne?"

CHAPTER XIX

BAWNE

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?

The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all familiar—the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man's heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin or loss.

"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid, and Honour bright!"

Saxham answered with equal gravity:

"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may come."

The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the thick throat and prominent under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that swept over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette's. The delicate, irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips were gifts from his mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously modelled on the father's, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of manly independence to come within the curve of the Doctor's strong arm:

"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."

Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of this Scout's Patrol.

"Turn round and show it, then!"

"Father, you're larking. That's my General Scout Badge. I've had it ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when I was a Tenderfoot, I'd only the top-part—the fleur-de-lis without the motto, and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this is something special, don't you see?"

Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful tremor in his voice:

"I've got the Ambulance Badge!—look at the Geneva Cross!—and the Signaller's Badge—this is it—with the crossed flags—and the Interpreter's Badge—the one with the two hands holding. But this is the very latest. Our Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day. It's the Airman's Badge—" He caught his breath, the secret was coming in a moment.... He went on: "To get it you must have made a model aëroplane. Not a flying-stick, any kid of nine can make one—but a model that will really fly. That's my special reason for coming. Mother was out—and—and next to her I wanted to tell you!"

"And next after me?"

The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:

"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."

Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.

"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"

"Rather!"

"Just tell me why?"

"Because"—the young brows were puckered—"because she's so big and so—beautiful. And she'd just die for you and Mother.... She comes in my prayers next after you two."

"And—the Chief Scout?"

"Father, wouldn't it be—a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like that?"

A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.

"Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you're taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and Queen?"

The boy's puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.

"Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That's what Mother says."

"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would you do then?"

Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:

"I would go and find her and bring her back!"

"Suppose she did not want to come?"

Bawne said instantly:

"I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you know. And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she wouldn't!"

"She cares so?"

"Doesn't she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and Mother was so ill?"

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the guarded bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her husband fought for her with Death.

"Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of your model."

The boy said, controlling his exultation:

"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You see—it's rather a special affair. It's not a flying stick, like the things I used to make when I was a shaver, nor a glider—you see men in spectacles flying those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty"—he caught his breath and with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling over one another as he reached the thrilling climax—"and I built up her fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a tin toy engine I've had ever since I was a kid—and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars, sir!—the upright ones are quills, and her stays and struts I made of copper wire and she's weighted with lead ribbon like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-fishing for tench or barbel—and her motor-power is eighteen inches of square elastic twisted—and father"—he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy unrestrained—"when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to Primrose Hill to test her—she flew, sir! First go-off—by George!"

"Really flew? ... You are certain?"

"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour. Scout's Honour and life are the same thing. That's what the Oath rubs into us." He squared his shoulders and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt with reverently. "I think it's—ripping. I can say it. Would you like me to?"

Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something sticking in his throat. That something Lear called "the mother." And, dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed. As the young voice said:

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and the King.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people at all times.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout Law.... You see"—the boyish arm was on Saxham's shoulder now, the ruddy-fair cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face—"you see, Father, when a Scout says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the Crucifix!"

Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost mastered him:

"It is—just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never keep an oath.... I have a friend of whom I have told you.... I think he would like to hear about your model aëroplane.... May I tell him, or would you prefer to tell him yourself?"

Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:

"Father.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand—your Flying Man who's in the Hospital?"

"My Flying Man—but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should. Now he has asked me—this afternoon if I am at leisure—to bring my little son to the aërodrome and see him make a flight."

"And go up in his aëroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!"

As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:

"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my son!"

The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father's heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast. Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.

He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.

"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say—"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend—since you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators—though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.

But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out its æons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.

CHAPTER XX

THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES

Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that faced the window. There were confirmed invalids who were really healthy men and women, and certain others who came in smilingly to talk about the weather and the newest Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the unmistakable stamp of mortal disease. The wife or the husband, the father or the mother had worried for nothing.... Would the Doctor prescribe a little tonic to buck them, or the surgeon alleviate a little trouble of the local kind? Really nothing—but—Death's knock at the door. And there were cases—open or unacknowledged—of the liquor-habit and the drug-mania. To these, instead of dropping out bromide of potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates with strychnine and the chloride of the metal that is crushed and assayed out of the quartz reef near Johannesburg, or pick-axed out of the frozen ground of the Klondyke, Saxham dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.

The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted the fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:

"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so. Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the habit is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank alcohol to excess for a period of five years."

Some of the sufferers—elderly women and mild-mannered old gentlemen—were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal—but attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the stern, impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.

"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would stutter. "And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in his hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog bites, if anyone does!"

He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering. Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free air, and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.

Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon than the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the leech. A patient hearing given to their category of evils—a little hocus-pocus, and a nostrum or so.

We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the salted earthworms, and the Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis or Pulvis Sanctus, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon—have but given place to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other small mammalia, with—instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates. With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century physicians—professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate—for the spurring of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.

Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.

Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate—consider.... This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator—this Ego for whose eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man, weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.

The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of an ounce?

It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with flowers.

A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need of one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might pray, it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while the miracle was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.

CHAPTER XXI

MARGOT LOOKS IN

It drew on to the luncheon hour. The last patient a very young, very little, very pretty married woman, was summoned by the neat maid from the waiting-room, in a remote corner of which a husband of military type and ordinarily cheerful countenance, remained, maintaining with obvious effort a fictitious interest in the pages of a remote issue of Punch.

The dainty little lady bore a name well known to Saxham. The fact that a title was attached to it did not interest him, nor had it shortened her term of waiting by a second of the clock. But her youth smote him with a sense of pity as she took the chair upon his left hand facing the window, and without overmuch embarrassment made clear her case.

She was going to have a baby. Franky, her husband, earnestly desired the kiddie for family reasons, yet its advent was unwelcome to him, in that it must inevitably involve physical pain and mental anxiety for the little lady, Franky's wife.

The little lady had been frightfully downed by the prospect. She rather cottoned to kiddies, she explained, than otherwise. It was the bother of having them that didn't appeal. It put everything in the cart as regarded the Autumn Season. Besides—there were family reasons on her side, why the prospect should not be too rosy. She stated the reasons, and Saxham's listening face grew grave. He realised the danger of a Preconceived Idea.

He said nothing. Margot went on talking. Her beautiful deer-eyes were alternately wistful and coaxing. They entreated sympathy. They begged for gentleness. They grew brilliant with enthusiasm as she explained that after a lot of chinning, she and Franky had hit upon a perfectly ripping plan.

A friend, recently encountered in Paris, had thrown a ray of hope upon the doubtful prospect. No doubt Dr. Saxham was in sympathy with the pioneers of the New Crusade against Unnecessary Pain.... Of course, Dr. Saxham knew all about the wonderful experiments of German gynæwhatdoyoucall'ems. The right term was frightfully crack-jaw. Perhaps Dr. Saxham knew what was meant?

Saxham reassured the little lady.

"You refer of course to the experiments of Professors von Wolfenbuchel of Vienna, and Krauss of the Berlin Fraüenklinik, resulting in the method of treatment now known throughout the Continent as 'Purple Dreams.' Wolfenbuchel and Krauss have published a pamphlet on the subject. Perhaps you have read the pamphlet?"

"Yes—I've read it. A wonderful book that has been translated into every language. A German officer, friend of a friend I met in Paris, told her about it. His sister had tried the treatment, and found it A1. So I bought a French translation of the book in Paris, and an English one at a shop in the Haymarket. It's bound in rose-coloured vellum stamped with a rising sun in gold. 'Weep No More, Mothers!' it's called. Isn't that a charming title? And the subject is: 'Pangless Childbirth, Produced through Purple Dreams.'"

In a sweet, coaxing voice that trembled a little, she began to tell the Doctor about the wonderful results obtained by hypodermics of Krauss and Wolfenbüchel's marvellous combination of drugs. And Saxham hearkened with stern patience, while the table-clock ticked and the luncheon hour drew near, and Franky chewed the cud of suspense in the Doctor's waiting-room.

Thousands of peasant women, and others of the lower middle-class in Germany had become mothers under the Purple Dreams treatment. Maternity Hospitals in Paris, Brussels, and New York had adopted the method after controversy and hesitation. It had triumphed over every doubt. An American woman whose brother's wife had had a "Purple Dreams" baby at the Berlin Institute had told the little narrator only yesterday how quite too wonderful was the discovery of the enlightened Krauss and the gifted Wolfenbuchel. Everything was made easy. When your ordeal drew near you simply went to the place, and signed your name in a book, and put yourself in the hands of skilled persons. You felt no pain—not a twinge. Only the prick and throb of the hypodermic needle-syringe, and most people were used to the pique nowadays—administering the first subcutaneous injections of the wonderful new drug.... Under its mild sedative influence you dozed off to sleep presently. And when you woke up—there was the baby—beautifully dressed, and lying on a lace pillow in the arms of a smartly dressed, fresh-cheeked nurse.

This had been the experience of the sister of the German officer, as of the wife of the brother of the American lady. The same thing happening to thousands everywhere. The philanthropic Wolfenbuchel and the benevolent Krauss had made of the stony Via Dolorosa by which Womanhood attains maternity—a path of soft green turf bordered with fragrant lilies and bestrewn with the perfumed petals of the rose.

She ended. Saxham had kept his keen blue eyes steadily upon her during the eloquent recital. Not a hair of his black brows had twitched, not a muscle of his pale face had moved—betraying his urgent inclination to smile. His fine hand, lying upon the blotter near the small black case-book, might have been carved out of ancient Spanish ivory, or yellow-white lava. Now he said:

"There is nothing new nor marvellous about the 'Dreams' method. It is—persistent narcosis obtained from the subcutaneous injections of morphine with the hydrobromide of hyoscine, another alkaloid obtained from henbane. I have visited not only the Institute at Berlin, but the Rottburg Fraüenklinik—and an establishment of the same type in Paris, and another in Brussels. It is a fact that when a patient awakens from the anæsthesia there is no recollection of anything that has taken place subsequently to the injection of the drug."

"There has been no pain. Absolutely—none whatever!" She spoke with a little, joyful catch in her breath.

"Pardon me," said Saxham. "You labour under a delusion which the rose-coloured pamphlet was not written to dispel. There must have been pain—if there has been childbirth. Perhaps there has been overwhelming pain. Pain manifested by outcries and convulsions—violent struggles—subdued by the attendants and nurses—for the friends and relatives of the patient are rigidly excluded—the patient enters and leaves the Home alone. Two or three days may have vanished in that vacuum which has been created in her memory. Days in which she has been lying—it may be—strapped to the bed in the private ward of the nursing home—her purple, congested face and staring eyes concealed by a mask of wetted linen—her agonies only witnessed by paid attendants whose interests are best served by denial or concealment—supposing anything to have gone wrong?"

The relentless surgeon's hand had torn away the painted curtain. Margot contemplated the grim truth in silence for a moment. Then she found words:

"But nothing ever does go wrong. The pink pamphlet says so. My American friend's sister-in-law says so.... Thousands of women have had children under scopolo—what's its name? And none of them felt pain—not the slightest. And in every case—in every case—there was the baby when they woke up!"

The sweet bird-voice quivered. She had entered the room so full of hope and enthusiasm, and this man with the piercing eyes and the brusque, direct manner was putting things before her in a way that dashed and damped. Hear him now:

"Yes, there is generally a baby—when it is necessary there should be one. Though the patients who are treated in the free wards of German and Austrian Kliniks may not always be scrupulous upon this point. Still, if the treatment can be carried out without undue peril for the mother—and I do not allow this for a single moment—have you not considered the risk for the child?"

Margot had pulled off one long glove. Now she murmured, setting the tip of a little bare, jewelled finger near the corner of a distracting little mouth:

"You consider that it's handicapping the start for—the kiddie?"

The avalanche fell; shocking and freezing and stunning her.

"Ask yourself, Lady Norwater, and do not forget to ask your husband: Will a healthy or a degenerate type of man or woman be eventually reared from an infant in whom the springs of Life have been deliberately poisoned with henbane and morphia—before its entrance into the world?"

She gasped:

"Then it's all U.P.?" She was slangy even in her tragic misery. She sought in her gold vanity-bag and produced the envelope that held the cheque, but Saxham waved it away.

"Pray put that back.... Neither from rich nor poor do I accept unearned money. You have not really consulted me. You have asked my opinion upon a course of treatment. And I have given it, for what it is worth. You will go home, and tell your husband that I have talked tosh, and consult another physician."

"No, I won't!" She said it bravely. "I want you to prescribe!"

"If I prescribe," Saxham told her, "you shall certainly fee me. But you do not need treatment." His eyes smiled though his mouth did not relax its grimness, as he added: "You strike me as being in excellent health."

She owned to feeling "top-hole," first-class, and simply awfully beany! Though, and her dimple faded as she owned it, the thought of what must happen in November took "the gilt off the gingerbread."

"Do not think of what is going to happen in November," Saxham advised her. "Or teach yourself to think of it in the right way." The sense of her childishness and inexperience went home to the sensitive quick beneath the man's hard exterior, as she said to him with an unconsciously appealing accent:

"But how am I to find out what is the right way?"

He had gained upon her confidence. The admission proved it. With infinite tact he began to win yet another woman to drain out her chalice of Motherhood, untinctured with the druggist's nepenthe,—to gain for the race yet another babe unmarred before its birth. For this end no labour was too great for Saxham. A crank you may call him, but that cranks of this type are the leaven of the world, you know.

It is typical of the human butterfly Saxham dealt with, that his clothes pleased Margot. She liked their characteristic mingling of elegance with simplicity. Some fashionable doctors got themselves up like elderly bloods, others affected garments dating from the year One. There was neither perfume upon Saxham's handkerchief nor flue upon his coat-sleeve. His shirt of soft white cashmere, his slightly starched linen cuffs and narrow double collar were fastened with plain buttons of mother o' pearl, the black silk necktie was blameless of pin or ring. The handsome gold chronometer he carried because it had been presented to him by the Staff and patients of St. Teresa and St. Stanislaus. The chain attached to it—rather worn and shabby now—was of woven red-brown hair.

The hair of his wife. A creamy-pale Niphetos rose stood where her hands had placed it near his writing-pad, in a tall, slender beaker of green-and-gold Venetian glass. His eyes drank at the beauty of the lovely scarce-unfolded blossom. Perhaps the resemblance of the fair flower to the beloved giver softened the lines of the stern square face into the smile that Margot liked, as he found her eyes again, saying:

"Perhaps I could better answer your question by telling you how another patient bore herself in—circumstances akin to yours. Will it tire you? I promise not to be unduly prolix. And to listen commits you to no course of action. Now, shall I go on?"

"I'd love you to go on!"

Always in extremes, the little wayward creature. She flushed and sparkled at the Doctor as he took from its place on his writing-table a triptych photograph-frame in gold-mounted mother-o'-pearl, folded the leaves so as to reveal but one of the portraits, and held under Margot's eyes the delicately-tinted photograph of a girl of twenty. The portrait had been taken the year following Saxham's return from South Africa with his young wife.

"How beautiful!" Margot exclaimed.

"Beautiful, as you say, but does she look happy?"

Margot wrinkled her dainty eyebrows, puzzling out the question. Did she look happy, the girl of the portrait, whose face and figure might have served one of the old Greek masters as model for an Artemis to be carved upon a gem? Well, perhaps not quite happy, now one came to look again.

The black-lashed eyes of golden hazel were full of wistful sadness, there was a faintly indicated fold between the fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the rippling red-brown hair, whose luxuriance seemed to weigh down the little Greek head. The closely-folded, deeply-cut lips spoke dumbly of sorrow, the nymph-like bosom seemed rising on a breath of weariness. Something was lacking to complete her beauty. So much was plain even to Margot. But not until the Doctor showed by the side of the first, the second portrait, did she realise what that Something was.

In the first portrait both face and figure were shown in profile. In the second, bearing a date of two years later, the beautiful, sensitive face of the young woman was turned towards you. Still rather grave than smiling, she held in her arms a sturdy baby boy of some twelve months, upon whose downy head her chin lightly rested. The clasp of her slender arms about her child, the poise of her still nymph-like figure, expressed fulness of life, buoyant energy, and happiness in fullest measure. What was previously lacking was now made clear.

"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an exquie kiddy!"

"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's husband had done not long ago.

