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The Messenger

by Elizabeth Robins · English · Gutenberg #35671 · 629,625 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Messenger

Author: Elizabeth Robins

Illustrator: George Giguere


        
Release date: March 24, 2011 [eBook #35671]

Language: English

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Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive/American Libraries (http://www.archive.org/details/americana)


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THE MESSENGER

by

ELIZABETH ROBINS

Author of "Come and Find Me," etc.

With Illustrations by George Giguere







New York
The Century Co.
1919

Copyright, 1919, by
Elizabeth Robins

Copyright, 1918, 1919, by
The Century Co.

Published, September, 1919




    TO
    S. C.




[Illustration: "Now your finger-print, if you please"]




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"Now your finger-print, if you please"

"O Gavan, save me!"

"I have a cabin below. I place it at the lady's disposal"

"The name of the man in the War Office!"




THE MESSENGER




CHAPTER I


"After all, we aren't _yet_ living in the millennium, Julian. What I'm
afraid of is that some day you'll be wanting to carry these notions of
yours beyond the bounds of what's reasonable."

"You mean," said the other young man, with a flash in his dark eyes,
"you mean you're afraid I may just chance to be honest in my 'notions,'
as you call them, of a scheme of social justice."

As far off as you saw Gavan Napier, you knew him as a scion not only of
the governing class, but in all likelihood of one of the governing
families. Exactly the sort of man, you would say, to have Eton and
Balliol in the past, a present as unpaid, private secretary to a member
of his Majesty's Government, and a future in which the private secretary
himself would belong to officialdom and employ pleasant, more or less
accomplished, and more rather than less idle, young gentlemen to take
down occasional notes, write an occasional letter, and see a boring
constituent.

It was no boring constituent he was seeing now, out of those cool blue
eyes of his, yet he followed with evident dissatisfaction the figure of
a woman who had appeared an instant over the sand-dunes and who, as
Napier turned to look at her instead of at his ball, changed her tack
and sauntered inland.

"What do you suppose she's always hanging about for?" Napier asked his
companion.

"As if you didn't know!"

"Well, if _you_ do," retorted Napier, "I wish you'd tell me."

"I shall do nothing of the kind. You're quite conceited enough." Julian
shouldered his golf clubs (it was against his principles to employ a
caddie) and trudged on at the side of his unencumbered friend. The eyes
of both followed the lady disappearing among the dunes.

"I've seen her only two or three times," Julian said, "but I've seen she
hasn't eyes for anybody except you."

"_That's_ far from being so," Napier retorted. "But if it were, I should
know the reason."

"Of course you do."

"But _you_ don't," Napier still insisted. "The reason is I'm the only
person in the house who isn't Miss von Schwarzenberg's slave."

"Oh! I took her at first for just a governess."

"She's a lot besides that!" Napier wagged his head in a
curiosity-provoking way.

"There's been so much to talk about since I got back," Julian went on,
"or else I've been meaning to ask about her."

"She interests you?" Napier asked a little sharply.

"I confess," said Julian, "I haven't understood her position at the
McIntyres."

"If _I_ haven't--it isn't from lack of data. Only,"--Napier wrinkled his
fine brows--"did you ever know a person that nothing you know about
them seems to fit? That isn't grammar, but it's my feeling about that
young woman."

The two played a very evenly matched game. As they walked side by side
after their balls, Julian wondered from time to time whether the subject
of Miss von Schwarzenberg had been introduced to prevent his reverting
to that vision of his--all the clearer since his tour round the
world--of a reconstituted society in which vested privilege should no
longer have a leg to stand on. Or could it be that Gavan was seriously
intrigued by the Rhine maiden who, more or less as a special favor, had
consented to superintend the studies and to share the recreations of
"that handful," Madge McIntyre, aged sixteen? This girl, with the boyish
face and boyish tastes and boyish clothes (whose mane of flaming hair
had helped to fasten on her the nickname of Wildfire McIntyre), Julian
already knew slightly as the only and much-spoiled daughter of Napier's
chief. Sir William McIntyre, K. C. B., adviser to the Admiralty and
laird of Kirklamont, had been the notable chairman of endless shipping
companies and prime promoter of numberless commercial enterprises, until
he accepted a seat in the cabinet, a man of vigor and some originality
of mind, in contrast to his wife--a brainless butterfly of a woman who
complained bitterly that she had less trouble with her four sons than
with her one daughter. The one daughter, by ill luck, had an
inconvenient share of her father's force of character. She had ruled the
house of McIntyre till the advent of the lady in question.

That lady's predecessor had been a Miss Gayne. Miss Gayne had been in
possession till a fateful morning last summer when Madge, driving along
the coast road, came in sight of Glenfallon Castle, and pulled up her
pony with a jerk that nearly precipitated poor Miss Gayne out of the
cart. "My goodness gracious, the Duke is back!"

Glenfallon, on its cliff above the Firth, commanded a view north and
south over the many-bayed and channeled mainland, out over rocky
islets--shining jewels of jacinth and jasper and azurite, spilled
haphazard into the sea--clear away to that great gray expanse miscalled
by the new governess the German Ocean. Nobody had lived at Glenfallon as
long as Madge could remember, so that she might perhaps be pardoned for
emitting that excited scream at sight of two young men in tennis
flannels busying themselves about the net.

"We mustn't sit here staring at them," Miss Gayne remonstrated.

Miss Gayne picked up the reins which Madge had let fall. Madge seized
them with an impatient "Don't!" and flung them round the whip.

"It isn't proper to sit like this, staring into a stranger's tennis
court. At two strange young men, too!"

"I'm only staring at one. You can have the other."

Presently a tennis ball came over the wall and bounced into the road.
Before Miss Gayne could remonstrate, Madge was out of the cart and had
sent the ball hurtling back.

The younger man caught it, and the elder advanced to the wall to thank
the young lady. He was a very good specimen of fair, broad-shouldered,
blunt-featured manhood, but when he opened his mouth he spoke with a
foreign accent.

"When are you expecting him?" demanded Madge.

"Expecting whom? We are not expecting anybody, I'm afraid, and the more
pleased to see _you_." He made his quick little bow and turned, to
present his brother. "This is Ernst Pforzheim and I am Carl."

Madge nodded, deliberately ignoring Miss Gayne's hurried approach and
disapproving presence.

"How do you do? Have you bought Glenfallon?"

No, they had only leased it. They hoped the change and quiet might do
their father some good. He hadn't been well ever since ... ever since
they lost their mother.

"We have great hopes of this fine air and perfect quiet," said the
elder. "The quiet is the very thing for our father--but for us it may
become a little _triste_. So we play tennis. Do you play tennis,
Miss ... a ... Miss...?"

"Do I play tennis?" Madge did not long leave any doubt on that score.