"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them. But"—she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from another woman—"but the fag of having them doesn't—appeal!"

The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back upon his visitor.

"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She—the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"

The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham went on:

"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For that these——"

The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his discourse.

"—That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God."

"How awfully good she must be!"

"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live—Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered intensely——"

His voice broke.

"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: 'Not yet! ... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns.' To-day the crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"

The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.

"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning, or I meant to.... My—my own mother died when I was born!"

"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance. Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your case and that of the—patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you more promising—regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."

Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole minutes had gone. She rose.

"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school. "Franky—my husband—will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him at the Club."

"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me," Saxham suggested.

Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:

"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"

CHAPTER XXII

MARGOT IS SQUARE

She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk" for fear that Saxham would accompany her to the threshold. But he merely bowed her out of the consulting-room and smartly shut his door. Then she tripped to the waiting-room and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant, fictitious cheerfulness. Her eyes were radiant, her little face was dressed in artful smiles....

"Did I seem long? Were you getting the hump?" she asked of Franky, who rose and hurried to meet her, dropping Punches all over the place. His smooth hair was almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a retriever's. He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:

"Yes—no! Did you pull off the interview? What does the Doctor——"

"S-sh!" She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining patient. "Tell you when we get out. Impossible here!"

He urged: "But is it all right?"

"As right as rain!"

"Good egg!" She had got him out of the room and as far as the hall door. "Stop! ... Wait! Oughtn't I to go and thank——"

"No—no!" The door was open, the neat little landau-limousine that had brought them was waiting by the kerb-stone. Before Franky knew it, Margot had plucked him down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given the chauffeur the signal. They were in Hanover Square before he recovered his breath.

"Oh come, I say, Kittums! That sort of Sandow business can't be good for you. Why you're in such a thundering hurry to get me away, I'd rather like to know?"

Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.

"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about the 'Purple Dreams' treatment?"

"More than anything in the world. That drug with the freak name! ... Can it do any harm—to you and——"

"Not a scrap!"

She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar. He greatly appreciated the attention, though it tickled him horribly.

"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable method. Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't suffer—not that much!" She measured off an infinitesimal bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went on as he caught the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't know a thing that happens. You simply go to bye-bye. And—there's always the baby when you wake up!"

"A first-class baby?" His harping maddened her. "A healthy little buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the Regiment, and inherit the title presently when his poor old Pater pops? Just look me in the face like the little sport you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square with me. For this—for this is the game of Life!"

He had both her hands. He made her look at him. She met his eager stare with limpid eyes. And all the while that sentence of Saxham's about the pre-natal poisoning of the springs of existence, drummed, drummed at the back of her brain. "What a little beast I am!" she mentally commented, hearing her own voice answering:

"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with you!" She grasped the fact that Franky had suffered, by the grunt of relief with which he loosed her hands. "And so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of—September, say?"

"Wow-wow! It's us for the gay life! Just when the beastly hole's as dusty as the Sahara and as hot as hell!"

"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't go before the beginning of October. You can go down to Brakehills and slay away at the pheasants, and run over when I cable, to bring me back——"

"With my boy! Our boy, Kittums!"

His simple, kind face was quivering. He put out a strong brown hand and laid it on hers, and she gave the hand a little affectionate nip:

"Hullo!" Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary lapse into sentiment. "Pipe old St. George's, where we did the deed! Hardly seems close on six months since we got spliced, does it? And there's the Bijou Cottage...." Franky thus irreverently designated the large, drab, stucco-faced, eminently respectable if mousey mansion on the Square's east side, where Margot's bachelor Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths and beetles. "Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero? Is he at all likely to be in?"

His hand was on the silk-netted rubber bulb of the chauffeur's whistle, when Margot caught it back.

"No, don't stop! Of course he's in. He never goes out, unless it is to a meeting of the Entomological Society, or the Museum of Natural History, or some other place equally stuffy and scientific. Besides, Uncle Derek is a vegetarian—and there wouldn't be anything but tomato soup, and pea-flour cutlets, and Lepidoptera for lunch!"

"Poor little woman, was she peckish, then? All lity, we'll chuff along and fill up tanks at the Club. Bally odd bill of fare, pea-flour cutlets and Lepidop—what's-their-names? But we'll get things nearly as rummy served up to us in Berlin. Pork chops with sweet gooseberry sauce, and pink sausages with lilac cabbage and dumplings. Why do you look so scared?"

She forced a laugh.

"Not scared, but you said 'we' ..."

"You don't suppose I could go shooting when you were—facing what you've got to face?" he asked her, and added, in a tone and with a look that she had once before encountered from him: "When you go to Berlin in October, Kittums, I go with you; take that as straight from Headquarters, old child! Unless—something happens to prevent our going there at all!"

He added, answering the mute question in her eyes:

"Something that's been on the cards since the Anglo-French Agreement of 1904. It cropped up again in 1905, when the German Kaiser's feelings were so upset by John Bull's carryings-on with the pretty lady in the tricolour petticoat and Cap of Liberty, that he called on the Sultan of Morocco at Tangier to ask his Sublimity to interfere. And again in 1908 we were up against it ... when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia took the needle, and William ordered out his best suit of shining armour in readiness for a scrap.... If there's anything in the Triple Entente, the fat was nearly in the fire then.... And again in 1911, over the French occupation of Morocco, when the German gunboat Panther and the German cruiser Berlin were sent to the closed Fort of Agadir near the mouth of the smelly River Sus. That piffed out after a good deal of what they call 'acute tension between the Powers.' To the Services acute tension means the stoppin' of leave. And I'd fixed things up for spendin' the July fortnight before Henley with some jolly people at Baden-Baden, and if the trip had come off, the chances are I'd have come back engaged to another girl!"

"Are you sorry?"

"Do I look sorry?" was the quick riposte. He went on: "France and Germany went in for 'precautionary measures' that time. Precautionary measures mean concentration of troops on both frontiers, and General Manoeuvres on the biggest scale. Dress-rehearsal for a general mobilisation, you tumble? While our Home Fleet quietly concentrated on our north-east coast. And just when the lid seemed on the point of being taken off, Billiam the Bumptious climbed down, and withdrew from Agadir. The squabble was patched up. France got a free hand in Morocco in return for the open door and 100,000 square miles of the Congo Basin. French and German troops left off mugging at one another across the frontiers. Whitehall Wireless, Nordeich Station, and the Eiffel Tower emitted radios reversin' the weather-signals from 10 to 0, which means a dead calm. And the British Fleet gave up all hope and went home to bed.

"But—and don't you swipe in, Kittums, for I'm gettin' to the thrillin' part—the bigwigs who manage Foreign Affairs weren't taken in so easily. They knew the bad blood had got to break out somewhere, and it did. Italy and Turkey went to war in November, 1911, and the Balkan Rumpus broke out ten months later. Turkey didn't win, though her Army has had German instructors ever since von Moltke licked it into shape in 1835, and Germany'd naturally expected her to finish as top-dog. So the concessions Germany wanted from Turkey were lost. I rather think the Prussian Eagle had its eye on Adrianople on the Black Sea coast, and the Gallipoli Peninsula, for the furtherin' of her views on the Near East—and Austria had a fancy for the Sanjak of Novibazar—and wanted Salonika as a base for operations on the Mediterranean. Anyhow, both of 'em were wiped on the jaw. And William the All Too Knowing, as Courtley calls him—Courtley's going in strong for Nietzsche just now—says his works are a slogging attack on Teutonism!—William has got to the end of his patience. The shining armour's been hanging up all these years, getting too tight for an Emperor inclined to run to tummy. The shining sword was getting rusty in its regulation sheath. And then in the nick of time—happens the Affair of Sarajevo. The news came through that Sunday in Paris. I remember how Spitz's Restaurant boiled over, and the people were shouting 'Sarajevo' on the boulevards. By George! I forgot you were in bed and asleep while we were dining."

Margot, between waking and sleeping, had got some inkling of the tragedy of that night. She asked, as Franky took off his hat and proceeded to mop his non-intellectual forehead:

"And is Sarajevo likely to stop me from going to Berlin?"

Franky left off mopping and said, looking at her squarely:

"If Austria's Note to Serbia is—what the Kaiser would like it to be—you may take it we're on the giddy verge of a General All-Round Scrap."

"You mean—a war?"

"I mean the War that'll dwarf all others by comparison. The War of Nations, that the prophet wrote of in Revelations. Armageddon.... The Last Battle. The Big Bust Up that comes before the end."

"Darling old boy, what rot!"

"Rot if you like. You wait and see what happens. D'you pipe me tipping you the gag Asquithian?" He grinned at the idea.

"Franky, you've set me asking myself something."

"Why you've married an idiot? ... Is that it?" He turned upon her a rueful face from which the grin had been wiped away.

Margot said, as the car turned smoothly into Short Street and stopped before the Club portico:

"No, but—How is it you know—all the things you know, when I've always known you knew nothing about anything?"

He shook his head.

"Give it up! ... No, I don't! The answer is—I'm one of those fellows—and the Services are simply stiff with 'em, who are absolute asses till it's necessary for 'em to be something else."

CHAPTER XXIII

A MODERN CLUB

Perhaps in those prehistoric days before the War, you knew the big, cool, ground-floor dining-room of the "Ladies' Social" Club. They lunched excellently at Margot's pet table in the corner near the conservatory, between whose rows of well-tended pot-plants you pass to the smoke-room, celebrated for its Persian divan, and green-and-rose-coloured glass dome.

Soon the Club would be abandoned to sweeps, painters, charwomen, and window-cleaners. Just now everything was in full swing. As the little tables became vacant, the drawing-rooms and lounges filled up. The smoke-room was a crush of well got-up men and extravagantly-caparisoned women, chattering nineteen to the dozen under a thick blue canopy of Turkish, Egyptian, and Virginian. The tang of Kümmel and Benedictine and Crème de Menthe came to you with the fragrance of the Club's especial coffee and the reek of innumerable illusion perfumes.

People were having a cigarette and a gossip before going on to Lord's to see the tennis-singles between Oxford and Cambridge; or the Inter-Regimental Polo Finals at Hurlingham. Others had just motored back from witnessing the rowing-matches at Henley, between Eton and Darley, and the Eton second Eight and Montbeau College, and were recuperating before dropping in for a whiff of the new comedy at the Ambassador's, or the latest revue at the Fleur de Lis. To be followed by Tango Tea at the Rocroy, or Unlimited Bridge at the house of an accommodating friend.

Perhaps you can recall them—those men and women of the best and bluest blood in Britain, strenuously spending their days in doing nothing as expensively as ever it could be done. Light, frivolous, shallow, dry-hearted; restlessly seeking new things on which to waste their barren energies, they seemed, and bore out their seeming in all thoroughness; the degenerate sons and daughters of a once great and splendid race.

Save Vanity and the Pride of Life there seemed but little in Eve or Adam. Not overmuch grey brain-matter appeared to be contained within their small neat skulls. Though in comparison with the modern Eve, slangy, loud, extravagantly attired in every tint of the Teutonic dye-chemist's chromatic register, topped with feathers that missed the ceiling by a bare half-foot, Adam in his neutral greys, and buffs and browns, and umbers, struck you as a being of mild demeanour and uncostly apparel, until looking closer, you found him out.

His nice hair was gummed about his head as sleekly as a golliwog's. He sported stays, for the preservation of his silhouette. His gossamer cambric exhaled perfumes like a Georgian dandy's. Fashionable complexion-creams lent his tanned and well-shaved cheek a tempting peachiness. His socks were all too lovely for description by this feeble pen of mine. The uppers of his boots were of every imaginable material and substance, ranging from silk brocade, green lizard, and ivory-white shark skin, to sandy-pink armadillo-belly, or the tender grey of the African gazelle.

The results of the Olympic Games of 1912 must have made dour reading for the fathers of these youthful Britons, remembering their own triumphs in the early eighties. A bitter pill for those stark old men, their grandfathers, makers of 'Varsity records in '61 and '67, whose faith in the superiority of British lungs and muscles had been bequeathed them by their own sires. Yet their juniors took it calmly. They carried the stigma of inferiority with cheerful indifference. Even while holding it the thing best worth living for—they placidly submitted to be outclassed in sport.

And both the man and the woman of this era were possessed by strange crazes and pleased with vivid contrasts. The musical jig-saw puzzles of Lertes, Hein, and de Blonc vied in their favour with the weird Oriental Operas of the Russian Rimsky-Korsakov and the delicate rhapsodies of Delius, and the sylvan nymphs and fauns of Russian Ballet shared their plaudits with Señora Panchita and Herr Maxi Zuchs, the celebrated exponents of the Tango.

Ah, yes, it was an extraordinary era. Slips from that old, old Tree that bore the Forbidden Fruit had been successfully grafted upon so many old-world stocks in British orchards, that you caught a tang of its exotic flavour in almost everything. Play ran high. Luxury ran riot. Period Balls and Upas Club Cabaret Suppers were IT—absolutely IT. Morality was at lowest ebb—Religion a forgotten formulary. And as the Christian virtues cheapened, so the prices of dress, jewellery, motor-cars, and other indispensables of modern existence climbed to still more amazing altitudes. The marvel was, because nobody seemed to have any money—where the money came from to pay for these things? What we are yet to pay for the wholesale levelling of moral barriers, and the abolition of old-world modesty and good taste, that distinguished the years of ill-fame 1913 and 1914, only Heaven knows.

Even more comprehensively pervasive than the illusion perfumes extracted from coal-tar by German chemists, and supplied us by German manufacturers; even more striking than the dazzling, vivid aniline dyes, procured from the same source, even more potent than the vast array of by-product drugs which represent as it were the scum of the insulated vats wherein the Teuton chemist macerates and mingles his high explosives—was the strange, mysteriously pervasive flavour, the seductively-suggestive tang of evil in the social atmosphere. You caught the look of secret, intimate, half-cynical knowledge in the faces not only of the merest youths, but of the youngest, freshest, prettiest girls. Subjects held unmentionable a few years ago were openly discussed in English drawing-rooms. Curious lore in strange things old and new was much sought after at this period, when Cubism and Futurism governed design, not only in dress and stage scenery, but in Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; and dances known in the voodoo-houses of East Africa and the West Indies, and the hells of Central America and the Argentine were seen in the ball-rooms as in the brothels, of Paris and London, Petrograd and Brussels, Vienna, New York, and Berlin.

Novelty was so much the rage, that if the Arch-Enemy of Mankind had appeared among the exclusive patrons of a fashionable night-club in any one of these cities, a hearty welcome would have been extended to him, and his ripe experience would have been laid under contribution with a view to imparting to the latest Cabaret entertainment some exotic novelty from Hell.

Franky with obtrusive care selected a comfortable corner of the Persian divan for Margot, and while she signed for coffee and Kümmel, established himself at her side.

They were isolated, it seemed to Kittums. Friends nodded and smiled cordially, but did not attempt to join them. Was it because Franky's too-possessive manner had told secrets? ... She shivered and glanced at her lord. He said, as the light-footed button-boys scoured about with coffee and liqueur-trays, while the electric fans purred, the blue smoke-canopy thickened under the green and rose glass dome, and the clamour of many feminine voices, in combination with the gaudy feathers of the clamourers, suggested the South American macaw-house at the Zoo:

"My eye! you're pretty thick in here. Might be a fog in mid-Channel." He mounted a square monocle recently purchased in Paris and the pride of his bosom, threw back his head and stared up into the famous green and rose dome. "Swagger affair. How much did it tot up to?"

"Seventeen hundred, clear, with the carpet and the divan."

"Pretty stiff!" His doleful whistle set Margot's teeth on edge. She added:

"And rattling cheap at the price! And—if it wasn't, I was spending my own money.... There was nobody—then—to interfere!"

He conceded:

"Of course I don't suggest that you were done in the eye. Probably you got the value of your dibs. But you'll have something better to spend cash on presently. Me, too! We must both draw in our horns now, Kittums. For the sake of—you know who! ... Hullo! Is anything wrong?"

She had winced, but she gritted her little teeth, and fought back the rising hysteria. She could have shrieked, or thrown the little coffee-pot at his head. He went on, recognising friends through the smoke-haze:

"There's Lady Beau with that German aviator-chap we met in Paris. Big red-headed brute. You remember him? And—who's the girl? But for her hair, I'd say it was Miss Saxham. By the Great Brass Hat, it is! With a wig, or dyed...."

"Dyed. It was done in Paris—done most beautifully." Margot's eyes had lighted up with interest. "I must have forgotten to tell you. I've known it three or four days. Don't you like it?"

"Like it?" Franky had reached for his little glass and gulped the contents hurriedly. "My stars, I never saw such a transformation. Order another Kümmel, please, to give me a buck-up."

"Take mine. I simply loathe the sticky stuff." She added, as Franky obliged: "I think that Pat looks ripping."

"All too ripping. That's where the trouble comes in." He went on: "When her hair was black, you knew where it was you'd seen her. Makin' one in an endless procession of women—all with long eyes and big busts and curving hips, walkin'—like pussy-cats along a roof-ridge, on the walls of those old Egyptian temples we did together—that November when I got such spoons on you—going up with the Gillinghams from Cairo to Philae—a flat-bottomed Nile tug towin' the whole crowd in a string of dahabeahs. You remember those ochre-coloured Nile sunrises? When a dust-storm had been blowin' over the Desert, and the River was all wrinkly white, like curdled milk."

"How killingly poetic!"

"Am I poetic? Good egg! Never thought I'd live to be called that."

"Live and learn!" Margot's laugh was a hard little silvery tinkle. She too was remembering the sunrises and sunsets of Egypt, and the long days under the green canvas awnings. How beautiful she had thought the brown eyes that seemed only vacuous now. She, Margot, would be ugly very soon now, she told herself. Already her small face showed lines and hollows. Soon beauty-loving men and women would turn their eyes away.... Her cheval-glass would tell her why, and shop-windows when she passed them would reveal her shapelessness. She would only possess interest for three people. For the doctor, as a patient. For the certificated nurse, as a Case. For her husband, as the potential mother of the boy he longed for. And—what price Margot?

"Should you like me to take you to see some polo, or wouldn't a chuff-chuff in the country be best?" Franky's eyes were full of hungry solicitude as they rested on the small, pinched features. "You look a bit fagged, it strikes me!"

She nipped her little lower lip, stung by the tone of sympathetic proprietorship. "Oh! very well. A drive!" she told him, and they passed together from the smoking-room. The sheath-skirt revealed, as she moved, what she would have hidden. Von Herrnung smiled, following the little figure with bold, curious glances. Other men stared, if more discreetly. Towering feathers nodded to each other as their feminine wearers commented:

"Poor little Margot, how quite too rough on her!"

Said Lady Beauvayse, assuming the rip-saw Yankee accent in which it pleased her to deliver her witticisms:

"Say now! if we women could pick babies right away off the strawberry-vines, it would save a deal of trouble, and a considerable pile of self-respect."

Everybody laughed. A slender white and golden woman with a string of sapphires very much the colour of her own eyes, picked up a toy Pekingese that squatted near her, and said, cuddling the goggling morsel under her chin:

"I agree. When I look at my two precious duckies I say to myself: 'You little dears, for each of your sweet sakes I became a plain woman with a shapeless silhouette and saucer-eyes. Now that I've done my duty to your pappy and Posterity, this is the only kind of baby I'll indulge in." She kissed the Pekingese on the end of its black snub-nose. "And when I want a new one—I'll buy it at the shop!"

"Noch besser. Why not hire one? ..." suggested von Herrnung.

Mrs. Charterhouse laughed and gave him the Pekingese to hold. But it snapped at him furiously and she took the little beast back again.

"Dogs do not like me," said the big German. "You will read perhaps in novels that that is a bad sign, yes?"

"I never read novels," returned Mrs. Charterhouse, with her famous manner, "nor any books, only bits of the papers for the Sporting and Society news. And Reports of Divorce Proceedings, and the Notices in Bankruptcy. One likes to know what one's friends are doing, and where they are to be found. Don't you, Count? Not that there is any great difficulty in ascertaining your whereabouts, just now, I fancy.... Why, what has become of Patrine?"

"Miss Saxham went in there just now to write a letter," said the smiling von Herrnung, pointing to the leather-covered swing-doors communicating with the writing-room. "She comes now, I think! Yes, it is she!" He rose with his air of exaggerated courtesy as the tall figure of Patrine Saxham returned through the swing-doors and re-crossed the room. She carried her head high, and had a letter in her hand. The alteration in the colour of her hair made her whiteness almost startling. There were bluish shadows about her long eyes, and her rounded cheeks had lost a little of their fulness, but her beauty had never been more apparent than now.

"She has dyed, therefore she is dead to me!" groaned Courtley, who was, as usual, in attendance on Lady Beauvayse. He added, plaintively: "It's like—white-washing the Sphinx, or enamelling a first-class battle-cruiser in some fashionable colour. Why did you let her do it, my lady fair?"

Lady Beauvayse retorted:

"Am I Miss Saxham's mother that I should meddle in her love-affairs?"

"If I was acquainted with her mother," said Courtley, below his breath, "and thought the good lady would take my tip seriously, I'd step in and nip this affair in the bud. It's no go, even if Miss Saxham thinks it is. It's a dud. That German flying-chap is booked to marry a cousin; a Baroness Something von Wolfensbragen-Hirschenbuttel. I've seen it in the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger, and that's inspired, a sort of Imperial Court Almanac. And even if it wasn't true, there are reasons—" His kind grey eyes were worried, he tugged at his pointed black beard in a vexed way. "Take me seriously, Miladi, tell her what I've told you, before it's too late!"

"And bring on myself the fate of the interferer.... Couldn't you—since you're so anxious?" Lady Beauvayse began.

"Not possible," said Courtley. "Too crushed with responsibilities. Got to brush up my seamanship, while my junior executive swots away in Docks at Chatham, fillin' in the watch-bill and making out commissioning-cards."

"You've got a ship, do you mean?"

Courtley nodded.

"They call her one at the Admiralty just by way of being funny. When they've scraped off the dirt enough to get at her, she may turn out to be a first-class protected cruiser. Twenty months out of commission—and mobilised for the Spithead Naval Review."

"Ought one to be glad? ... Does it mean that we're to congratulate you on promotion?" asked puzzled Lady Beauvayse.

"Well," Courtley admitted cautiously, "when I've got my full-dress frock-coat and sword out of pawn, and hoisted my pennant and called on the post Commander-in-Chief—I shall be something between a Rear-Admiral and a Post Captain—or they'll have told me wrong."

"And the Review—what do you call it?" persisted Lady Beauvayse. "Can one go and see it—whenever it comes off?"

"It'll be big enough to see—with a stiffish pair of binkies," admitted Courtley in his gentlest manner; "and the newspapers seem to have arranged it for somewhere in the middle of the month. As to what you're to call it—if you called it an Object Lesson on the biggest scale for the use of German Kultur Classes, perhaps you wouldn't be very wide of the bull."

He got up before Lady Beauvayse could rejoin, and had met Patrine, and engineered her into his vacated seat next her friend upon the divan almost before she knew. She lowered her tall person upon the cushions, studiously avoiding von Herrnung's glances. She wore a white embroidered gown of cobwebby material and extreme scantiness, a stole of black cock's feathers was looped about her shoulders, and on her dead beech-leaf-coloured hair sat a curious little hat of glittering silver spangles, from which sprang a single black cock's plume.

"What have you all been talking about?" she asked, looking about her.

Lady Wastwood, who sat near, answered, balancing her long, slim, fragile personality on the fender-stool before the hearth that was filled with tall ferns and flowering plants in pots:

"We were saying—what a wretched pity the process of racial reproduction is so abominably unbecoming. It really points to a loose style of reasoning on the part of Nature—or whoever it is who arranges these things!"

Who does not know Lady Wastwood. She affected, at this period, a skull-cap of gold-green hair and a triangular chalk-white face, with a V-shaped mouth, painted scarlet as a Pierrot's. Her eyebrows were black and resembled musical slurs. Through her few diaphanous garments you could have counted every bone of her frail person, so light that it was a favourite vacation joke with her eldest boy—who was now at Sandhurst qualifying for a Cavalry Commission—to sprint with his widowed mother on his shoulder up and down corridors and stairs.

Listen to Trixie:

"I suppose—Nature. She's so unreasonable—that must be why she's a she, in literature. She implanted in us poor women the raging desire to be pretty under all imaginable circumstances.... At the same time she says to us: 'You're immoral, unnatural, and selfish, if you don't replenish the Race. Go and do it!' Consequently, when one is ordered in that bullying way to choose between immorality and ugliness, one calls out: 'Oh! do let me be pretty, please!'"

A soldierly, good-looking man, sitting with a charming girl in a particularly smoky corner, lazily propounded:

"Why do women covet prettiness beyond everything?"

"To please men, I rather surmise," said Lady Beauvayse, turning her Romney head in the direction of the speaker, who queried:

"Ah! but why do women want to please men?"

"I can answer that," interrupted Mrs. Charterhouse. "Because she who pleases is perfectly sure of having a gorgeous time."

"It has been said by some inspired idiot," lisped Lady Wastwood "that women make themselves beautiful for the sake of their own sex. Give us your opinion on this question, Count von Herrnung. Did I put on this perfectly devey frock for Miss Saxham, or for you?"

"Gnädige Gräfin, for neither myself nor Miss Saxham. For your own pleasure," said von Herrnung, "have you joy in making yourself beautiful."

"You feel like that when your tailor has done you particularly well?" asked Lady Wastwood, wickedly, looking down her long, thin nose to hide the sparks of humour in her eyes. Half a dozen pairs of ears were cocked to catch the answer, in which von Herrnung's characteristic lack of humour showed.

"Gracious Countess, certainly. It is prachtvoll for a cultured man to study and develop his physical advantages. To please women," he made his little insolent bow, "who adore Beauty, and for the sake of ingratiating oneself with men. But above all for one's own sake. For ugliness is despicable," said von Herrnung. His florid face paled, his hard blue eyes dilated, he shivered as he spoke with uncontrollable disgust. "It is—niedrig! There is no other word! No longer to be beautiful and strong—that would be horrible! There are many ugly accidents in our German Flying Service. Thus far I have escaped disfigurement. But when my time comes I shall take care to be killed outright. Better to die than to be made hideous!"

"Did you hear?" said the man in the distant corner to the charming girl who shared it with him. "The fellow's dead in earnest. And he is uncommonly good-looking, though I don't care about the German Service type of man myself. Don't like their clothes, don't like their jewellery, don't like their tone when they're talking to women, and simply loathe it when they're talking to me!"

"It's a case of Doctor Fell," said his pretty friend. "Now I should admire him—if he admired himself a little less, and his valet or somebody with influence over him could persuade him to cut that awful thumb-nail. No, you can't see it now. He's wearing a glove on his left hand. But it can't be under two inches long."

"Queer kind of freak for a Twentieth Centurion," said the man contemptuously. "All very well for the Imperial Court of China, or a Stone Age make-up for a Covent Garden Fancy Ball. But for a London drawin'-room in the year 1914 it is a little off the bull. We must approach Miss Saxham in the matter of cutting it. She appears to be the Ruling Star."

His friend glanced across at the big knot of people gathered near the ferny fireplace.

"They go about together a good deal, and he does stare at her in rather a possessive style. She's so awfully good to look at, isn't she?"

"She is; but she isn't quite so good for you to know!"

"Why?"

"Could we drop the subject? I'll say why later. Let's scoot now! With luck, we could nip in for the end of the second act of 'The Filberts' at Ryley's Theatre, and see Jimmy Griggson do 'The Dance of the Varalette.'"

And they rose and sauntered away in search of entertainment, leaving Cynthia Charterhouse drawing out von Herrnung, who seemed in a particularly arrogant mood. Did he like England and London especially? Did he find English women as nice, generally, as the friends he had left at home?

ü

"Nice.... One is charmed with English ladies!" declared von Herrnung. "So tall, willowy, and elegant, so independent of manner, and so amiably ready to make a stranger feel at home! True, they have not the plumpness and repose of our German ladies ... at the theatres especially they are rather thin than otherwise.... But they have gehen and chic"—he showed his white teeth—"and change is a delightful thing!"

Patrine, silent in her settee-corner, wondered whether Trixie Wastwood and Cynthia Charterhouse knew that he was insulting them?

"Change from a fat woman to a thin one, is that what you mean?" asked Mrs. Charterhouse. She added: "I'm so glad we strike you as having lots of go. Perhaps it's a result of our being given to exercise, that general effect of slimness you mention. But if German women don't walk, or ride, or skate, or fence, or swim, they do dance a great deal."

"They dance a great deal, yes!" agreed von Herrnung. "One might say they are passionately devoted to it. Dancing is also one of the chief joys of a German officer's life—when he has handsome partners to choose amongst!" He added: "When one is young, and the blood runs hot in the veins, what more glowing pleasures can Life offer, than to ride a noble horse, to drink glorious wine, or to dance all night with a beautiful woman, to the sound of music voluptuous and exquisite!"

Patrine, behind the shelter of a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette, was shuddering uncontrollably. Her life seemed driven back from the extremities to centre about her heart. In that and in her brain were glowing cores of fire. All else was ice, rigid and heavy and cold.

"Dear me!" came plaintively from Mrs. Charterhouse. She signalled with her eyebrows to Lady Wastwood and continued, as the diaphanous Trixie came drifting to her assistance: "Really, I shall have to seek a delightful change by going to Germany. I'd quite forgotten how different you are! The way you talk about your blood, and all that. It's simply too awfully interesting! Trixie, you've got to listen to this!"

"I need no telling, I assure you. I have been drinking in Count von Herrnung's eloquence at every pore," affirmed Trixie. She added: "Like you I have been deeply intrigued by his descriptions of his countrymen. So, so different from our poor creatures, who don't drink glorious wine because they funk gouty complications, and leave their noble horses eating their heads off in loose-boxes while they're scorching about the country in racing-cars. And as for dancing all night—" She shrugged her frail shoulders, and elevated her Pierrot eyebrows beneath the veil that tightly swathed her white triangular face.

"Doesn't it fire you to go to Germany?" gushed Mrs. Charterhouse. "Why"—she demanded, raising her fine eyes to the genuine Adam ceiling—"why can't my husband get a post in the Berlin Diplomatic, instead of stupid old Petersburg? One never dreamed Germans could be so interesting before!"

"We are interesting, yes!" blandly agreed von Herrnung. He lighted a fresh cigarette, balanced his magnificent person upon an inlaid Oriental chess-stool, folded his huge arms upon his broad breast, and turned upon Trixie and the impressionable Cynthia the batteries of his superb blue eyes. "Es mag wohl sein—it may possibly be because the Englishman is a human machine—a cold and formal, if intelligent being; while the German is a child of Nature, whatever his calling may be. His bounding pulses throb under the official or military uniform as though it were a fawn-skin worn by a young satyr. He can sing. He can revel. He can enjoy. He can love——"

"He can love! Now you're getting really quite too interesting!" Mrs. Charterhouse exclaimed in seeming ecstasy: "Do go on, Count. Pray, pray tell us how German officers love!"

"Yet this exuberance, and seeming-careless child-likeness," pursued von Herrnung, "co-exists in the representative male of our glorious German nation with an energy which is pitilessly indomitable, and a hardness like that of diamond, or of the metal of the Hammer of Thor. Scratch the child, joyous and voluptuous"—the ladies nodded to each other delightedly at this second reference to voluptuousness—"you will find beneath its rosy skin the German Superman. Gnädige Gräfin, may I give you a cigarette?" He pulled out a massive silver-gilt case, and offered it to Lady Wastwood, who had thrown away the end of a tiny Péra.

"Thanks," said the lady, "but it might turn out a super-cigarette and disagree with me. How astonishingly well-informed you Germans are upon the subject of yourselves! I've met heaps of your countrymen whom the subject seemed perfectly to obsess. I suppose they begin to teach you at a very early age, don't they? Don't you suppose they would, Cynthia dear?"

Mrs. Charterhouse agreed.

"Of course. But I wonder if that sort of—might one call it—intensive culture?—can be good for you?" With her charming head on one side she regarded von Herrnung pensively. "Don't you sometimes get fed up with yourselves? One would somehow suppose you would! Like the East End Board School children whose mother had to write to the Fifth Standard teacher to ask her not to tell Hemma and 'Arriet any more nasty things about their insides."