The adventure was not smiled on at home, but poor Miss Gayne got all the
blame.

There was a touch of irony in the lady's being succeeded by some one
recommended by, or at least through, these very undesirable and
undoubtedly foreign acquaintances.

The same success which the Pforzheim young men had with their country
neighbors generally, they had with Madge. Everybody seemed to like them.
Lady McIntyre liked them from the first. "Such charming manners! And so
devoted to their poor father!"

With his pleasant malice Napier described the Pforzheims at Kirklamont,
and Lady McIntyre's graciousness that "'_so_ hoped to make your father's
acquaintance.'" The Pforzheims shook their heads over the poor
gentleman's condition, "'confined to a darkened room.'"

"'But we heard that he was out yesterday evening, in your new steam
launch.'

"'Ah! that ... yes ... that is because his eyes are very painful. He
can't bear the least light. So he gets no exercise and no change of air
during the day.'

"'Well, in that case of course he couldn't expect to sleep!' And then
Lady McIntyre had an inspiration. 'Doesn't it sound,' she appealed to
Sir William, 'extremely like the kind of insomnia Lord Grantbury suffers
from? I believe it's the very identical same. And Lord Grantbury has
found a cure.'

"Great sensation on the part of the Pforzheims. Oh, _would_ Lady
McIntyre tell them.... They'd be eternally grateful if she would only
get Lord Grantbury's prescription. But Lady McIntyre could produce it at
once. She did produce it. And what did Julian think it was?"

Julian shook his head. He knew quite well now that Arthur was telling
him this yarn in order to avoid reopening the subject of their
disagreement--the only one in their lives. So he bore with hearing that
Lord Grantbury's remedy for insomnia was a combination of motion and
absence of daylight. Lord Grantbury had contended that light was a
strong excitant. That the consciousness of being seen, of having to
acknowledge recognition, or even of knowing your label was being clapped
on your back--all that was disturbing in certain states of health. "'So
he has himself driven out, they say, about eleven o'clock at night in a
sixty-horsepower car, and goes whizzing along lonely roads where there's
no fear of police traps, as hard as he can lick. When he comes back, he
finds that all that ozone, and whatever it is, has quieted him. He
sleeps like a top.' The sons were advised to put Father Pforzheim in a
Rolls-Royce car and see what would happen. 'You haven't got a high power
car? Till they can send for one,'--Lady McIntyre appealed to her
husband--'don't you think, William, we might--?'

"But Carl, profuse in thanks, said that unfortunately his father had a
nervous abhorrence of motor cars.

"'How very strange!' said Lady McIntyre.

"'No, it wasn't at all strange. My mother,'--Carl dropped his eyes and
compressed his full lips--'our dear mother was killed in a motor
accident.'

"'But our father,'--Ernst looked up as he brushed a white, triple-ringed
hand across his eyes--'our father finds the water soothing. After all,
Carl, swift motion on the water, why shouldn't that do as well as racing
along a road?'

"'_And_ darkness,' said Lady McIntyre.

"'_And_ darkness!' the brothers echoed her together. 'We can never thank
you enough, Lady McIntyre. We will persevere with your friend Lord
Grantbury's remedy.'" The brothers clicked their heels and pressed their
lips to her hand and left her in a flutter. The poor young men's anxiety
was most touching! Especially Carl's. Lady McIntyre, according to
Napier, doted on Carl. He wasn't so taken up by his filial
preoccupations either, that he couldn't sympathize with the anxiety of a
mother. Lady McIntyre's about Madge. Mr. Carl agreed that Miss Gayne was
_not_ the person. He had seen that at once. No influence whatever. Miss
McIntyre was a very charming young lady. Full of character. Fire, too.
She required special handling.

"'Ah! how well you understand! Now, what do you advise me to do? Seeing
you reminds me,' Lady McIntyre said with her infantile candor, 'that
we've never tried a German governess. We've had so many French ones. And
quite an army of English and Scotch--'

"'Ah! a German governess!'"--he pulled at his mustache. Mr. Pforzheim
promised to consult his aunt. The widow of a Heidelberg professor.

By a special providence Frau Lenz knew of a young lady who was at that
moment in London, on her way home from America. She would be the very
person to consult.

"She was the very person to _get_," Lady McIntyre said, when she came
back from interviewing the paragon. "And, Heaven be praised, I've got
her!"

They had gone back to London on account of that commission Sir William
had insisted on having appointed. There were a lot of people in London
that July, and things going on. Madge in the thick of everything, as
though she'd been twenty-five instead of fifteen. That's how the von
Schwarzenberg found her, neglecting lessons, ignoring laws, living at
the theater, figuring at her father's official parties, sitting up till
all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes till her fingers looked as if
she'd been shelling green walnuts, gossiping, arguing, on every subject
under the sun. That's the situation to which Miss von Schwarzenberg was
introduced as the latest in a long and sorry line.

Napier had watched the transformation.

"They've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every
member of the minister's household.

"Not you, I hope?" Julian said quickly.

Napier laughed. "_She_ would set your mind at rest on that score. Only
the other day she got me into a corner. 'What have you got against me,
Mr. Napier?' she said. 'You don't like me.' It took me so by surprise, I
stammered: '_I?..._ What an idea!' '_Why_ don't you like me, Mr.
Napier?' Mercifully just then Wildfire McIntyre flamed across our
path."




CHAPTER II


When the young men reached Kirklamont, the McIntyres were already
gathered about the tea-table in the hall of the big, ugly, Scotch
country house. "The family" consisted at the moment only of three, the
fourth person present being Miss von Schwarzenberg, for it was mid-July.
In another month the absent sons (two soldiers and a sailor) would come
up for the shooting and bring their friends.

All this presupposed--as nobody found the least difficulty in
doing--that Sir William's recent "little heart attack" would leave no
legacy more destructive of the usual routine than abandonment of London
a fortnight or so earlier than had been planned. A more acute anxiety
might have touched Lady McIntyre had her husband not deliberately thrown
her off the track. He dubbed the great specialist "a verra reasonable
fella," who didn't make a mountain out of a molehill. The patient did
not add the means by which he had been coerced into turning his back on
public affairs at a moment made so critical for the Government by Irish
affairs.

"A break in the London strain, at once and often, or else smash."

That was the dour deliverance which had installed the McIntyres in their
beloved Kirklamont two weeks earlier than they could have hoped. It was
a party which, with a single exception (again Miss von Schwarzenberg),
had shaken off London by every token of tweed garment, stout boots, of
golf stockings, and of gaiters.

Cup in hand, Sir William, as became the head of the house, stood planted
on wide-apart legs in front of the fireplace--a sanguine-colored, plump,
little partridge of a man with a kind, rather _ruse_ face.