Courtley and Lady Beauvayse, who under cover of a separate conversation had been listening, were seized with simultaneous attacks of coughing, rose and escaped from the smoking-room. Patrine Saxham remained, seeming to study the newspaper she had picked up. But only a confused jumble of letters, big and little, danced up and down the columns she held before her eyes.

And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout the newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world. How little we dreamed of what was coming while crowded London audiences applauded Jimmy Greggson in the "Dance of the Varalette." The River was ablaze with multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their gate-money to witness cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts between International champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs.

Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight Carpentier was whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia, white-faced, weary-eyed men of great affairs were spending the hot hours of the July days and nights—minus a stray half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and then—in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents of the Secret Intelligence Department—who were registered as numbers and owned no names.

These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible designs perfect and perfecting. Poison-fruit, grown and matured in shade, now bursting-ripe and ready to kill. The aërials thrilled, the long waves travelled through invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed men.

The despatches were not all in cipher. Thus little polyglot employés, youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge of ship-stations in Territorial or foreign waters, or Wireless posts quite recently established on foreign frontiers, found themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors, Emperors, Kings, and Presidents.

In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost gravity," "friction avoided," "Triple Alliance," and "Triple Entente," were repeated over and over. To them the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his Cousin of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas. They heard the British Foreign Secretary talking from Downing Street to the British Ambassador at Berlin, and the British Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to communiqués from the Quai d'Orsay. Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna, confirming Whitehall views as to the extreme gravity of the Austro-Servian situation.

Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded sanctum in the Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz, Berlin, saying in a cipher of grouped numbers, the secret language of Hohenzollern intrigue not understood of little operators—things that bleached the face of the listener in London to the yellow of old cheese.

"As Vicegerent of the World, charged by Almighty God with the supreme duty of maintaining peace among nations ... warn these silly devils of the danger in which they stand! Just for the word 'neutrality'—a word in War-time often disregarded—they risk annihilation of a dynasty by my conquering sword, and the inevitable blotting-out of the British race. Invasion Belgium indispensable.... Must strike the blow before Russia could get to the frontier. Life and death as regards the Success of my Plan. Delay by diplomacy. Promise anything for neutrality. Obtain an understanding of non-intervention. Bluff for all you are worth!"

Again in yet more groups of numbers, the vocal spark sang on and on:

"Attention. If the Secret Service agent who has managed to get into Lord Clanronald's service as under-librarian at Gwyll Castle can secure complete copies—or better still, the originals—of the old Lord's plans for construction of the secret War-machine that hypocritical England has kept up her sleeve out of so-called humanity since the days of the British Regency—strike a deal with him at once. To the ménu that will presently be served to our enemies—beginning with Super-Explosive—explosive bullets, incendiary shells, lachrymatory shells serving as entrées—the bombardment of Dover from Calais—the destruction of London and the chief Naval Ports of Great Britain by our Zeppelin Fleet being the pièce de résistance of the banquet—the Clanronald Death-engine will be added as fifth course! Thou wilt pay the rogue who has dared to stickle for higher terms ten thousand pounds in English banknotes on account of the sum of twelve million marks he presumptuously demands of us. The balance will be paid him on personal application at the Wilhelmstrasse—you understand! Warn Prince Henry and von Moltke not to risk bringing the Secret Plans personally. Should the loss of the documents be discovered, suspicion would instantly attach to one of these two. Trust not the thief; he may be tempted to betray us. Send the plans by Undersea Boat 18 now on coast-observation duty in Area 88—fathoms 50—44, east of Spurn Head. Annulled. Forward by air. Squadron-Captain-Pilot von Herrnung of my 10th Field Flight will be detailed for this duty, being now in London investigating the value of a new stabiliser—rejected by the English War Office—which the French Chiefs of the Service Aë are anxious to secure. Tell him to obtain a personal flying-test from the inventor. I say no further! As the Hohenzollern were noble robber-knights, so also were von Herrnung's ancestors. Let the eagle fly home to his Imperial master with booty from across the sea. England may suppose him drowned. France also.... We shall know better.... A hearty welcome awaits the proud bird-knight alighting on our German soil."

CHAPTER XXIV

DISILLUSION

Rhona Helvellyn came stalking in, looked round, recognised Patrine, came over and dropped down beside her on the divan, full to the brim of the invariable subject, and suffering to talk.

Through the good offices of a legal pal she had got in to hear the Suffragette Trial at the Old Bailey that day. Fan Braid and Kitty Neek had been frightfully plucky. Full of grit and vim, in spite of the six weeks' hunger-strike. Began shrieking like Jimmy O! the moment they were brought into the dock by the warders and wardresses. On being rebuked by the Judge, Fan had bunked a bundle of pamphlets at the head of his lordship, catching the Clerk of the Court, who was seated immediately underneath the Bench, no end of a biff in the eye.

"And then?"

Patrine heard a strange voice from her own stiff lips asking the question.

"Then both of 'em were removed from the Dock. It was done—in time!" Rhona's light eyes danced with enjoyment. "Such a scrimmage! Such a rumpus! Took three men and a woman to tackle each of 'em. We could hear 'em giving tongue all the way down to the cells. Then they had to go on with the Trial without 'em." She chuckled. "You may guess there were a lot of us at the back of the Court waiting—just for that! Perfect wadge all together. Hell and trimmings when we started. They had to eject us before they could jog on with their gay old summing-up!"

"But in the end they got through?" The weary voice was so unlike Patrine's that she wondered why Rhona did not jump and stare at her. But Rhona was mounted on her hobby-horse, and unobservant of other things.

"Through right enough! And Fan and Kitty—" Rhona screwed up her lips into the shape of a whistle, and winked away a tear that hung on one of her fair eyelashes; "It's too brutal! Three months each, and poor little Kitty dying of lung-trouble. They only brought her back from Davos in May. That riles me!" She clenched her hands fiercely and went on, cautiously lowering her tone: "So far I've taken no active share in any Militant Demonstration. Partly because I'd be wiped off the Club books if I got spouting in public, or was mixed up in any police-court business, partly because I'm funky—there's the word! But at last I'm wound up! It was Kitty's little peaky-white face did it! ... She—she broke a blood-vessel as the warders were carrying her down to the cells."

A sob choked Rhona's voice, and a spasm of misery wrenched her. She controlled herself. She was deadly in earnest—wound up to go, as she had said. She went on, talking rapidly, in a tone that only reached the ear it had been meant for. How many such secret disclosures the Club divan had known.

"I've thought.... A regular swarm of Distinguished French and Belgian Big Pots and Little Pots—Mayors—Prefects and Deputies, Judges, Press Representatives and Inspectors-General—are engaged in Discovering England this week as ever is. It's an echo of the Entente Cordiale. Behind the badge of the International Advancement Association—I've got one!—I might drop in at one of their farewell speechifications, I believe the next's on Friday at Leamington—and heckle 'em like one o'clock! Ask 'em why women don't have the Vote in France and Belgium——"

"Don't they?"

"Nix a bit! Not for all the fuss they make about the sex. Or—to fix the scene of my maiden effort nearer home—there's a Banquet of Archbishops, Bishops and their wives at the Mansion House to-morrow night. Music just after the flesh-pots and before the speeches or after—a select company of Concert Artistes, the gemmen in boiled shirts and the usual accompaniments; the ladies in white with black sashes and black gloves. And that's where I shall come in—in white with black trimmings. Land of Hope and Glory!—when I get up and ask the Archbishop of Canterbury to plump for Female Suffrage!—or shall it be the Lord Mayor? ... Won't my Uncle Gustavus burst the buttons off his episcopal waistcoat. You've seen him. He's Bishop of Dorminster—and they fasten 'em at the back."

"Let the Bishop keep his buttons on!" said Patrine, suddenly and savagely. "What the—devil does it matter whether women get the Vote? Would we keep it if we got it, or throw it away—oh! idiots—idiots!—to gratify some vulgar vanity, or some beastly sensual whim?"

"Gee-whillikins!" Rhona whistled shrilly in astonishment. "Why, I thought you were one of Us. Not actively militant, but a sympathiser, no end. Didn't you get our Committee in touch with Mrs. Saxham, when we'd set our hearts on having her speak at the Monster Meeting of Women we're going to have in October at the Grand Imperial Hall? She's promised to address us on Suffrage and we're all over ourselves to hear her. That last article of hers in The National Quarterly—'The Burden of Tyre,' has collared the literary cake. People tell me who've read it that she doesn't care a hang about the Vote for Women in any other sense than that it'd open a gateway to legislation on the Sex Question of a much more drastic kind. She'd bring in a Bill to have moral offences against children dealt with by a Jury of Mothers—a lot they'd leave of the offender once they'd their claws on him!—and make it a Life Sentence every time, for the fellow who seduces a girl."

Patrine listened in stony silence. Rhona chattered on. "Of course the work she does amongst those unlucky wretches—young girls and women who've come to grief—is topping. But why waste herself rescuing prostitutes and street-walkers? Aren't any of us good enough—or bad enough to interest her? I'm going to ask her that when you introduce me—remember you've promised to!"

Patrine said in a voice jarred and harsh with anger:

"Since your declared intention is to be offensive to Mrs. Saxham, whose shoes neither you nor myself, nor any woman of our set is worthy to unlace, I take back the promise, if it was ever given!"

"What's up?" Rhona turned and stared. "I say!—but you look fearfully seedy! Worried about Margot, is that it?" She was off on another tack, carried by the light shifting breeze of her imagination. "Poor little Margot!—in spite of good advice and top-hole mascots—booked for the Nursery Handicap—and out of the running for a year!"

"Who told you—that?—about Margot?"

"Melts—the head housemaid here—had it from Kittum's maid Pauline, who dropped in to fetch away some stored luggage of her ladyship's.... They've furnished a house at Cadogan Place—Margot and her Franky-wanky. West End enough, and quite exquie inside, but not as convee as the dear old Club. But—I believe I'm boring you." Her nimble glance left Patrine's face, and darted in the direction of von Herrnung. "Who's the big, good-looking, carroty man, gobbling you up with his eyes while he's talking piffle to Cynthia and Trix? Now I remember—I have heard some hints of your going over to the Common Enemy." Rhona's sharp light eyes sparkled like polished gold-stones. "Is that the reason why you've bleached your hair? What a putrid shame of you! And the Enemy's a foreigner—a German! Did he give you that gorgeous ring?"

Upon the third finger of Patrine's left hand was the magpie pearl set in platinum, gleaming to its wearer's fevered fancy, like some malignant demon's eye. Rhona caught the hand, and uttered a little squeak as Patrine wrenched it away. She—Patrine—was driven beyond endurance: her self-command was breaking. Her hair seemed to creep upon her tingling scalp. Down her spine and along the muscles of her thighs passed slow recurrent waves of physical anguish. She could have screamed aloud, torn her garments, set her teeth in her own flesh. But she mastered herself sufficiently to say:

"I won the ring over a bet in Paris. You can see for yourself I don't wear it on the engagement left. Do not despair of me. At this moment I do not particularly esteem women. But on the other hand, I absolutely abominate men!"

"Hope for you then, politically speaking," said the misanthropic Rhona. "What, are you going?"

Patrine had thrown aside her paper and risen, towering over her. She nodded without speaking, and went out of the smoking-room, crumpling the letter she had written in her strong white hand. She would not post it, she told herself as she passed through the outer lounge. She would go and look up Uncle Owen at Harley Street. She spoke a word to an agile hall-boy in the vestibule and he skipped out, and signalled a taxi-cab.

A handsome Darracq four-seater, enamelled bright yellow and fitted in ebonized steel, was waiting by the kerbstone. As the taxi manoeuvred to get round it, von Herrnung's voice said, speaking behind Patrine:

"Stop the boy, that machine will not be wanted.... I have here a car that is lent me by a friend."

She turned and saw him, standing hat in hand. His tone was pleasant, and he was smiling. He went on:

"He—my friend—is a Secretary of our German Embassy. He has three automobiles—why should he not lend me one?" He replaced his hat and pulled a curved gold cigar-case out of the breast-pocket of his waistcoat asking: "I may light a zigarre after these stupid cigarettes I have been smoking? It will not be unpleasant to gnädiges Fräulein?"

His courtesy insulted. His smile was an outrage. She controlled the trembling of her lips with difficulty. Whether he observed or not was uncertain, he seemed to busy himself solely with the selection and kindling of his cigar.

"Pardon that I get in first, as I shall be driving!" he said, and threw away the smoking vesta, pushed back the hall-boy who was wrestling with the door-handle, got in and took his place at the steering-wheel, beckoning to Patrine.

"Thanks, but I cannot.... I am going to Berkeley Square."

"I will drop you at Berkeley Square." He met her eyes hardily. "You will not refuse me this pleasure, when I have not seen you since—" The slight significant pause stabbed as it had been meant to. He saw her wince, and finished: "Since two days. Will you not get in?"

She took the seat beside him. He stretched his arm across her knees and shut the door neatly. She leaned back to avoid his touch, and he smiled, feeling her shudder. Her eyes were on his gloved left hand as he drew it back.

He manipulated the electrical starter and the yellow Darracq moved up and out of Short Street. Patrine stared before her, sitting rigid in her place. Not once did her glance visit him. But every skilful movement of his hands upon the steering-wheel, every creak of the springy leather cushion under his great body, every tightening of his mouth or twitch of his thick red eyebrows, were photographed upon her brain.

He was irreproachably got up in thin, loose grey tweed morning clothes, cut by a West End tailor, and his feather-weight grey felt hat testified to the make of Scott. His knitted silk tie, a combination of electric blue and vivid yellow, was a discordant note. Patrine was certain it must have been the work of some other woman in Berlin. The heavy flat gold ring through which the ends were drawn was set with a ruby and two diamonds, another false note that jarred her painfully. But he was looking strong and well and in admirable condition. His blue eyes were bright, his red hair and his tightly-rolled moustache glittered in the sunshine, there was a bloom of perfect health upon his florid skin.

If Patrine did not look at von Herrnung, his eyes were less abstemious with regard to her. Under cover of their short red eyelashes, they scrutinised her from time to time. There was unbridled curiosity in their regard, and also a retrospective vanity, admiration, and resentment as well. She rode the high horse. She was hellishly sure of herself. Sure of von Herrnung, it might be. This passed in his mind as he said to her:

"Do you know that this car has had the honour to carry the Emperor of Germany? When Seine Majestät paid a visit to England in the year 1907, he used it every day."

Patrine returned indifferently:

"It seems to go smoothly."

Von Herrnung said, as the car obeyed every motion of his practised hands upon the steering-wheel:

"It is a wonderful traveller. It has been fitted with a Heinz motor, three times more powerful to its weight than any other known petrol-engine. Some journeys, I can tell you, it has had with the All Highest. Travelling incognito, driven always by a—certain young Prussian officer; then of Engineers—attached to the Personal Staff specially for this work."

"I daresay you mean yourself?"

"That is a clever piece of guessing; I congratulate you, gnädiges Fräulein. Well, it is now no secret. I do not object to admit having been the young Leutnant in the case. So now you know how I gained my flair for English scenery and my violent penchant for English beauty. A weakness of which I am rather proud, since it is one the Emperor shares."

The final sentence might have conveyed a jeer. But Patrine was not listening. She called to her companion: "You are driving in the wrong direction for Berkeley Square, but it does not matter. Please put me down just here at the corner of Harley Street. I can leave this letter at a house there instead of putting it in the pillar-post."

"You are not getting out, gnädiges Fräulein. You are coming with me to Hendon. I have there a little business which will occupy an hour." He added with a familiarity that stung, looking at the tense white profile and the black brows knitted in anger: "You are yourself to blame that I cannot part with you. You are really as magnificent by day as by evening—with your so-gloriously-coloured hair. May I also congratulate you on the effective costume? Black and white are our Prussian colours. I take that as a personal compliment."

"Take it as you like, it will not make it one."

"Sehr gutig. I do not need telling. When I want things I take them. It is a habit of mine."

He spoke sheer, brutal truth. Oh God! what of Patrine's had he not coveted and taken, only two horrible days ago. "So," he went on, "you will have to post your letter. I will stop at a Postammt and drop it in for you. You see, I am greedy of your society. At any moment I may be recalled to Germany. One must catch the Bird of Happiness and hold it while one can. Now tell me, is not that a pretty speech?"

"Extremely, but it does not alter the situation. I have a particular appointment. I cannot go to Hendon with you."

"I have already told you that we are going there. Grosse Gott!" His tone was savage. "How is it that you are so confoundedly stubborn? Do you think such behaviour sensible—or wise?"

"I am certainly wiser than I was two days ago."

He slewed his head round to look at her with a greedy curiosity. He saw the lines of face and figure grow rigid, and her bare hands clench themselves together in her lap.

He glanced at her ringed hand, then transferred his regard to his own left hand, the glove upon which he had retained at the Club. The soft dressed suéde bulged as though a bandage were concealed underneath. She averted her eyes hastily as though she shunned some ugly, sickening, spectacle. He said:

"I see that you honour me by wearing my mascot. The magpie pearl most excellently becomes your beautiful hand, my dear!"

They had reached Regents Park Square and were turning into the Broad Walk. She plucked the ring from her bare finger, and held it out to him, saying in a low tone:

"Please take it back!"

"I am to take it back? ... You are in earnest?"

She repeated her words, holding out the bauble. He released his gloved left hand from the steering-wheel to take it. His eyes were on the road ahead and his face was hard as pink stone. But she heard him give a little sigh of relief as he slipped the ring into an inside coat-pocket. He said, as though to excuse the sigh:

"It was given me in April, when I made my raid on Paris from Hanover, landing my Albatros once only during two days' flight. The weather was magnificent. My engine gave no trouble. That is why I call the ring my mascot, you understand. Now that it has been worn by you, it is more precious than when I first received it. Whenever I look at it, it will speak to me of you."

"Don't let it!"

"Why should it not speak of you? Isis! My heart's Queen!"

"I have told you—don't revolt me with—piffle of that kind. And don't touch me, unless you want me to jump out of the car!"

A voice that he barely knew had issued from the face she turned on him—a face all violet shadows and haggard drawn lines, under the burning splendour of the dead beech-leaf hair. She vibrated like an electrified wire, and round her pale pinched mouth and about her blue-veined temples were little points of moisture, fine and glittering as diamond-dust.

"Am I to understand that my touch is unpleasant to you? That you are angry with me? That you do not love me any more?"

"Love...."

She laughed out harshly, hugely disconcerting him.

"Lady Wathe said at that Grand Prix night dinner in Paris that you were without a sense of humour. But you must have a grain or so—to talk of love to me!"

She turned her face away, and the exquisite beauty of her small white ear appealed to him provokingly. He ground his teeth. He could have thrown his arm about her, and crushed the tall, full, womanly figure against him. How superb she was in her mood of hate. The strapped-up wound in his left hand was throbbing and smarting, just as when she had writhed her head free from his furious kisses and bitten him to the bone.

He had made her pay richly for her bite. He hugged himself as he remembered.... Now the sting of desire was renewed in him and he eyed her with greediness. Presently he stooped and said in her ear, coaxingly:

"Let us be friends! Dine with me at the Rocroy to-night. We will have a box at the Alhambra, and sup again at the Upas. Say you will come, loved one! Will you not, Patrine?"

"No!"

"No? But I think you mean Yes! Do you not?"

"I have said No! Is that not enough?"

"You are mad!" he blustered at her—"mad as a March hare!"

She answered him:

"I have been mad, but I am sane now and I stay so."

He said scoffingly:

"You may not always remain as you are now!"

If he launched a poisoned dart, its meaning glanced aside from her.

"Shall you not write to me when I am back in Germany? Not one line? Not one single word? Yet I have a few little notes from you that I particularly value...."

"Make the most of them. I shall write no more." And suddenly her hate and loathing of him reached boiling point and ran over. "My God! Can't you understand that I ask nothing better than never to see nor hear of you again!"

"Grossartig! You are hellishly conciliatory." His voice was thick and shook with anger. His smile mocked and the look in his eyes was hateful as he pursued in a tone that was now quite gentle and purring: "Just think a bit, my dear! Because—to burn one's boats behind one—that is not prudent at all!"

She did not answer, and he drove on to Hendon, planning fresh assaults upon this unconquerable woman's pride.

CHAPTER XXV

THREE MEN IN A CAR

When the yellow Darracq car turned in under the archway that advertised Fanshaw's Flying School in three-foot capitals, the name revived no associations in the mind of Patrine. She had never visited the aërodrome upon an afternoon in the mid-week, when as in the present instance practice and instruction were being carried on. The cafés, no longer crowded by smart people, were thinly patronised by bronzed young men in overalls, not innocent of lubricating medium, thirstily drinking ginger swizzle or sucking iced-lemon squashes through yellow straws. Business-looking middle-aged men discussed the market-prices of steels and timbers, dope and fabrics, over bitter beer and ham-sandwiches, while experimenting amateurs, male and female, discussed in loud, relieved voices the experiences of the premier flight. These, having been previously warned not to experiment upon a crowded system, were now ravenously putting in the solid, three-course lunches they had foregone.

It was a perfect July day, hot and blue and green and golden. To the nor'-west, you glimpsed the elms and oaks and beeches of Boreham Wood, westward the chestnuts of Bushey and Stanmore in fullest summer foliage. The hawthorns of New Barnet were already browning in the sun. Hill and common were plumy with the brake-fern. Heather and ling were purpling into bloom.

Still looking westwards, you snatched a glimpse of Windsor. Eastwards, a diamond set in emeralds, was the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Across the whitish-grey scarp of Highgate and the verdant shoulder of heathy Hampstead you saw the dun-coloured haze that is the breath of London, the huge, black, formidable and formless monster, as, sprawling on her ancient River, she keeps her envied place in the Sun.

At the café end of Fanshaw's enclosure the Frogged Roumanian String Orchestra were playing the "Dance Rhapsody" of Delius. From a rival establishment came the brazen strains of a German band in a death-wrestle with ragtime. Behind a straggling crowd of visitors, where the cars that had brought them were parked in a double row, von Herrnung stopped the yellow Darracq, leaned across Patrine's unwilling knees and opened the car-door.

As Patrine was getting out, a large hand in a white leather glove was thrust forwards for her assistance. The owner of the hand was a square-faced, fair-haired, soldierly-looking servant of the somewhat hybrid type that has replaced the carriage-groom. He wore a dark blue livery overcoat with silver braid upon collar, belt, and shoulder-straps, black knee-boots, and a white topped cap with silver braid, a shiny black peak and an enamel front badge in black, white, and red. Looking past Patrine, he saluted in military fashion and spoke to von Herrnung in German, of which language Patrine possessed a smattering:

"Will the Herr Hauptmann speak to the Herrschaft? Upon business. Er ist sehr wichtig."

Von Herrnung, at the first sound of the messenger's voice, had stiffened to rigidity. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction pointed out by the big hand in the white glove, and answered:

"Say to the Herrschaft that I come!"

The groom vanished. Von Herrnung jumped out of the yellow Darracq and went quickly over to the machine that had been indicated, a large, superbly-finished F.I.A.T. touring-car of the landau-limousine type, enamelled dark blue with a narrow silver line of finish. The top was open. A white-capped chauffeur in dark blue and silver livery sat immovable at the steering-wheel, and three men, only one of whom was plainly visible to Patrine, occupied the roomy body of the car.

The visible man, sitting in the forward seat with his back to the motor, his baldness topped, in deference to the weather, with a white felt Newmarket, was a long-bodied, broad-shouldered personage, certainly over seventy; clean-shaven, with staring eyes of light grey tinged with bilious yellow, and skin of a prevailing yellow-grey doughiness, with a huge wart in the middle of the cheekbone on the side next to Patrine. His clothes were of yellowish-grey like his eyes and skin, his linen had a yellow line in it and a huge, crumpled vest of buff nankeen threw into relief a flaming crimson satin necktie confined within bounds by a flat jewelled ring. He had the air of an old actor of character parts, or of a libertine monk who has foregone the cord and cowled habit. Of the two men sitting facing him little could be seen beyond the peak of a gold-banded white yachting-cap pulled rather low over a bronzed and rather aquiline profile with an upward-turned moustache and slightly-grizzled beard of reddish-brown, and a Homburg straw with a broad black ribbon and a slouched brim, overshadowing the face of the man who sat on White Cap's left hand. An astute and cunning face, his; long and sallow, with narrow, blinking eyes, a drooping nose, and a drooping black moustache. With this its owner played constantly, twisting and pulling it with a delicate white hand that wore a diamond solitaire. He never looked up, when addressed by either of his companions, but raised his eyes to the speaker, and pivoted, without lifting his head.

Von Herrnung's friends were nothing to Patrine, and von Herrnung's person was by now intolerable, yet her eyes unwillingly followed the tall, soldierly figure as he drew himself up, clicked his heels and uncovered. A brown hand went up to the peak of the white yachting-cap, the wearers of the straw Homburg and the felt Newmarket slightly raised their hats. Von Herrnung did not speak first, he waited bareheaded to be spoken to. When the door of the big blue car was opened by the servant at an imperious signal from the sallow man, von Herrnung got inside, and sat down beside the personage with the wart on his cheek,—leaning forwards deferentially to be addressed by the bearded wearer of the white yachting-cap, who made great play with a brown right hand that sported a heavy gold curb-chain watch-bracelet. Once the hand clenched and shook in vivacious threat or warning, very close to von Herrnung's handsome nose. That made Patrine laugh, and instantly she was angry with herself for laughing. She put up her long-sticked sunshade, turned her back upon the blue F.I.A.T. car and moved away towards the part of the enclosure where the visitors sat or promenaded, drawing eyes as she went with her spangled silver headgear twinkling in the sunshine, and its black cock's plume waving over her strangely coloured hair.

So changed, so changed. She was sensible of an alteration even in her gait and gestures. A sickness of the soul weighed on her body as though she walked in invisible fetters of lead. The free space, the fresh air, seemed to yield no physical stimulus. She had bitten deep into the apple of Knowledge, and found bitterness and ashes at the core.

CHAPTER XXVI

A PAIR OF PALS

Among a dozen pairs of masculine eyes that followed the gallant womanly figure, crowned by the plumed hat of silver spangles and displayed in the frank unreticence of fashion by the semi-transparent sheath of glistening white, a pair very blue, very shiningly alert and interested, drew nearer until the elongated shadow of a small boy in Scout's uniform mingled upon the sunlit turf with the longer shadow of Patrine.

His thumping heart had said to him: "You know her!" It was Pat and yet not Pat. Her tall, rounded figure. Her walk. The same face—and another woman's hair. The white gown and the long stole of black cock's feathers he had seen before, and the hat had previously fascinated him. He had asked Pat if it were not made of the twinkly stuff with which they covered the Bobby-dazzlers on Christmas trees? She had cried "Yes!" and assured him that she would always hereafter call it her "Bobby-dazzler chapper." ... And his Cousin Irma, whom Bawne secretly abominated, had said it was too bad to talk costermonger slang to the child. "The child." ... A man must be ready to pardon an insult from the unpunchable female. But Bawne found himself wishing that Cousin Irma had been a boy.

He loved Pat. You had to love a person who could keep secrets as faithfully as Dad or Mother, and play tennis and hockey better than a great many grown-up fellows. Bowl you out at cricket, too, middle bail, before you could wink. She could cycle all day without getting knocked up, and swim a mile, easily. For these reasons Bawne knew he loved her. But he loved her most for the reasons that he did not understand.

"Pat!"

He had screwed up his courage to touch his crusher felt and speak the name, but the tall lady with the electrifying hair did not seem to hear. Her long eyes looked at him in a blind way without seeing him. He had never kissed this frozen, stranger's face.

"I thought you knew me! I most awfully beg your pardon!" he stammered, in scarlet anguish, and the dull eyes suddenly came to life, and the stiff lips smiled:

"It's Bawne. My sweet, I'm glad! How did you come here?"

"Dad brought me because he'd promised," the boy said joyously as they shook hands.

"Where is Uncle Owen?"

"Over there." Bawne pointed to two men talking apart beyond the straggling line of spectators, and Patrine recognised the great frame and scholarly stoop of the Doctor, standing with his side-face towards her, a half-consumed cigar in the corner of his mouth, and his stick, a weighty ivory-topped Malacca, loosely gripped in both hands behind his back.

"And the man he is talking to? Why—of course! It's Sir Roland—how is it I didn't recognise him?"

"The Chief Scout!" Bawne's tone was one of incredulous wonder. "But you couldn't have forgotten him! It—isn't possible!"

Nor even to a stranger did he appear a personality to be easily forgotten, the bright-eyed, falcon-beaked, middle-aged man, whose feather-weight crusher felt was worn at an inimitable angle, and whose slight, active figure set off his well-cut morning suit of thin blue serge in a way to arouse envy in a military dandy of twenty-five.

"You see," Bawne explained, "he was talking business with Father, so I just took myself out of the way." He added: "They hadn't told me to, but they might have forgotten. And so"—the big word came out of the childish mouth quaintly—"I acted on my initiative—you understand?"

"I understand." The formal handshake once over, their fingers had not separated. She held in her large, strong, womanly palm the hand that was little, and hard, and boyish. It squeezed her fingers, and the squeeze was an apology. It said:

"I'd like you to have kissed me if there hadn't been lots of people looking. For, of course, you know I love you, Pat!"

"And I love you, Bawne. We'll always love each other, whatever happens," said the answering pressure. Her spoken utterance was:

"So these are your holidays! ... How did you leave them all at Charterhouse? And—are you still tremendous pals with young Roddy Wrynche?"

He said, with a naive, adorable gravity:

"Boys don't squabble like girls—and Wrynche is a frightfully decent fellow. We passed together from Shell into Under Fourth, and we've promised always to stand by each other!"

"Good egg! And now, how is it you're here? Has Uncle Owen given in at last about the flying?"

"Really and truly! Man alive!"—Bawne's characteristic expletive—"I've been up to-day in the air-'bus and—wasn't it first-class!"

"Honour?"

"Honour! Twice round the aërodrome with the Instructor—and presently I'm to have a longer flight with Mr. Sherbrand in his monoplane."

"'Mr. Sherbrand' ..." Patrine repeated rather vaguely. "Sherbrand" had somehow a ring that was familiar. Bawne explained:

"He's a great friend of Father's. He's splendid. A regularly topping chap!"

"And you've actually flown?"

"I've flewed—and I mean to go on with it." He repeated the assurance more sedately: "It's the profession I have chosen. They say you've got to begin young. And my legs wobbled and the ground rocked a bit when I got down on it. But I wasn't air-sick at all."

"Air-sick.... Are people...?"

Bawne said from the pedestal of superior knowledge:

"Oh, aren't they just, like anything! The Calais-Dover steamer-crossing's nothing to it sometimes—the Instructor told me."

Patrine laughed. The latest circulating-library novel, Love in the Clouds, had omitted to mention this fact. The heroine had donned an aviator's cap and pneumatic jacket, and "leapt nimbly on board" the aëroplane in half a gale of wind. As the machine dipped and rose gracefully upon the heaving element that cradled it, Enid had experienced merely a delicious exhilaration. Then a crisp moustache had brushed her rosy ear. The voice of Hubert, attuned to deepest melody of passion, had murmured in the shell-like organ of hearing: "Little girl. At last I have you! ... Mine, mine, my bride of the swan-path!—mine for ever and aye!"

Bawne continued, innocently discounting further statements on the part of the author of Love in the Clouds:

"He told me before we went up, you know. Of course, when you're flying you can't hear anything but the racket of the propeller. It goes roaring through you till your bones buzz, and the very ends of your teeth hum. So the other man has to yell at you through a trumpet, or write to you on bits of paper, unless he's switched off the engine for diving, and then you don't feel like talking—that's if you're a beginner, you know.... But man alive! it's splendid. You must try it, Pat!"

She declared, laughingly:

"While a single flight costs a brace of my hard-earned guineas, the sport is not for me! Why haven't I got a pal like your wonderful Mr. Sherbrand? I'm getting envious—you lucky infant, you!"

It didn't hurt to be called an infant by Pat, because she never would have done it in a stranger's hearing. And it was ripping to have her here, sharing his hour of joy.

He told her: "Father brought me here as a reward for making a model aëroplane. Reminds me!—I've got to tell you all about that. But it's only a toy and this is the Real Thing. There's nothing worth having in the whole world," added the unconscious philosopher "unless it's real and true!"