Lady McIntyre, behind the urn--fair, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed--looked,
as such women will, far older in the country than she did in her "London
clothes." But she was far too correct not to make any sacrifice called
for by the unwritten law of her kind. Behold her, therefore, bereft of
all fripperies save the dangling diamond ear-rings, which emphasized
painfully an excuse for frivolity which had been outlived. To tell the
blunt truth, Lady McIntyre looked like some shrunken little duenna,
attendant on the opulent majesty of the heavy-braided, ox-eyed Juno at
her side. For Miss von Schwarzenberg shared the High Seat--otherwise
Lady McIntyre's carved settle. At her feet sat Madge, her pupil, and an
Aberdeen terrier.

"You _really_!"--the high-pitched excitement in the girl's voice reached
the young men depositing their golf clubs and caps in the lobby--"you
really and truly want to learn golf--_after all_?"

"If nobody has any objection," a voice answered, in an accent very
slightly foreign, and to the English ear suggesting, as much as
anything, Western American.

"Objection! Quite the contrary. Capital idea!" Sir William spoke
heartily.

Bobby, fourteen but looking nearer eighteen, spilled over and sprawled
out of an arm-chair as he beat the arm, and cried out with animation and
a mouth full of griddle cake, "Bags I teach you, Fraeulein!"

"I hope you've been taking it out of Gavan," Sir William had called out
by way of greeting to Julian. Julian played up by proceeding to describe
with mock braggadoccio how he'd completely taken the shine out of the
champion. That person, handing tea, contented himself with privately
observing yet again how his friend, long and lithe and dark, offered to
the rotund little figure of the eminent official a contrast that
ministered pleasantly to a sense of the ludicrous. Sir William's bald
bullet head barely reached the height of Julian's chest. But it was
notorious--and Napier had not worked for two years with Sir William
without finding good reason to share the prevalent opinion--that inside
the aforesaid bullet was an uncommon amount of shrewd sense and a highly
developed skill in organizing power.

Sir William ran his department as he ran his vast commercial
enterprises, with an ease that was own child of intelligence of a high
degree. But now, as though it were the main factor in life, he talked
golf.

The governess, after a perfunctory "how do you do" to the visitor, had
leaned over to stroke the Aberdeen. The lady's full-moon face--with its
heavy, shapely nose, its smooth apple cheeks, its quiet, beautiful
mouth--was bent down till her chin rested on her generous bust. It
occurred to Napier that she often adopted this pose. It gave her an air
of pensiveness, of submission, the more striking in a person of so much
character.

Also, the little tendrils of yellow hair that escaped from under the
Gretchen-like banded braids cast delicate shadows on the whitest neck
Napier had ever seen. Oh, she had her points.

"Did you hear, Mr. Grant?" Madge called out. "Miss von Schwarzenberg
says now she wants to learn our foolish national game."

"Never!" Julian turned back to the tea-table. His tone was faintly
ironic--as though the sensation created by this lady's conversion to
golf seemed disproportionate to its importance.

Lady McIntyre lifted her appealing eyes. "I wonder if you'd be very
kind, Mr. Grant, and help the children to teach Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

The almost infinitesimal pause was cancelled, obliterated, by Miss von
Schwarzenberg's promptitude. "Oh, I couldn't think of being such a
trouble." She had risen. "Sit here, Mr. Grant," she said. "Yes,
_please_. I've finished." In spite of his protest, she retired to a
chair on the far side of the fireplace--Napier's side--and picked up her
knitting.

Madge followed, dog-like, and so did the Aberdeen.

"It _is_ a comfort," Lady McIntyre went on, "to find such a terribly
clever person"--she nodded significantly in the direction of Miss von
Schwarzenberg--"taking an interest in the things ordinary mortals care
about. It's been the one fault I've had to find with Greta. She doesn't
play games. They don't, you know. But the Germans are a wonderful
people! Take this young girl"--she lowered her voice. But, however,
little of the conversation was lost on Miss von Schwarzenberg. She
knitted steadily. Madge played with the dog.

"Greta's only twenty-five or six," Lady McIntyre went on. "Her father
was an officer of Uhlans. An invalid now. And somehow they lost their
money. An uncle in America is tremendously rich, and he's had Greta at
one of the great women's colleges over there. She insisted on going home
every summer ... _so_ domestic, the Germans! I always think it's
extremely nice of them to feel affectionate toward such a horrid country
as Germany--don't you, Mr. Grant? And such a language to wrestle with,
poor things! Do you know, they call a thimble a finger hat? Yes, and a
pin a stick needle!"

"Well, well!"--Sir William broke off in the middle of the golf
discussion, and rattled his seals with great vigor, as though they were
a summons to industry--a simulacrum of factory bell or works whistle. "I
must write one more letter. No, I don't need you, Gavan."

"But that translation?"

"It's done."

"Done!" said the astonished Napier.

"And couldn't be better," said Sir William, as he disappeared into the
library.

"Miss Greta did it!" triumphed Bobby.

"I wonder," said the lady, smiling, "which of you two would go and get
me the rest of my wool?"

Bobby was on his feet, staring helplessly round.

"In your work bag?" asked Madge.

Greta nodded, and the two raced each other upstairs. Miss Greta lifted
her candid eyes. "Does it require a _great_ deal of practice, Mr.
Napier, to play golf passably?" She blushed slightly as she went on: "I
suppose I've hoped that if I watched you, I'd stand a better chance of
playing a fair game myself some day. Fair, that is," she added, with her
meek droop of the braid-crowned head, "fair for a woman."

"I'm sure you know," Napier returned a little impatiently, "that plenty
of women play very well."

"Do you mean," she inquired with her soft persistence, "you'd ever be so
kind as to give me a tip or two?"

He didn't answer at once, and she turned in her chair to look at him.
Out from her disarranged cushion rolled a large ball of field gray. It
bumped against Napier's ankle and rebounded to the wall.

"Isn't this the wool you were looking for?" He took it up by the loose
end, and rapidly unrolled several yards of it.

"Thank you _so_ much! I can't think how it got down here." She took the
ball from him, and remained standing while she rewound. "After all, I
sha'n't much more than have time to get on my things." She glanced at
the clock.

"Where are you going?" Lady McIntyre asked the question from habit.
Seldom was Greta allowed to leave the room without that question.

"You were so kind as to say I might have the cart."

"Oh, yes," Lady McIntyre remembered.

"What for?" asked Bobby, tumbling downstairs. "Want to be driven
somewhere? Bags I--"

"Certainly _not_!" Madge called out to him. And then in a markedly
different tone, "I've turned everything out of.... Oh, you've got it!"

It was all right, Miss Greta said comprehensively. She would go to the
station alone.

"Oh, _please_ let me come!" Madge begged.

Miss von Schwarzenberg shook her head. Madge looked at her wistfully. "I
_wish_ she wasn't coming!"

Then with a gleam, "I believe you do too!"

Miss von Schwarzenberg smiled.

"Who is it?" demanded Bobby.

"Oh, a little American friend of mine. A girl I went to school with."

"Her name's Nan Ellis," Madge informed the company gloomily, "and she's
not much to look at, and not at all rich, and not much of anything that
I can discover. Just a millstone round Miss Greta's neck."

"We mustn't say _that_." Miss Greta was winding the last couple of
yards. "You see, she's an orphan, and I rather took her under my wing at
school--poor child!"

Bobby asked if the American was going to stay with us.

"Oh, no," said the wool winder, now at the end of her task. "At the inn,
of course." Miss Greta glanced again at the clock as she gathered up her
knitting.

"Cart wasn't ordered till six," Madge threw in. "Don't you mean to bring
her here at all?"

"I should be delighted. But--I can't flatter myself that my little
friend would interest _you_." She swept the circle. "Quite a _nice_
girl, but ..." (a deprecatory wave of one hand), "well, crude. Western,
you know. She has grown used to looking to me for the summer. I tried to
explain that--" the pause was eloquent of a delicate desire to spare
feelings--"that I wasn't taking a holiday myself this year. But,"--on
her way out of the hall Miss Greta laughed over her shoulder--"she's not
perhaps so very quick at--how do you say it?--not so quick at the
uptake." She turned at the sound of a motor car rushing up the drive.

Through the open lobby doors a girl was seen rising from her seat and
scanning Kirklamont Hall with a slight frown. As the car swerved round
to the entrance she called out to the chauffeur in a voice of appalling
distinctness, and most unmistakably transatlantic: "Are you sure this is
the place? It isn't _my_ idea of a.... _Oh!_" She had given one glance
through the lobby and was out of the car as a bird goes over a hedge.
"It is! It is!"--The girl stood in the hall, holding out her hands,
"_Greta!_"

"My _dear_ Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg had hastened forward, more
flurried than anybody there had ever seen her.

"Oh, my!" said the newcomer with a face of rapture. "Oh, _my_!" and she
fell to hugging Miss von Schwarzenberg.

Bobby sat contorting his long legs and arms with unregenerate glee at
Fraeulein's struggle to be cordial and at the same time to disengage
herself as rapidly as possible.

Lady McIntyre left her settle and pattered forward with hospitable
intent. An instant of indecision on Miss von Schwarzenberg's part, and
then Miss Ellis was duly presented.

She wasn't nearly so tall as Napier had thought her when she stood up in
the car. This was because the figure was slight and extremely erect. For
the rest, a small head, overweighted with a profusion of bright, brown
hair; a rather childish face under a little golden-brown hat, guiltless
of trimming but for the two brown wings set one on each side, rather
far back. "The kind of hat," Napier pointed out afterward, "that
Pheidias gave to Mercury. Cheek for a girl to wear a hat like that!"

Even under her manifest excitement, the delicate oval of the girl's face
showed only a faint tinge of color. Miss von Schwarzenberg's round
cheeks were richest carmine. "Oh, you've kept the car! That's right. I
won't stop for a hat. Your scarf, Madge. Then I won't have to keep her
waiting."

"But why must you--" Lady McIntyre began.

"She has rooms at the inn," said Miss von Schwarzenberg, with decision,
as she wrapped Madge's scarf round her braids.

Yes, Lady McIntyre understood that. "But why should you be in such a
hurry?"

"Oh, _I'm_ not in any hurry," said the girl. "Not now. I have been in a
hurry--a terrible hurry for sixteen days. But now--" she smiled a bright
contentment at her goal.

The instant application of Miss von Schwarzenberg's arm to her friend's
waist was less for love, Napier felt sure, than as a means of
propulsion. "You'd like to get unpacked, I'm certain."

Lady McIntyre, nervously anxious not to be inhospitable to Greta's
visitor, declared she was not going to allow them to go till Miss Ellis
had had some tea. Miss Ellis still stood looking at her friend with
adoring affection. Plainly she was ready to do anything Greta
liked--anything that didn't involve her losing sight of this face she'd
traveled five thousand miles to see. Greta unwound her scarf.

"This is my daughter," said Lady McIntyre.

"Oh, are you 'Madge'? Of course, I've heard about you." Miss Ellis put
out a hand.

Madge gave it a muscular shake and let go quickly. "How do?"

The stranger seemed not to notice. She accepted a double wedge of
buttered scone from Bobby, and with great cheerfulness she deposited
three lumps of sugar in her tea.

Miss von Schwarzenberg raised her eyes to Napier's face. He and Julian,
several yards away, were leaning against the mantel-piece, pretending to
discuss the Ulster situation.

As Miss von Schwarzenberg, across her friend, met Napier's look, she
smiled ever so faintly, but with enormous meaning. "Behold a child of
nature," the look said. Then, "Did you have a good passage, Nanchen?"
she asked.

"Well, they _said_ it was a bad passage. I thought it perfectly
glorious." Miss Ellis had taken a large slab of shortbread. Rapid
disposal of it did not at all interfere with a description of the
amenities of an unchaperoned sea voyage. Miss Ellis did not pause till,
to the accompaniment of a crunch of gravel and voices outside, two young
men could be descried coming up the middle of the drive. They were
leading a couple of great, long-bodied, white dogs.

The hall was instantly a hive of excitement. Bobby and Madge bolted out
as one, with cries of rapture. Lady McIntyre, hardly less pleased,
prepared to follow, with Julian. Napier sauntered slowly after them.

The elder Pforzheim entered with his brisk ceremoniousness, and bowed
low over Lady McIntyre's hand: "My father has sent you those Russian
boarhounds he promised. Ernst has got them outside"--he stood back in
that _empresse_ way of his that seemed to say, "My manners are far too
perfect not to suffer others to precede." And the others, in the
careless English way, _did_ precede. They even blocked up the entrance,
leaving Mr. Carl and his politeness in the rear. This manoeuver so
obstructed the view that Miss Ellis rose and came a few paces nearer,
hoping for a better sight of those exciting animals. Napier, glancing
back, saw that Miss von Schwarzenberg sat perfectly still.

"Did you ever see boarhounds before, Greta? I never did."

What Greta answered, Napier didn't hear; but the moment was not lost
upon him when, all view of the spectacle being quite shut out by the
crowding at the door, Miss Ellis' attention--about to return to the
tea-table--"caught," as it were, on Carl Pforzheim's profile.

"Why, how do you do?" she said with a quick turn. "I'm very glad to meet
you."

Carl Pforzheim stared. Miss von Schwarzenberg shot forward and took Nan
by the arm.

"In the midst of all the masses of strangers I've been seeing, you seem
like an old friend. Tell him, Greta--" At sight of Miss von
Schwarzenberg's face, she stopped short.