"Am I not real?" Patrine asked, squeezing his shoulder.

"Now you are!" He said it with an effort of candour. "But when I saw you a minute ago, I wasn't—quite sure." He glanced up at her and asked shyly: "Why are you different since you have been away in Paris?"

"Different, how different?" She whipped her hand from his shoulder. Her black eyebrows knitted, and her face stiffened into the strange mask that had puzzled him, under the scrutiny of his clear blue eyes. "Do I seem changed?" she queried. And Bawne answered:

"A little. I was afraid at first you were somebody else, because of"—he said it shyly—"because of your hair."

"My hair?" she repeated blankly, and then said awkwardly: "The air of Paris did that, darling, but it will soon be its old colour again!"

"Will it ever be just like it was before?" asked Bawne, looking innocently up at her, and something broke in Patrine's heart just then. She gave a sudden gasping sigh, and a sudden spate of tears rolled over her thick underlids, streamed down her pale cheeks, and fell upon her broad bosom, heaving under its thin covering of filmy white voile.

"Pat! You're—crying!" Bawne had never yet seen his friend weep, and he was wrung between pity and bewilderment. "Who has vexed you? Who has been hurting you?" he begged, and she answered brokenly:

"No one! ... Someone.... It doesn't matter!" adding: "Would you punch him, if anyone had—done as you say?"

"Wouldn't I?"

"My sweet!" Her arm went round his slight, square shoulders. She doted on the little amber freckles on his pure, healthy skin, the little drake's tail of silky red-brown hair at the nape of his brown neck, the half-shy, half-bold curve of his mouth as he smiled, the blue sparkle of his eye glancing sidewise up at her. She found in the pure warmth and sweetness of the slight young body leaning against her, a healing, comforting balm.

"Why aren't you my little brother, Bawne?" she said, hugging him closer. He answered after an instant's thought:

"If my mother could be your mother too, it would be jolly! Not unless! ..."

He was not going to take on Mildred for anybody. Patrine sighed pensively.

"That's what I used to cry for when I was a little pig-tailed girl, my sonny. More than anything I wanted to belong to Aunt Lynette. But she's so young—only thirty-three. She couldn't be my mother."

"No." His eyes considered her face gravely. "Of course not. You're far too old. How old are you, Cousin Pat?"

"How old am I?" A shudder went through her. "Nineteen in August. And I feel about a hundred and one."

"That's 'cos you're not well!" His eyes were anxious and a little pucker showed between his reddish eyebrows. "You're not going to be ill—are you?" he asked in alarm.

"Not I!" She murmured it caressingly in her deep, soft voice. "My pet, don't worry. Everything's all right with me!—perfectly all right and O.K.! Only talk to me. Don't let me keep on thinking. Things are never so—bally rotten if you can stop brooding over them."

Why did she look like that? What had somebody done to hurt her? His boyish hand clenched, the thumb well turned in over the knuckles. Instinctively Bawne knew that the Enemy, who had stamped that dreadful look of frozen misery on the face of his beloved, white as ivory or old snow in its strange setting of flaming tresses—was of his own sex.

All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's, the song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The tractor of the practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of the double-engined passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white circles where a giant T indicated "Land."

This was not a show day when visitors' half-crowns rattled unceasingly into the boxes at the turnstile. The rows of green-painted chairs behind the whitewashed iron railings of the spectators' enclosure were but thinly patronised by friends of people taking passenger-flights. No man with a megaphone announced events forthcoming or imminent. No white flag fell for the start, no pistol cracked signifying the conclusion of a race.

Three men occupied the Judge's stand behind the Committee enclosure. One, small and dapper, in a frock-coat and topper, kept his eye on what was probably a stop-watch. Another, stout, bearded, and straw-hatted, was absorbedly gazing at the sky through a big pair of Zeiss binoculars. The third, in the uniform of a commissionaire, was an employé of the School. No one manifested any particular interest in them or their occupation. The sparse general public were not enlightened as to the reason of their presence on the Judge's stand.

"Talk," Patrine said, clinging to Bawne, her slender plank in moral shipwreck. "Tell me what Sir Roland and the Doctor are waiting to see. What is that thin man doing with the stop-watch and the note-book? And the fat gentleman beside him, who never leaves off staring at the sky through those big field-glasses. Nothing is billed to happen—there are no numbers up on the pylons—yet something seems to be going on!"

"Rather!"

The boy broke into a little gurgle of excited laughter, and began to dance up and down under the arm that rested on his neck.

"Rather! Didn't you know? How funny! Why, man alive, we're waiting for him!"

"For him?"

"For Mr. Sherbrand. Father's friend. The Flying Man I've told you about."

"Mr.—— Where is he?" Patrine asked vaguely, looking all about her. In the tumult of her thoughts the name that had been upon a crumpled card suggested no association with that so rapturously uttered by the boy.

"There!" Bawne pointed upwards with another of the excited laughs. "Carrying out a hovering-test. The man with the stop-watch is timing him, and the other with the binnocs is observing him. He's French—no end of an official swell! The French Government sent him," went on the boy, with infinite relish, "to see Mr. Sherbrand test his invention. He thought they didn't catch on, but the hoverer has fetched them. If he hovers for twenty minutes, ten thousand feet up, his fortune's made!—I heard a fellow say so to the Instructor. Man alive! isn't it topping that you and I should be here to-day!"

CHAPTER XXVII

SIR ROLAND TELLS A STORY

While yet the Bird of War hovered invisible at ten thousand feet of altitude, and the lungs of the men aboard her toiled and laboured, and foam gathered about their nostrils and lips, Saxham stood talking with the man who in his eyes ranked above all others, the tried and trusty friend of fourteen years.

In those unforgettable months of the Siege of Gueldersdorp you might have noticed a crow's foot or so at the corner of the Chief's keen falcon-eyes. To-day, their hazel brightness undiminished, they looked at Life from a network of fine criss-crossed lines. But Time, the spider, had spun no web in the fine alert brain, and the man's heart was free from crow's feet or wrinkles. Fresh and evergreen, it was as it would always be, an oasis of kindness for the downhearted or weary, watered by the twin wells of sympathy and enthusiasm. He said, speaking to Saxham of the invisible Sherbrand:

"I wish we had a million like him!"

Saxham answered:

"I wish we had several millions. He is a fine, energetic type. A bit of a hero-worshipper—a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a stoic: 'He hath seen men rise to authority without envy, and schooled himself to endure adversity, that he might bear himself the better when his time should come to rule.'"

"His time is coming, or I am no judge of capability. And you quoted from the Encheiridion of Epictetus, I think? I've always found good reading-meat in that and the Discourses. Used to carry a little sixpenny copy about in my pocket, until I wore it to rags."

"I have often seen and noted its raggedness, and its uncompromising Isabella-hue!"

"It was negroid in complexion before the Relief of Gueldersdorp. Perhaps you won't be astonished when I tell you I have got it now." The Chief's smiling eyes narrowed in laughter. "My wife has bound it gorgeously, and with other volumes of my Siege library, it occupies a special and most sacred shelf near my writing-desk at home."

He went on:

"This fine fellow Sherbrand is an old correspondent of mine. He would say I might tell you the story, and I think it's worth hearing, in a way. It must be eight years ago, when he would be about seventeen, that he wrote to me from an engineering college at Newcastle, to say he had read some papers of mine on the subject of scouting, and proposed—if I thought it would not be presumption on his part—save the mark!—to enrol and organise a troop on the lines laid down. He wanted a definite code of Scout law to work on, and Rules and so forth, all of which I supplied him, you may be sure. Busy as I was drilling and cub-licking the North British Territorials, I couldn't find time to spare to run up and see the boy. So he commandeered a holiday and motor-cycled to Headquarters. Rode all through one night in pelters of rain, and caught me in my 5 A.M. tub."

"He meant business."

"Business—and it was up to me to encourage such grittiness and enthusiasm. So I ordered coffee for two, and bacon and eggs for half a dozen, and when I had fed him I talked. My book wasn't published, but I lent him some proof-sheets. He thanked me, but before he took them he had to disburden his mind."

The fine sunburnt hand went thoughtfully to the grizzled moustache, worn rather longer than of old.

"He had got something on his mind. He had been reading that old bogey-book, Hales on Mental Heredity, and the theory of the transmission of base or criminal tendencies from the parents to the children, had haunted him night and day. He said to me, standing up before me, looking about as long and thin as a fathom of pump-water: 'My father was dismissed from the Army in War-time, for not backing up his C.O. Is there a kink in my brain or a bacillus lying waiting in my body that will one day make a slacker of me?"

Saxham's square face was ashen, but the Chief's eyes were elsewhere.

"And you told him——?"

"I told him, that whilst physical disease and deformity are transmissible from the unhealthy parents to their unlucky offspring, no sensible Christian regarded the theory of inherited vice or crime, as anything but the most pernicious lie that the devil ever invented to spread as a net for the catching of bodies and souls. That seemed to buck him up!"

"I do not doubt it!" said Saxham. He breathed more freely, and his face had regained its natural hue.

"I reminded him," went on the Chief, "that our Army and our Fleet are indebted for thousands of the finest men, morally and physically speaking, to Reformatories and Industrial Schools and Homes. 'Think of the character borne by Barnardo's boys,' I told him, 'and grind the scorpion lie to pulp under your boot-heel, whenever and wherever you find it cocking up its damnable tail!'"

"So he went back," said Saxham, "cheered and strengthened by your sympathy, as—other men have been before now!"

"So he went back to the College, fortified by my bit of nervous English, and worked at his troop for all he was worth. Raked in seventy in the first month, and kept on raking. He is dandy at drill and organisation, is Sherbrand. When he left the College they mustered three hundred strong." The speaker struck his stick upon the turf and said emphatically: "How it grows!—how the Movement spreads and gathers and ramifies! Do you know Saxham, that there are moments in my life when I am tempted to be proud. When rank upon rank of young, fresh, fearless faces with bright eyes are turned to me. When thousands of active, lithe, healthy young bodies run out into the open and rally about the Chief Scout."

There was a mist in the bright eyes that his manliness was not ashamed of.

"Years ago, when the officer in command of a certain beleaguered garrison was doing his best to defend it, a great Fear came upon him in the watches of a particularly anxious night. Perhaps you will guess what I mean, Saxham? The man had not slept for more weeks than I like to remember, and the hours of rest in the day-time were hot-eyed staring horrors of insomnia. He was—up against it! The shrunken lids would not shut down over his bursting eyeballs, and his jaws were clamped so that he could not yawn. Then, on this night, his Fear rose up and mopped and mowed at him, and it had the kind of face that madhouse doctors and keepers know. He wasn't ordinarily a 'fearful man,' like Kipling's immortal Bengali, but now he was horribly, sickeningly afraid!"

"I guessed it," said Saxham. "I realised what you were suffering, but I did not dare to hint my knowledge to you. There was no danger of madness. But you were certainly on the verge of mental and physical breakdown."

"And being in such desperate case," said the other, "I prayed to God in my extremity. I promised Him if He would help me to carry out my duty to Him, as to my earthly superiors, and those men and women and children who looked to me as their protector and guide, that I would one day, if He spared me, build Him a big Temple, made of the little temples that are the work of His Hands."

"And to-day the Temple is a reality!"

"A grand reality. East, West, North, and South, it spreads and widens and towers. It is built of boys. Clean-limbed, clean-minded, self-respecting fellows, scorning vices, eager for service, sensitive in Honour, chivalrous, patriotic, keen for Truth and Right. It frightens me, Saxham, when I think what a leaven is working through these boys of mine, potential fathers of sons in the ripeness of Time, for the ultimate regeneration of this vicious, degenerate world. It makes me understand how near old Coleridge got to the live heart of things when he wrote the Ancient Mariner. The service of Almighty God is the love of your fellow-man. But why to me, and not to another worthier, should God have given this wonderful, glorious thing to bring about? ..."

"Because you are worthy of doing His work for Him. Has He not used you as His instrument in my own case? Should I not own to this, I who owe everything to you?"

The other laid a hand on the great shoulder of the Dop Doctor.

"If ever you owed me anything, Saxham, you paid me long ago!"

He was silent a moment and said in a lighter tone: "I am not quite clear yet as to how you met my whilom Scoutmaster."

"Our acquaintance dates from a cross-Channel flight he made in the end of June."

"I know." The Chief prodded the turf with his walking-stick. "A French pilot-officer of their Service Aëronautique, a certain Commandant Raymond, who flew here in the contest for the Ivor International Cup in May, had heard of Sherbrand and his inventions from Lamond of the Central Flying School. He took a shine to the aërial stabiliser and got his Chiefs to give it a trial. That came off on the Grand Prix Sunday, when Paris went wild over the Sarajevo affair."

"And scenting War in the air," said Saxham, "Sherbrand promptly took wing for England without waiting for the decision of the judges who were present at the test."

"Did he? He has keen scent."

"Better now," said Saxham laughing, "than when he came to me—on the recommendation of an old patient—suffering from an aggravated form of nasal catarrh. He had had it at intervals for years, and suspected it to be owing to what he described, in the language of the engineering-shop, as "a defect in the air-intake." He proved to be right—and I sent him into the Hospital, where Berry Boyle performed a slight minor operation which removed the trouble, and left him capitally fit. Then, when he came out of the Hospital, he found a letter from the French Consul waiting at his office——"

The Chief interpolated:

"Ah yes. The aërial stabiliser had gained the suffrages of Messieurs the Chiefs of the Aëronautique Française. I hope M. Jourdain's report to his Government will induce them to buy the patent. For, judging by the interest that the representatives of another Power seem to take in——"

The Chief broke off. The smiling lines about his eyes and mouth had vanished as he queried: "Who is the lady my Scout over there is squiring? A superbly-shaped young woman, with hair of the fashionable terra-cotta shade. But for the hair, I should have said it was your niece, Patrine."

Saxham's eyes followed the direction of the Chief's glance. He said, and his face looked hard as a mask of stone:

"Your memory for faces is correct as usual. The lady with the terra-cotta hair is my late brother's daughter, Patrine."

The Chief's familiar whistle filled in a space of silence, with a pensive little fragment of Delius' Spring Song, while Saxham's frown grew deeper and his jaw thrust out more angrily. Then the well-known voice said:

"I am sorry that Miss Patrine has been tempted to follow the fashion. But I regret still more her choice of friends! I refer to the German officer in whose company your niece arrived here, in a yellow Darracq car, about half-an-hour ago." The speaker made sure, with a rapid glance to right and left, that no listener was standing near them, and added: "I know that I may trust you as myself in any private or official matter. Between ourselves frankly, I am here to-day for the purpose of—keeping an eye on this particular man!"

The Doctor's vivid blue eyes darted rapier-points at the other, from caves that had suddenly been dug about them. The General went on:

"The man himself is no common spy, though he may on occasion act as an agent or post-box for Secret Intelligence communications. He is an extraordinarily able young officer, a squadron captain in their Field Flying Service, with some astonishing records to his credit, though he was an Engineer Lieutenant in 1907 when he came to England as chauffeur-officer attached to the Kaiser's Personal Staff. For a comprehensible reason his superiors desired him to improve his knowledge of the topography of the British Isles. He certainly did so, but"—the keen eyes twinkled—"the record runs accomplished by von Herrnung with the All Highest as passenger, were not unattended, or unobserved by us. That he is well-born and well-looking is undeniable, and these advantages, with other social gifts, may easily attract your niece, like any other of Eve's daughters. But to say the least it is inadvisable that she should encourage the advances of this man, or of any other German officer,—when the next forty-eight hours may see Britain and Germany at grips in War."

"That is your opinion?"

"It is my plain, unvarnished opinion, speaking as one of those who are admitted behind the scenes. Not that I am infallible, but the Signs and the Tokens all lead one way." He lifted his lean brown hand and pointed eastwards. "For years they have been making ready, but now—what a frenzy of ordered preparation. What secret councils, what reiteration of orders, what accumulations of stores, what roaring of electric furnaces—I'd give my little finger to know what chemical they're making in huge bulk at the Badische Anilin-und-Soda Fabrik, and hundreds of other dye and bleaching-powder works in Germany and Austria!—every one backed up by the German Imperial State or the Dual Monarchy on the understanding that at the signal, they are to turn to and turn out—what? Benzine for phenol, phenol for picric, and toluene for Super-Explosive, that's understood. But this stuff puzzles me. Do you see the Senile Arc in my eyes yet, Saxham? It must be that I'm getting old!"