"I think you are making some mistake," said Mr. Carl.

"Oh, no, I'm not!" that terribly "carrying" voice went on. "It's because
Greta has told me such a great deal about you. And you're exactly like
your picture, down to the cleft in your chin--" The girl hesitated
again as Greta mumbled, and Pforzheim, with a desperate, "I must help my
brother," forgot all his fine manners and pushed his way out.

"What's the matter, dearest? Oughtn't I to have said that?" Then in a
half whisper: "I never mentioned Ernst. And, after all, it was only
Ernst that you--"

"_Will_ you be quiet?"

In another ten seconds they were whirling away in the car.

       *       *       *       *       *

Napier walked half-way home with Grant as usual. He was amused at
Julian's indignation over the von Schwarzenberg's patronage of her
"little friend." And then they quarreled a little over Napier's decision
that it was cheek for a girl to come "winged like Mercury." Julian
defended her. He'd never seen a hat he liked better. It just suited that
face of hers.

"'That face!'" Napier mocked. "I suppose, out of pure contentiousness,
you'll be saying it's pretty."

"'Pretty!' Pretty faces are cheap. That one has got the fineness of a
wood anemone. And the faith of a St. Francis. Did you ever _see_ such
faith in any pair of eyes? Ye gods! If I could believe in life as that
child does, if I were as serenely sure of everybody's good will,"--he
threw out his walking-stick at the prison wall between him and such
freedoms, such innocent securities. "It's pathetic--a person like that.
Think of the knocks she'll get. Think--"

"What I'm thinking of--I can't get it out of my mind! Every time I go
back to it, it seems to me stranger--the expression on the von
Schwarzenberg's face when the girl recognized Pforzheim."

"What sort of expression?" said Julian, absently.

"I wish you'd seen it! And the way she looked after Carl with a sort of
cowering apology, before she plunged into the car. Now leave off
quarreling with me about the Mercury cap, and just tell me: Why the
devil should that woman have pretended she'd never seen the Pforzheims
before she met them at Kirklamont? I wake up in the middle of the night
and ask myself that question."

"How do you know she pretended--?"

"I was there. I saw them introduced."




CHAPTER III


That hall at Kirklamont was for Gavan Napier, as he looked back, forever
associated with the most decisive hours in his own fate, as well as that
of his closest friend. It meant to him, perhaps more than anything, the
abiding memory of that morning after the arrival of Miss Greta's "little
friend."

He stood in front of the fireplace, waiting for Andrews to bring in the
post. At that particular moment there wasn't anybody else in the hall.
There probably soon would be somebody, Napier reflected, with a mingled
sense of amusement and uneasiness. For this was about the time Miss von
Schwarzenberg was astute enough to choose for her little tete-a-tetes
with the private secretary--always elaborately accidental. Sir William
would be out riding; Lady McIntyre dawdling over her late breakfast, and
Madge in the schoolroom, as Napier could all too plainly hear,
practising with that new ruthlessness introduced by Miss von
Schwarzenberg.

Miss Greta was never so at a loss as to enter without her little excuse,
"I think I must have left my knitting." Or, _sans_ phrase, she would go
to the writing table and consult Whitaker or Bradshaw. There was always
a semblance of reasonableness in such preoccupation. For Lady McIntyre
had fallen into the habit of going to Miss Greta for every sort of
service, from somebody's official style and title to looking out trains.

It wasn't the first, by several score of times, that young ladies had
shown themselves fertile in pretexts for a little conversation with Mr.
Napier. He himself was not in the least averse, as a rule, to a little
harmless flirtation--even with a governess. But suppose this particular
young woman should, with the fatal German sentimentality, be really
falling in love. One day, as he was sorting the letters, she had stood
at the table beside him, _durchblattering_ Bradshaw with piteous
aimlessness. He suggested: "Shall I look it up for you.... Where do you
want to go?"

With a heave of her high bosom she had answered that sometimes she
thought the place she'd best go to was the bottom of Kirklamont Loch.
Only the timely entrance of a servant with a telegram had, Napier felt,
saved him from a most inconvenient scene. He reflected anxiously upon
the high rate of suicide in Germany. It would be very awful if for sake
of his _beaux yeux_ Miss Greta should find a watery grave.

He looked at the clock. If the post was late, so was Miss von
Schwarzenberg.

Suddenly it came over Napier that she timed these entrances of hers, not
according to the clock, and not according to his own movements. He was
sometimes twenty minutes waiting there alone for the post to come in.

"God bless my soul!" he ejaculated mentally. Wasn't she invariably here
about two minutes before Andrews brought in the bag?

Before Napier had time to readjust himself to this new view of the
lady's apparent interest in _him_--there she was!--in her very
feminine, rather Londony, clothes; her intensely white, plump neck
rising out of a lace blouse; her yellow hair bound in smooth braids
round her head; a light dust of pearl powder over her pink cheeks.

She came straight over to the fireplace, "Mr. Napier, I should like to
speak to you a moment."

Napier lowered his newspaper, "Yes, Miss von Schwarzenberg."

"I don't know if you gathered yesterday ... the Pforzheims are old
friends of my family."

"Oh?" said Napier.

"Their father and my father were brothers-in-arms," she went on in that
heroine-of-melodrama style she sometimes affected. "They have been close
friends since their university days."

"Really." Napier's calm seemed to detract from her own.

The color surged into her round cheeks, but she held her head
dauntlessly on its short white neck as she confessed, "Carl and Ernst
have known me since I was a child."

Napier laid down the newspaper. "Indeed!"

"I suppose," she challenged him, "you think, that being the case, it was
very odd we should meet like strangers?"

"Oh, I dare say you had your reasons," he said, as Andrews came in.
Napier walked the length of the hall to where the man had put down the
bag.

Miss von Schwarzenberg did not move till Andrews had gone out. She did
not move even then, until Napier found his keys, selected his duplicate,
fitted it to the lock, and at last threw back the leather flap and drew
out the letters.

That instant, as though she had only just resumed control of her
self-possession, Miss von Schwarzenberg, handkerchief in hand, moved
softly down the hall and stood at Napier's side. It came over him that
this wasn't the first time that she had executed this simple
manoeuver, if manoeuver it was. He knew now that he had been
imputing to his own attractiveness her invariable drawing near while he
transacted his business with the letter-bag. The little pause before
Andrews left the room he had set down as a concession to the
proprieties. More than ever--so he had read her--if she laid traps for
little talks with the private secretary, was it important that the
servants should not be set gossiping. But now, with an inward jolt, he
asked, had he been making an ass of himself? His hand, already inserted
a second time to draw out more letters, came forth empty. He noticed
that her eyes were on it as he turned the palm of his hand toward him,
fingers doubled and nails in a line. He studied them.

She studied the letters already lying in an unsorted heap. They seemed
not to interest. She pressed her handkerchief to her lips and raised her
eyes. "I would have told you before--only--only,"--her beautiful mouth
quivered and her eyes fell again--"you ... are difficult to talk to."

"Am I?" said Napier, in a tone of polite surprise, still studying his
nails.

"For me. Yes.... You make it difficult. Why _do_ you, Mr. Napier?"

That man must have a heart of stone to resist an appeal so voiced.
"Perhaps you imagine it," he said, taking refuge in pulling out the rest
of the letters and sorting them into piles.

She stood as though too discouraged to continue, too listless to go
away. But when, in the midst of his sorting, Napier glanced at her, he
discovered no listlessness in the eyes that kept tally of the letters he
was dealing out. What earthly good does it do her to read the outsides
of our envelopes? he wondered.

"I've been unhappy," she went on, "most unhappy under my enforced
silence. I've wanted so much that _you_ anyhow should know the truth."

"I don't know why I especially--" he began.

"No, no, no!" she said a little wildly, in spite of the hushed softness
of her tone, "you don't know. And it's a good thing--a good thing you
don't. But I'm too unhappy under the innocent little deceit that's been
forced on me. You see, we had quarreled, the Pforzheims and I. That is,
_they_ quarreled. They each wanted to marry me. Oh, it was dreadful!
They wanted to fight a duel...."

"About...?" Napier laid a long official envelope on the top of Sir
William's pile.

"About me," she said with lowered eyes. "That was why I went to America.
I couldn't bear it. I said: 'We are strangers from this day!' And
so,"--she pressed her handkerchief again to her lips--"and so we met
like that. I told them I wouldn't stay here an hour if they swerved a
hair's breath from the role of strangers. Now,"--her voice altered
suddenly as though out of weariness after immense effort--"now you
know."

Napier took out the last letters. "I expect," he said kindly, "it's been
hard enough for you--at times."

"The strain is frightful." She swallowed and began again. "I--Maybe
you've noticed.... They will write to me from time to time."

She waited. Napier's face as blank as the new sheet of blotting paper in
front of the great presentation ink-stand.

"Well, is it my fault?" she demanded. "I've tried to make them see what
an equivocal position it puts me in, how unfair--" her face yearned for
sympathy.

Napier went on with his sorting.

"It's too nerve-racking," she said with increasing agitation. "Each one
thinks the other has got over that old madness. But the letters they
write me...! _Frantic!_" She came closer still. She laid her hand on
Napier's sleeve. "Do you know, sometimes I'm afraid...." She drew back,
as a step sounded on the gravel.

"The Pforzheims!" Napier said to himself.

But a very different apparition stood there. The girl in the Mercury
cap. Not so blithe as the day before--eager still, but wistful.

"Why, my _dear_ Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg said again, precisely as
she had before. "I told you I would come for you!"

"Yes, in the afternoon, you said. But I couldn't wait. Don't look like
that, dearest." She had lowered her voice as Miss von Schwarzenberg
joined her in the lobby. "I began to be afraid I'd only dreamed that you
were so near again."

Miss von Schwarzenberg answered in a voice lower still. Napier gathered
up Sir William's letters and his own. As he went with them into the
library, Miss von Schwarzenberg turned hastily. "I'll just go and see if
Lady McIntyre can spare me two minutes. I'll meet you out there, by the
clump of firs."

"All right," the girl said quietly, and turned away.

Miss von Schwarzenberg knew as well as Napier did that Lady McIntyre was
in the breakfast-room looking at the illustrated papers over her second
cup of coffee. But Miss von Schwarzenberg hurried upstairs.

Ordinarily Napier would have sat reading and answering his own letters
till what time Sir William should come in from his ride. To-day he stood
near the library fire--still seeing that face under the cap. What had
the von Schwarzenberg been saying to her? It wasn't at all the face she
had brought here the evening before. And if Julian Grant had been struck
by the happy faith in its yesterday aspect, Napier found something
rather touching in the hurt steadfastness it showed to-day.

"It isn't the same face," Napier repeated to himself; and before he had
at all made up his mind what he should do next, he was going through the
hall.

There she was pulling off her gloves, and holding her hands over the
fire.

"It _is_ cold," Napier said, and he seized the poker. The flames sprang
up and danced on the girl's face.

"Oh, _my_! How nice! You are the private secretary, aren't you?"

"What makes you think that?" he asked, a little on his dignity.

"Well, the other one was 'Julian,' wasn't he?"

Napier didn't much like this familiarity with a Christian name on the
part of a stranger. "Yes. I'm Gavan Napier."

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Napier." She held out her hand.

He said nothing, only glanced round the hall in an undecided fashion
after releasing her hand, and then put his letters down on the nearest
chair. "I hope I'm not in your way," the girl said. "You see, I don't
know at all what private secretaries do. You are the first one I ever
met."

He laughed, and said they were a good deal like other people so far as
he'd observed, and didn't do anything in particular.

Miss Ellis declared she knew better than that. "That's where you sit,
isn't it?"--she nodded at the big table--"writing your state documents.
And I suppose everybody goes by on tiptoe. And nobody dares speak to
you ... and _of course_ I oughtn't to be here!"

"Oh, yes, you ought."

"No. I ought by rights to be out by the firs. But I was cold. I didn't
see why I should wait out by the firs when there was a fire here doing
nobody any good."

She misinterpreted his steady look. "Oh, my! _you_ think I ought to have
gone out and waited by the...!"

"Nothing of the sort! I shouldn't have thought half so well of you if
you'd gone out and waited by the firs."

But the wing-capped head with its overweight of hair turned anxiously
toward the staircase by which Greta had vanished. "I've often heard
Greta say, 'The great thing is to learn instinctive obedience.'"

"But why on earth should you obey Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

"Because Greta's the cleverest as well as the most splendid person in
the world." She glowed with it. "And knows more in a minute than I do in
a year."

Napier laughed at that reason, so Miss Ellis produced another. "And
then, you see, ever since I was quite young I always _have_ obeyed
Greta--when I was good!"--she threw in quickly with a self-convicting
laugh.

"How long have you known Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

"Oh, for ages. Ever since I was seventeen."

"That _must_ have been a long time ago!"

"Well, it is. It's going on six years. Will it hold me too?" She looked
doubtfully at the brass bar of the fender.

"Oh, yes," he reassured her, "it would hold ten of you." His smiling
glance took note of the small-boned hands that clutched the brass. From
the delicate ankles and the impossible feet, up to the slim neck, there
wasn't enough substance in her to furnish forth a good British specimen
of half her age. Yet when she stood up she was not only tall, she was
almost commanding. That was partly carriage, he decided, and
partly--well, what was it?