He smiled his whimsical smile and went on:

"A day or two after the burial of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic partner, murdered by some fanatics among the Greater Serbs, a huge majority among the German military and naval officers doing duty in their Colonies, or on political service in Africa, were recalled by Wireless. Leave has been stopped. Rolling-stock in inconceivable masses is being concentrated on the greater strategic railways, while the official and semi-official Press prates and gabbles of peace and neighbourly goodwill!" He shrugged. "Things were safer when they yelled and foamed in convulsions of Anglophobia. Then one doubted.... Now one is sure! ... Ah, I thought I wasn't mistaken. Here's Sherbrand coming down!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE GOD FROM THE MACHINE

The dazzling turquoise of the sky was now streaked with milky bands of haziness. Dappled golden-white cloudlets at the zenith made what is known as mackerel sky. Trails of rounded stratus floated low in the east and south-east. Long shadows of hangars, pylons, semaphore and electric searchlight-stations, stretched over the turf from westwards, crossed by perambulatory shadows of people moving about. These became stationary, betokening that popular interest was newly awakened. Umbrellas and sticks flourished towards the sky. Bawne gave a little crow of delight as the whitish-brown, shining shape of the monoplane dived down out of the empyrean, travelling with a bold, beautiful swooping glide that took away the gazer's breath.

"Look, oh look!" Bawne gasped, leaning against Patrine. Now her tardy interest was genuinely awakened. Reaching the end of its glide, the monoplane had regained the horizontal position. As she flattened out and hung well-nigh motionless in mid-air with the sunlight beating on and drenching her fragile, lacy structure, she was a thing of beauty and of wonder. The humming of her tractor came to you mingled with the buzzing of her gyroscopic hoverer, like the incessant vibration of living, sentient wings.

She seemed to tire of hanging between earth and heaven, ceased buzzing, tilted a wing sharply and began to frolic after it as a kitten runs after its tail on a hearthrug, or as a swallow gambols on a chase after gnats, always turning towards the West, whilst her greyish shadow danced and skipped upon the gold-white cloud-surfaces to eastwards a long way below her, like the ghost of an aëroplane. All the time she was gobbling up distance, steadily descending. She presently reversed her sun-worshipping tactics, dived, and spiralled, banking, from west to east. You saw plainly the helmeted heads and slightly hunched shoulders of the pilot at the controls and the mechanic strapped in the forward cockpit.

Soon she hovered again and swooped, so suddenly that Patrine nipped Bawne's shoulder, saying "Great Scott!" under her breath. Another long sweeping glide brought her close to the green turf of the aërodrome. Then, with an adroit flexing of the wing-tips, she balanced, flattened, and landed lightly within the huge white circle, rocking a little on her tyred wheels.

The man with the stop-watch checked the mechanism, the bearded man with the big binoculars lowered and closed them, scribbled in a memorandum-book and came down the judge's stand. The Bird of War's mechanic stayed in his place, the pilot unhitched his body-strap, pushed up his goggled visor, threw a long leg over the fuselage and jumped lightly to the ground. He staggered as he reached it, recovered himself and stood breathing quickly, as a man overcoming giddiness, or other physical sensation of distress.

Tall, young, and lightly built, with long active limbs and a physique suggestive of youth and courage and enterprise, as he stood motionless, his eared and goggled cap now in hand, the play of sunlight upon his thin brown waterproof gabardine and overalls made him look like a statue of Mercury wrought in pale new bronze. And with a lifting of her sick heart as though it had suddenly spread wings, and soared into a region of unlimited space and glorious freedom, Patrine recognised her Flying Man of the Jardin des Milles Plaisirs.

From what airt, of what world unknown, did it blow, that cool, fragrant wind that then and always heralded for Patrine his coming? It took her by surprise; lapped her delicately about; enveloped her from head to foot in its pure invisible waves. The hot, sore places in her heart were bathed and healed, the deep caverns filled, the little thirsty rock-pools set awash and brimming. When the sough of it was no longer in her ears or the tug and flutter of it among the folds of her garments; when she ceased to be conscious of the cool resilient pressure upon cheek and neck and forehead—her brief sweet hour of joy was over. Sherbrand had gone away again.

"Cela ira-t-il, monsieur? Je suis prêt à faire une nouvelle demonstration si vous n'êtes pas satisfait."

His clear, strong voice speaking in laborious public school French gave her a delicious shock of pleasure. He was addressing the stout, bearded Frenchman who, accompanied by the thinner man who had timed Sherbrand by the stop-watch, now walked across the turf to shake the aviator's hand. As Sherbrand spoke, he drew a white handkerchief from the sleeve of his gabardine and wiped from the corners of his mouth some little blobs of foam, slightly bloodstained. The stout, friendly Frenchman glanced at him, and uttered an exclamation. Sherbrand shook his head in vigorous protest and laughed, repeating his offer to demonstrate again. Upon which the bearded man, who had also a moustache with thick, stiff waxed ends, and wore a large checked-pattern summer suit with a white drill waistcoat, a low collar and a necktie with flowing ends, and was topped with a high-crowned straw hat that suggested Trouville in mid-season, negatived the proposal with a vivacious gesture, pouring forth a stream of words:

"Au contraire, Monsieur, je suis convainçu que vous avez une idée superbe. Nous vous avons observé avec la lunette Zeiss, pendant votre vol, et nous avons constaté le temps très soigneusement: vous avez maintenu le bruit et la stabilité pendant cinq minutes de plus que les vingt-cinq minutes stipulées. Permettez moi comme une simple formalité de voir votre altimètre?"

"By all means!" Sherbrand returned.

They went back to the aëroplane together, and Sherbrand reached over and unhooked the altimeter from a board in the pilot's cockpit, and the bearded man examined it, and then cordially shook hands.

"Within two days, at latest. Possibly sooner!" Patrine heard the straw-hatted, bearded gentleman say in English, pronounced with a strong French accent. "Believe me," he added, "I shall represent most strongly the usefulness of your invention to the Chief of the État de l'Aviation. Au revoir, Monsieur, et encore mes félicitations!"

Then he went away with the small dark man who had used the stop-watch, and who carried the Zeiss binoculars slung in their case.

During this business interview Patrine had felt Bawne panting and wriggling close beside her, like an excited, but well-mannered fox-terrier waiting to be whistled for. But Sherbrand, though he glanced at the boy smilingly, had turned aside to engage in conversation with Saxham, and the Chief Scout, whom Sherbrand saluted in orthodox Scout fashion, flushing red under the clear sunburn that darkened his fair skin.

"He's one of Us!" Bawne whispered to Patrine, his own young face alight with pleasure. "He was Scoutmaster of a troop in the North, he told me, and I know he must have been a splendid one. He's the kind of chap who'd be prepared for anything. Don't you think he looks like that?"

Patrine did not answer. She was feeling "cheap," as Lady Beauvayse would have expressed it. She had put the man out of her thoughts because she had taken it for granted that Fanshaw's instructor could not be a gentleman. Now, as she watched Sherbrand in conversation with the elder man, his manner of quiet, well-bred deference, mingled with a pleasant courtesy, showed her beyond all doubt that his place was above the salt.

He had looked towards her, when he had smiled at Bawne, and his glance had swept over her without recognition. She would have known him anywhere, while he——! She had forgotten her preposterously-coloured hair.

How sweet the breeze was, bringing from the west the smell of strawberry-fields and red and white clover. Yet she had not noticed it until now. Her mood had changed. She had put away the thing she most hated to remember. She felt almost like the Patrine of two days ago.

"Miss Saxham!"

It was von Herrnung's voice speaking behind her, and with a shock of loathing horror she remembered all. She turned to see his tall figure approaching. The first impression was that he was ill; the next, that he was furiously angry. His florid complexion had bleached to an ugly, greenish pallor, even the blue of his eyes had faded to a curious lilac hue. He carried in his gloved left hand, and with evident care, a flat strapped wallet of brown leather, fastened with two Bramah locks and a lock-strap. He said to Patrine in a jarring voice of resentment and impatience:

"I have been looking for you. Could one not leave you for a minute but you must go off by yourself? Sapperlot! Whom has one here? Where did you pick up the boy?"

Her heart swelled as Bawne looked up at her in astonishment, then transferred his stare to von Herrnung, puckering his brows in disapproval of the rude, strange man. She answered as calmly as was possible:

"This is my cousin, Bawne Saxham, Count von Herrnung."

"Why did you leave me?" von Herrnung grumbled as Bawne stiffly saluted, and she told him:

"Because I saw you occupied in conversation with your German friends."

"Women are incomprehensible creatures! ... How do you know that they were German? At any rate, whether they were or not, they have gone away now! You find me annoyed. It is because they are—what shall I call it?—perhaps a little exigent. Now I will have a smoke. I suppose you do not mind?"

He had not freed his hand from the brown leather satchel to remove his hat when he had mopped his perspiring forehead, with a big cambric handkerchief scented with the très persistent perfume that always clung about his clothes. Nor did he relinquish it to help himself to a cigar, but opened the gold case containing the weeds with the hand that drew it from his pocket, extracted a cigar with his teeth, and returned the case to his pocket; then produced a matchbox, opened it in the same way, picked out a match, shut the box, and struck the match upon it, saying to Bawne, as he blew out the first mouthful of smoke: "What do you think of that, my fine fellow? Should I not make a famous one-handed man?" But Bawne's suffrages remained unwon, although the dexterity of the thing had secretly pleased him. He remained doggedly silent, scowling with his reddish-fair brows, thrusting out his chin.

"Should I not? Tell me!" von Herrnung persisted. "Or is it that British boys are cowards and afraid to answer when they are spoken to?"

"I am not afraid—of anything or anybody!"

Bawne reddened and looked the taunting big man between the eyes, squarely. The look added—And least of all of anybody like you! He went on:

"But I think it takes more than—that kind of being clever—to make a famous man."

"Nicht so schlimm!" Von Herrnung nodded. "But all the same these little tricks are worth knowing. You might be bound with ropes to a post, or tree, or waggon by the enemy, and if he happened to have left your matches on you—and you could get one hand free—there is no knot man could tie that I could not wriggle myself out of!—you might burn the rope and get away! I did that once when I was a gunner-boy of seventeen in South Africa——"

Von Herrnung stopped short. Bawne asked simply, and with the same straight look between the eyes:

"Did you fight with the Boers against us in the War?"

Von Herrnung did not seem to have heard. He had caught the drift of a sentence spoken by Sherbrand, who was answering to a question of the Chief Scout.

"Oh yes! I live here—have quarters over Mrs. Dunlett's restaurant—you could communicate with me practically at any time. We've the 'phone and a private telegraph-office, and the wireless—under the usual licence from the Postmaster-General."

He pointed towards the well-known tall posts with the short cross-pieces, china insulators and lines of thick wire, standing beside the telegraph-cabin, over the roof of which straddled the wireless installation's tall, latticed steel mast.

"We find it useful for business as well as instructional purposes," he went on. "Macrombie—the man in charge—is a one-time Royal Navy Petty Officer Telegraphist and a first-class operator." Sherbrand's mouth twisted a little at the corners as he added: "About twenty-four days out of thirty, let us say!"

The quick rejoinder came:

"Then he's D.O.D. two working days in the month, not counting Sundays. I've met plenty of Macrombies in my time. This doesn't happen to be the monthly pay-day, by any chance, or one of the other close days in its neighbourhood?"

"No, no! He's as right as rain and as sober as a seal," said Sherbrand. "And—this tall fellow with red hair must be the man who has written to me upon business. I shall have to go to him."

They exchanged a left-handed grip, mutually smiling.

"Good old habits stick," said the Chief, and Sherbrand answered:

"Fortunately, they do. Let me say again how much and how gratefully I have to thank you for the teaching that has helped me to find myself!" His clear light glance reverted to Saxham. "The Doctor too, for giving me this chance of meeting you. Please tell him the story if you think it would interest him. I hope with all my heart, sir, that you will soon come here again!"

"I had already taken the permission for granted," the Chief said, as Sherbrand saluted and went forward to meet "the fellow with red hair." "There is big business in that gyroscopic stabiliser of his," he added to Saxham, "and our friends at the French War Ministry have tumbled to it as one might naturally expect. So much the worse for our bungling bigwigs at Whitehall, who've let a good thing slip, for the millionth time, out of their claws. But taking for granted the value of the patent, and recognising the likelihood of the French bid stimulating Teutonic competition——"

The gentle, modulated voice broke off. Von Herrnung had stepped out upon the green and was striding towards the lightly-moving, less stiffly-carried figure of Sherbrand, the approximation of the two somehow suggesting a salute of gladiators previous to the fight. Now the big, grey-clad German was arrested in the middle of his stride by the sudden kling-a-ling of a motor-gong, a sharp crystal vibration that stiffened him to attention, and pricked his ears for a repetition of the sound.

It did not immediately come. He raised the left hand that held the leather satchel, and swung it from front to rear, so that it was for a moment clear of the outline of his body, as who should signal: "I have it safe!" Quick, watchful eyes noted this. Took in also the ornate bulk of the dark blue F.I.A.T. touring-car, as with the characteristic, noiseless smoothness of its make, it glided between the ranks of parked and waiting automobiles, and stopped in the open, perhaps some forty yards away.

A fat yellow hand, with a twinkling solitaire upon it, waved. A brown hand, with a massive gold curb-chain watch-bracelet on the wrist of it, beckoned imperiously. Something had been forgotten, something was still to say. Von Herrnung wheeled, and went back in his traces as obediently as the pointer that has been called to heel. He did not uncover, perhaps he had been told not to. He saluted, and stood stiffly, listening to a harsh German voice that yapped at him. All his arrogance and swagger seemed to have been juggled out of him by the gestures of the brown hand with the flashing wrist-bracelet, emerging from the white cuff with jewelled sleeve-links and the snowy sleeve with its broad bands of glittering golden braid.

"S'th!"

The slight sound pulled Saxham's head round. He had not been looking at the occupants of the blue F.I.A.T. His eyes were intent on the tall white figure of the woman standing beside his boy. Her black lace sunshade was closed. She held the tall-sticked thing at arm's-length, leaning upon it, and the westering light smote a myriad of multi-coloured sparkles out of the tinsel spangles of the hat with the single black cock's plume. The queer headgear crowning her barbaric hair, and her full white oval face with its wide, low, arched black brows and long eyes, made her seem strange, alluring, as some tall-stemmed, exotic flower, sprung at the incantation of an Oriental conjuror, from a green stretch of English turf.

In the same instant von Herrnung touched his hat, stepped back from the blue car, wheeled and walked away toward the waiting figure of Sherbrand, the sallow man in the Homburg hat gave an order, the chauffeur touched the electric starter, and the F.I.A.T. turned and smoothly bowled away. But in the instant of its turning, the bearded man in the white naval uniform rose in his place, and obtruding half his short, bulky body across the lean person of his sallow neighbour, scrutinised the face and figure of Patrine Saxham with a cool, appraising deliberateness that tortured the wincing flesh it enveloped like the cut of a carriage-whip.

They were full, bright, and rather handsome grey-blue eyes shadowed by the white cap-peak, and they had the indefinable expression of authority and power. Their glance said—and the face with the perfectly-trimmed beard and the upturned moustache wore a curious smile that bore out the glance's meaning:

"So! That's the woman!" And a surge of scalding shame and bitter resentment rose in the heart of Patrine Saxham and filled it to the brim.

She could not have explained why she felt certain that her shameful secret was known to the man with the powerful eyes, the cast of whose face with its pointed beard faintly reminded one of the King and the Tsar.

Patrine had always abominated cheap sentiment. She had once laughed until she cried at a revival of an old four-decker drama, whose hero, waking to the knowledge of a committed, irrevocable deed cried in throaty, stagy tones of anguish upon God to put back the dreadful clock of Time and give him yesterday.

Now she perceived the deep, vital interest of the common-place human story. If asking Him on whom that other sinner cried would wipe from Time's register a span of hours between twelve P.M. and three o'clock in the morning—blot one deed from the Roll of things that done, are beyond Humanity's undoing—Patrine told herself that it would be worth while to wear sackcloth, live on boiled field-peas, drink brook-water, and pray—until her knees were worn to the bone.

She caught Saxham's piercing glance across the intervening strip of greensward. He turned away his eyes, and a shudder went through her frame. Had he suspected—could anyone have found out and told him? The Doctor's head was bent now as the General talked to him. It seemed to her that a muscle in his lean cheek twitched, a characteristic sign with him of excitement, or emotion. She wondered what the General had said to Uncle Owen to make him look like that.

As a fact, the quiet voice was saying in Saxham's ear: "And prepare against a surprise, Doctor—for though your nerves are tough as aluminium bronze, a few million gallons of water have rolled under the Thames bridges since you and I held Council of War.... As I mentioned before, the interest taken by the French Government in Sherbrand's gyroscopic hoverer may well have stimulated the interest of our Teuton neighbours. But it doesn't explain the presence on Fanshaw's Flying Ground of Lieutenant-General Count Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German Great General Staff, and—Grand Admiral Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser—in a F.I.A.T. touring-car!"

CHAPTER XXIX

A SECRET MISSION

"Can it be possible——" Saxham checked himself. "You see how rusty I am getting, General. You refer to that machine that turned out from where cars are parked just now. The German fellow went up to it.... It had a groom beside the chauffeur and three other men inside it.... While I was looking—elsewhere—it must have moved away!"

"It has only turned the corner of the café-restaurant," the Chief said in his quiet tones. He glanced in the direction of the squat block of gaily painted wooden buildings devoted to the inner needs of Fanshaw's clients. "The awning hides it, but I can see a bit of it still. Until it moves, I can go on talking. Frankly, I am in the position of the High Church curate who went out wild-pig shooting in the territories of the Limpopo with a single-bore hammer-gun of grandpapa's pattern—and got his choice of pot-shots between a lion and a rhino. Prinz Heinrich is my royal lion and von Herrnung,—who counted for little more than a bush-pig—has suddenly swelled into a rhinoceros."

He pulled the grizzled moustache thoughtfully, keeping his eyes glued on the back of the big blue car.

"If I could get hold of Sherbrand!—but the chance is dead for the rhino and lion winding me. Old von Moltke with the big wart on his ginger-coloured face, and the charming manner that makes you forget that you don't like him!—would certainly recognise me—and the nautical Hohenzollern and I have met once or twice before. I must lay low like Brer Rabbit, and take a single-handed chance. No, no, Doctor, you have your patients to look after! I am not going to drag you into this. But if I'd got a couple of my Boy Scouts handy——" He broke off, encountering Bawne's bright eyes. "By George, Doctor! I'm going to chance it! I'm going to give your youngster an opportunity to prove his Saxham blood!"

The Master-hand gave the Scout's Sign, and Bawne shot across like a brownish streak of swiftness. He drew himself up, gave the Full Salute, and stood waiting, his rigid attitude in sharp contrast with his dancing, expectant eyes. The Doctor looked at his watch and moved away silently. The Chief said in a clear undertone:

"You see that tall, red-haired man in grey clothes over there with Mr. Sherbrand? Don't look at him openly, or he will know we are talking about him, but take a sidelong gliff, and say."

"I see him, sir."

"Do you know anything of him? Stand easy and answer carefully."

The hand came down from the hat-brim. The boy said:

"I've heard him talk, sir, and I think he is German. I'm learning that and French at Charterhouse."

"He is a German. Do you speak enough of the language to understand him, suppose he were talking to one of his countrymen?"

"Ich—kann—lesen, aber Ich kann es—nicht sprechen." The answer came slowly. "And if they weren't using crack-jaw words, sir, or talking very quick, I might manage—I could make out a lot of what they said."

"Very well, keep your man under close observation and—you see that brown satchel he has in his hand?"

"I've seen it close, sir. A flat brown leather despatch case thing—with a criss-cross pattern on the leather, and two locks, and another lock on the strap that goes round. He hadn't it with him when first I saw him talking to—a lady. Then a man—a servant—came and called him away to speak to some gentlemen in a big blue motor-car. One of them—fat and old and bald—with a wart on his cheek, who wore a white topper, and yellowy clothes, and a red necktie, and looked rather like a—like an Inspector of Sunday Schools in shooting-clothes—passed him the leather case. That's how I know he didn't bring it, sir. Oh! and the yellow car he drives isn't British. She's got an oval International plate with the German 'D' in black on a white ground."

"I am glad my Scout knows how to use his eyes!"

The Chief's own eyes were crinkled with merriment. That Moltke, the Chief of the German Great General staff, bosom friend of the All Highest, should resemble a stout Inspector of Sunday Schools in the estimation of a small British boy, was lovely in the extreme.

"Well, I want to know what the big German officer—he is an officer!—does with that leather satchel he's carrying so carefully. Where he goes with it, whom he talks to, and what he says to them. Find out whether it is light or heavy, if it is what I believe it to be, you might be rendering good service to your country in destroying it. But you'll be doing all I want or expect, if you stick to the man who carries it!"

"I'll do that, sir, on my Honour!"

"Good! Make your little German serve you. I may have to leave here upon this business, but I'll be back within, at least—half an hour. If he goes before I get back, find out where he is going. If you can't find out, follow him. On foot if he walks, in a taxi if he doesn't. Here are six separate shillings—in that case you'll want money for fares. Remember, if things take a puzzling turn and you find yourself in a tight place, whisper a quiet word to Sherbrand, though I'd prefer you to carry through on your own! Report to me, in case he goes before I get back here—at Headquarters, Victoria Street. Have you got all this tucked away safe in your head?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then quit yourself like a man. My signal to you that I have left will be a dog's yelping. Ah!" The keen bright eyes, glued on the distant back of the blue car, had seen the rear wheels moving. Before the F.I.A.T. glided smoothly out of eyeshot the Chief had hurried away.

In the opposite direction to the archway of exit, the slight, active figure in the perfectly-cut blue serge morning clothes and pot hat of Bond Street block, was rapidly walking. Bawne doubted his eyes for a moment before he remembered that the Collingwood Avenue ran along that side of the Flying Ground fence. There was a smaller gate in charge of a commissionaire, in the fence, about a hundred yards along it. Taxi-cabs were standing outside the gate. Any person on foot or awheel, leaving the Flying Ground, must pass the gate and the taxi-stand. You could see through the chinks in the fence when they passed, nip out when they were well by, and follow in a green-flagged chuffer. Bawne had settled this to his satisfaction before a wrench at the rein of duty pulled his head round to the business on hand.

"I'm not spying on Mr. Sherbrand," the boy told himself, gritting his small square teeth doggedly. "I've got to listen, so as to understand the German's game. And I'm going to. This is how I'm going to!"

He began to turn hand-springs after the fashion of the London street Arab, thus lessening the distance between himself and the talking men. They glanced at him, and Sherbrand grinned, but they looked back again directly at each other. Then Bawne threw himself down and panted, rolled over and lay, still panting. Now he was near enough to hear what passed between the two.

Sherbrand said:

"No, I was not particularly solid in my conviction that the aërial stabiliser would take the fancy of the Chiefs of the Service Aëronautique. An accident prevented me from witnessing the final test, and I got what the Americans call cold feet and judged it no use staying in France longer. So I flew back here, starting early by daylight the next morning, with Davis, my mechanic, and found a cable waiting at my office to say the working of the invention had been observed with interest by the Chiefs of the S. Aë. F., and that if I could carry out a satisfactory time-trial at my headquarters in the presence of the French Consul, the authorities at the Ministry of War would be willing to buy my patents for France. As it happened, I was suffering from a slight obstruction in the nasal passages, that spoiled my climbing. It was absolutely necessary to go into Hospital. That is why I could not give M. Jourdain an earlier date for the hovering-test you have just seen carried out."

Von Herrnung demanded:

"But did you not receive a letter containing a business proposal? A communication from Rathenau, Wolff and Brothers, Aëromotor Engineers of Paris, 200, Rue Gagnette? I happen to know that it was posted, and the date being that of the Paris trial, Herren Rathenau and Wolff certainly possess the prior claim!"

"Their communication reached me in Hospital, three days later than the French War Office cable," Sherbrand answered. "It had been forwarded from the makeshift hangar I rented at Drancy—a mistake in the address being the reason of the delay!"

"That fellow Lindemann is a Dummer Teufel," said von Herrnung, shrugging.

"My German landlord.... Why—do you know him?" asked Sherbrand with a look of surprise.

"No, certainly. But you—you said the fellow's name was Lindemann. Not so? No?—then I am mistaken," said von Herrnung with another shrug. He hurried on as though to cover a mistake with a spate of sentences:

"Of course, with Rathenau and Wolff I have nothing to do. Save as an old customer, of whom they have asked a favour—you understand? Indeed I—you will pardon me!—do not your hoverer regard as an original invention. In 1912 our German Ministry of Marine completed a gun-boat fitted with a gyroscopic stabiliser to prevent rolling—you understand—in stormy weather. The device was hellishly effective."

"So effective," rejoined Sherbrand, without the quiver of a facial muscle, though there was laughter in his eyes, "that it broke up the ship."

"Es mag wohl sein!" returned von Herrnung, covering discomfiture, if he felt it, with his imperturbable shrug and hard blue stare.

Sherbrand went on, straightening his wide shoulders and clasping his hands loosely at his back as he talked:

"I don't claim that my patent is an absolutely new invention. Far from it. But it is a new arrangement of some old ideas, and limited though its use may be—it works. You have seen it working. You agree that it justifies its name?" He waited for the assent, and went on: "Possibly if I had described it as an aërial drag-anchor, I should have explained its uses more clearly. It is no good at all when your machine isn't flying level—of course you understand that? If you were ass enough to try to dive without cutting out the power that drives the horizontal screws you would drop to the ground like a plummet and break into a million of little bits—or dig a hole in the earth big enough for a Tube Station. But—keeping an even line of flight—when you switch it on it pulls against the tractor just sufficiently to give you—not immovability—but poise. Sufficient to take a photograph or drop an explosive with a good deal of accuracy."

The small boy lying outstretched on the warm turf near them, thought dolefully:

"Dummer Teufel meant 'stupid devil' in German. But this talk is dreadfully business, I can't stow away much. Man alive! I wish Roddy Wrynche or some other fellow with a top-hole memory had got this job to tackle. And yet the Chief trusted it to me!"

All this, while Sherbrand was explaining.

"M. Jourdain declared himself completely satisfied. His observer said that I maintained poise and stability for five minutes longer than the stipulated twenty-five. He looked at the altimeter and said I should receive a definite answer within a couple of days.... Unlucky brute! Someone must have run over him!"

The shrill yelp of a hurt dog had evoked Sherbrand's exclamation. The sufferer's plaint came from the Collingwood Avenue, on the other side of the fence. Thrice the excruciating sound ripped the ears, then died out in a sobbing whimper.... That was for me! Bawne told himself, as von Herrnung went on:

"Still, you are not pledged. There is no definite understanding. In the interests of the wealthy firm I am asked to represent—solely as a matter of courtesy, because they have been immensely civil to me in business,—you would not refuse me a test?"

Sherbrand said, drawing off his left glove and showing blood oozing from under bluish-looking finger-nails:

"I found it uncommonly parky to-day at 10,000 feet. There was a nor'-east breeze, a regular piercer. Found myself spitting blood rather badly, and to be candid, I was uncommonly grateful that the French Consul declined my offer, in case he was not satisfied, to do the thing again. The fact is, the operation, slight as it was, has weakened me a little. I wouldn't care to repeat the performance without a good night's rest to buck me up."

Von Herrnung shrugged and agreed:

"That it is cold at 10,000 I can credit easily. I have had the oil in my own gauges frozen at 7,000 in midsummer. Da ist nicht zit strassen. Hæmorrhage and dizziness are the chief enemies of the aviator. One's stomach betrays one also, the cursed beast!—after a good hearty meal!"

"I don't give mine the chance!" Sherbrand returned, "but stave off the pangs of appetite with milk-tablets and meat-lozenges. Do all my flying on these and chocolate. Keep a little store of the things and a Thermos of hot coffee, in a cache I've made for them, under the map-desk on the left of the instrument-frame, facing the pilot's seat. If you will come over to the Bird I'll show you, and explain the working of the gyroscopic hoverer." He added, looking squarely at von Herrnung: "Of course the cutting of the double screw is the chief thing about the invention. I've registered every way I know and got a trade-mark. They tell me at the Patent Office that my international rights are secure!"

"They should be, if you have those precautions taken. It does not do to trust," said von Herrnung, "too much! The monkey proverb is law for most men." He shrugged. "It comes, by the way, from Namaland in German South-West Africa. 'Nuts in your pouch are nuts in mine!'"

The freemasonry of their calling had established a degree of friendliness between them. They were laughing over the monkey's philosophy as they went over together to the Bird. The small boy who had been idly sprawling on the hot turf near them, with his tilted hat shielding his face from the westering sun-rays, got up and trotted after them like a collie pup.

"Coming too, young man?" Sherbrand said, glancing back and smiling. The boy nodded in answer, and thence-forward kept close at the heels of the men, his ears industriously drinking in their conversation, while his eyes were glued on the brown leather satchel depending from the German's gloved left hand. Both men, now leaning over the side of the pilot's cockpit, examined the gearing of the hoverer, protected by a transparent casing set in the tough ash, copper-riveted planking of the fuselage. Then with the aid of sulky Davis they tilted the Bird, and inspected the pair of thin circular plates of toughened steel with flanged edges that, revolving at high velocity in different. directions, constituted the horizontal screw.

"Driven from the engine, as you see, by an endless chain-drive arrangement. By manipulation of levers, you can throw the tractor out of gear, and hover, under favourable circumstances and in still weather, by means of the horizontal screw alone. But as a rule you keep the tractor working, and the screw acts in one as a lifter and floating-anchor. That's about all it amounts to!—I've said I don't pretend to hang immovable in the air like the albatross and the condor, not to mention the gull and sparrow-hawk and dragon-fly! While I hover I am making way—but way to an inappreciable amount. One of these days we shall find out the big Secret of Stability. Until then we must rub along as best we can!"

Von Herrnung returned:

"I am hellishly interested in your invention. It now occurs to me that as you happen to know my flying record"—he shrugged his great shoulders and smoothed his tight red roll of moustache with a well-manicured finger-tip—"that it is possible you would have sufficient confidence to allow me to test your gyroscopic hoverer myself?" He laughed again pleasantly as he finished: "Whatever else I may do, I give you my word of honour I shall not pile up your machine. Will you consent? It may lead—supposing you do not close with the French offer—to big business—done with my friends!"

Sherbrand had looked doubtful, only for an instant. Before the twelve-year-old eavesdropper had recovered from the shock that had set his brain spinning and his heart thumping, the situation had been accepted by the owner of the Bird of War. He held out his left hand, and von Herrnung gripped and wrenched it, noting with inward amusement that his grip had brought fresh lines of blood creeping about the edges of Sherbrand's finger-nails.

"You shake hands with the left," he commented, smiling. "Not for the first time have I noticed the peculiarity in Englishmen of the younger breed."

"It is a custom," Sherbrand answered, "with—members of an organisation to which I had, and still have, the honour to belong."

His eyes, in speaking, went to the bright-haired boy in Scout's uniform standing near them, but von Herrnung's glance had not followed his. The boy was staring wistfully at the round-faced clock on the front gable of the café restaurant—ten minutes to the half-hour and no sign of the Chief's returning. Bawne's courage began to ooze away at the ends of his fingers and toes.

"Then," von Herrnung was beginning impatiently, when a sallow, undersized young man, whose hollow chest and inky paper cuffs advertised his clerical employment, came up, touched a pen sticking out from behind his ear, and said as Sherbrand turned to him:

"Beg pardon, sir, but the telegraph-cabin is locked up proper, and Mr. Macrombie 'as carried orf the key."

"Out of sorts to-day, is he?" Sherbrand asked meaningly, and the telegraph-clerk answered:

"I've never seen 'im so bad before—in the middle of the month!"

As Fate would have it, Macrombie, ex-Petty Officer Telegraphist of the R.N.—from whose sleeve the golden Crown and thunderbolt had been reft by reason of his anti-teetotal habits, had received a visit that morning from a friend who had repaid a debt. Hence the licensed operator of Fanshaw's experimental and educational Wireless-station had succumbed to an attack of his intermittent complaint.