"The trouble about Greta," she went on, "is that she's a person
everybody is always wanting. Then, added to that, she is the best
daughter in the world. Every year she went home for several months. But
she always got back in time!" The girl smiled an odd smile, not as
though intended for Napier at all. "She always got back (we've often
talked about it) just as I was about to commit some _awful_ mistake."

Napier was morally certain he could have got her--if only for the honor
and glory of Greta--to enumerate one or two of these timely rescues, if,
by a stroke of rank bad luck, Julian hadn't appeared at that moment.

"Oh, my!" said Miss Ellis under her breath--which, was silly as well as
slightly irritating.

With a casual "Hello!" Julian came marching over to the fireplace.

"You're being very energetic all of a sudden," Napier said, with his
smiling malice. "This early worm, Miss Ellis, is Mr. Grant."

"I'm very glad to meet you." She stood up and held out her hand.

"Hasn't it been a splendid morning?" she asked. And did they have many
days so un-Scotch-misty as this?

They went on uttering banalities about the morning and the countryside,
and smiling into each other's faces.

Napier sat on the fender-stool, chuckling to himself. Fancy old Julian!
Do him all the good in the world to have a girl looking at him like
that.

She did so want to see as much as ever she could of "this lovely coast."
Perhaps Mr. Grant would advise her what to begin with?

Oh, Julian could advise. There was nothing he was readier at.

"Stop! stop!" the girl interrupted, "I mustn't be made greedier than I
am; for I've only got two or three days."

"Two or three--! Where are you going?" Julian demanded.

"Greta thinks London."

"_London?_"

"Well, there _is_ the National Gallery, and the old city churches," Nan
said, with marked absence of enthusiasm. "Oh, I don't doubt really but I
shall find it perfectly fascinating.... And then from time to time Greta
will run up for a day or two."

"It isn't my business," Julian said, in that tone people use when they
have definitely adopted the business in question, "but it sounds to me
the very poorest--" He left it hanging there.

"Surely," Napier observed quietly, "when you came, you meant to stay
longer?"

"Oh--yes! when I first came. But, you see, I didn't understand. I
thought being a governess here was like being a governess at home." And
quickly, as though to obliterate any suggestion of odious comparison,
"Perhaps it's because we have so few governesses in California."

"Well, does that make it different for them?"

"Well, we give them time to themselves. I--I don't criticize your way,"
she threw in, a little flustered to find where she was going--"only
we--Oh, here is Lady McIntyre!" she ended with much relief.

The manners of the lady of Kirklamont were in marked contrast to her
pinched and chilled appearance. Her fairness was the kind that goes with
a slightly reddened nose and a faint, bluish tinge about the mouth at
this hour of the morning. She was most genial to Miss Ellis, and the
girl was, in her turn, won to ease and confidence.

"No, thank you, I won't sit down. I didn't _mean_ to stay but half a
minute ... though I'm afraid Greta may think, even now, that I still
don't understand that her time belongs to you."

"But we are not such slave drivers!" The little lady shook her diamond
ear-rings. Greta could certainly take any day off to be with her friend,
and _every_ day, she of course had several hours at her disposal,
whenever she wished.

Miss von Schwarzenberg, in the act of descending the stairs, had paused
the fraction of a second. "Oh, there you are!" she threw over the
banisters toward Lady McIntyre.

It occurred to Napier that the girl standing between him and Julian was
a little uneasy at being found so far this side of the firs.

"Yes," Lady McIntyre said, "I was just arranging with Miss Ellis that
she must stay to luncheon."

"And _I_ was just going to ask if you'd consent to _our_ plan," Greta
said as she joined the group. "We thought of lunching at the inn."

At sight of the smile on Miss von Schwarzenberg's face--still more at
her "plan,"--the slight cloud of dubiety vanished from Miss Ellis. She
stood in full sunshine.

"But why not lunch here?" urged Lady McIntyre.

"We want to talk America, don't we? And the old days?"

"Yes, yes," said her enraptured friend.

"Well, then,"--Lady McIntyre fell in with what she took to be the
previous arrangement--"you'll bring her back to tea."

They all saw Miss Ellis to the door, and Miss Greta saw her to the first
gate.

"I say," remarked Julian, when the lady of the house had also
disappeared, "why shouldn't we take those two girls around?"

"Sir William. He'd never stand it."

"No, no! But after. He plays before tea, doesn't he?"

"Yes, before."

"Very well, then. We'll take 'em round after. I'll come with the motor."
He caught up his cap. "You arrange it with the Paragon." Julian bolted
off toward the footpath leading to the inn.

Did she realize that, the woman coming back with the reflective air?
Apparently not. She lifted her bent head, and when she saw Napier was
waiting there at the door alone she smiled. She was certainly very
charming when she smiled.

"I don't want to disparage the golfing powers of either Bobby or Madge,"
Napier said, "but what do you say to a round with me after tea?"

She looked at him oddly. It struck Napier that she didn't apply her
formula, "You are very kind." He was conscious of a slight embarrassment
under her scrutiny.

"You say that because Lady McIntyre asked you to."

"Not only for that reason."

Whereat Miss Greta lowered her eyes. "What should I do about Nan Ellis?"
she said.

"Oh, we've thought of that. Mr. Grant will look after her while you and
I--" he smiled. "Shall we say half-past five?"

The china-blue eyes turned to the open door and to the gaitered
rotundity approaching--Sir William coming up from the stable. "Half-past
five, then," she murmured. On her way to the schoolroom she caught up a
book with the air of one who finds at last a boon long sought.

Sir William was inclined to be facetious over "catching you and the
Incomparable One. I've always known the day would come...."

Instead of tackling the letters, he went on with his absurd chaffing.

"The fact is," Napier said, when he had shut the library door, "I've
been wanting to say a word about this lady."

"What's up?" Sir William was still smiling roguishly.

"I'm thinking of the matter of the translation. Surely an official
document of that description ought not to be in chance hands."

What did he mean? It hadn't been in chance hands.

It had been in the hands of Miss von Schwarzenberg. And Miss von
Schwarzenberg, Napier reminded his chief, was an outsider. Or, if not
that (hastily he readjusted himself to the McIntyre view) she was at all
events outside the official circle.

"My dear boy, of course she is. She is a woman. And beyond knowing an
English equivalent for a German word, she understands as much about the
bearing of a paper on International Commerce--as much as that Aberdeen
terrier."

"I think, sir, you underrate Miss von Schwarzenberg's intelligence."

"Or maybe you," said Sir William, wrinkling his little nose with silent
laughter, "maybe you underrate the Aberdeen's."

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Greta did not produce her friend at tea time. "Nan doesn't care
about tea. Americans don't, you know. She will meet us at the links."

And it so fell out.

If Miss Ellis didn't "take to" tea, she "took to" golf "as if she'd been
a born Scot," according to Julian. Why on earth Miss von Schwarzenberg
should want to go on trying when the power to hit a ball was so
obviously not among her many gifts, passed Napier's understanding. It
struck him as rather nice of her that she wasn't the least disturbed by
Nan's swinging efficiency. Was that because it got rid of her?--put wide
stretches of sand and gorse between the ill-matched couples? Napier
would hardly have stood it so amiably but for Julian's disarming
frankness as to the satisfaction he, at all events, was deriving from
the arrangement.

And Nan--planted high above a bunker, hair rather wild, face sparkling
with zest for the game, or for the company, or for that she was Nan
Ellis.

"_Look_ at her!" Julian said, on a note so new in Napier's experience of
him that he stood silent a moment, looking, not at the girl, but at his
friend.

Napier was still in the phase of being immensely diverted at the
spiffing progress of old Julian's flirtation--so much better for him
than addling his brains over that scheme of internationalism that was
going to save the world.

"Look at her," Julian repeated, "did you ever see anybody so, so ...
God's-in-His-Heaven,-all's-well-with-the-world!"

"Look here, Julian, I hope you're not...."

"Well, do you know, I'm afraid I am," said his friend. "I don't really
quite understand what it is that's happened. But _something_ has."

With that childlike directness that was part of Julian's charm for the
more complex mind, he turned to Napier just before the von Schwarzenberg
came within earshot. "There's a fly in the precious ointment," he said.
"This rot about her going to London. Look here, Napier, the von
Schwarzenberg woman would do anything for you. Make her leave the girl
in peace here."

"Impossible!" Napier said with decision. "How _could_ I ask such a
thing, you unpractical being!"

"That woman" was too near now for more, and Julian sheered off toward
the figure on the sky-line.

On the way back to the hall, Miss von Schwarzenberg talked more
intimately than ever she had to Napier. She told him about her home in
Hanover. About her childhood. Her "years of exile." So she spoke of
America. She had a story of how an odious Chicago millionaire had wanted
to marry her.

"But why do I tell you all this?"

Napier too had been wondering.

"It must be," she went on, "because you are a little less 'remote' this
evening, and I am suffering from _Heimweh_."

In a sturdy, practical tone Napier advised her not to give way to that!
In order to divert her thoughts, "What do you think of ..."--he nodded
to the two on in front.

"Of what?" said Miss von Schwarzenberg, dreamily.

"Well, aren't you chaperoning your friend?"

"Chaperoning!" She came to, suddenly. Plainly she hadn't liked the word.
"We are too near of an age for chaperoning."

"It's not a question of age, is it?"--Napier extricated himself quickly.
"But perhaps it's only that I don't understand. I never can be quite
sure about Americans."

"Exactly my feeling," Miss von Schwarzenberg struck in. "They are so
old ... and yet so passionate. Oh, there's more than three thousand miles
of salt water between us of the Old World and the people of the New.
They're a new kind of humanity."

They found Nan and Julian alone in the hall. As Napier stopped to
unshoulder the golf bag, Miss von Schwarzenberg lingered too.

"What shall you do in that miserable inn all by yourself the whole
evening?" they heard Julian saying.

At the sound of the golf clubs clattering into the corner, Nan called
out, "Here they are!" She came running to the lobby. "I wanted to say
good-by, dearest." She pressed Greta's hand. "Hasn't it been heavenly,
learning golf? I never enjoyed myself so much."

"I wonder," Miss von Schwarzenberg said, smiling, "how many thousand
times I've heard you say exactly that."

"Oh, have you, Greta? No matter how many times I've said it before, I
never knew what the words meant till this minute. Good-by."

Julian walked on air at the girl's side. "I say," Napier called after
him, "don't forget you're dining here."

"Here? Oh, no," said the unblushing Julian. "I'm dining at 'The Queen of
Scots.'"

"_Are_ you?" said Nan, stopping short. "I was _thinking_ of asking you,
but I didn't know I had."

"You hadn't."

"Oh! and do you in Scotland," she laughed, "invite yourself to dinner?"

"Yes, when it's an inn."

They went off arguing, laughing.

The hall seemed to grow suddenly dark. Miss von Schwarzenberg leaned
against the big table as she unwound her scarf.

"Is your friend given to these sudden--a--these flirtations?" Napier
asked in his lightest tone.

Miss von Schwarzenberg spoke of "several little affairs." She couldn't
say how far they had gone. "You know the American standard in these
things isn't ours." She spoke of the sanctity, the binding character, of
the German betrothal.

While this recital was going on, Napier's thoughts were nearer the
Scots' Inn than the scene of the German _Polterabend_.

Should he or shouldn't he?

He knew quite well he could prevent this American girl's being shunted
on to the London line. Suppose he didn't prevent it? Julian would never
know how easily Napier could have kept Nan Ellis in Scotland.

Should he or shouldn't he?

Suddenly it occurred to him how extraordinarily serious he was being
about this trifle. What could it matter whether this little American
tourist spent a few weeks in Scotland or went to London to-morrow?
Napier knew, looking back, that he had no faintest prevision of the
difference that the girl's going or her staying would make, even to
Julian. And all the same he stood there in the middle of Kirklamont Hall
with the oddest sense of compulsion upon him.

He must see to it that the girl didn't go.

"I'm far from being unsympathetic to,"--he moved his head in the general
direction of the "Queen of Scots." "But, speaking of flirtation, I can't
help hoping your friend won't carry _my_ friend off to London."

Miss von Schwarzenberg's air of dreamy sentimentality dropped from her
as the petals of an overblown rose at some rude touch. She stood bare of
all but the essential woman with never a grace to clothe her. "What on
_earth_ are you talking about? Does she _mean_ to carry him off...?"

Napier shrugged. "I can only say that it's highly probable if Miss Ellis
goes to London that Mr. Grant will find an excuse for going too."

"You'd have to prevent that. What would his father, what would Lady
Grant think of...." She stopped there, as having indicated some
unsuitableness even greater than might appear.

"All the more, then," said Napier, as though she had given out of those
close-shut lips some damning fact, "all the more we ought to keep an eye
on them. But if they are in London--there'll be only one of us 'to keep
an eye'--" She kept both of hers on Napier. "You'd be here," he added,
"and I'd be sweltering in London."

"You, too, in Nan's train!"

"Oh, dear, no!" he laughed. "In Julian's, catching up what Miss Ellis
designs to let fall."

"You, too!" she repeated, as though the calamity were greater than she
could grasp.

He nodded. "I'd have to. Especially after what you ... didn't say. And
to go to London now would be an awful sell for both of us."

"For both of us?" she inquired with a little catch.

"For Julian and me. My holiday begins in ten days, and we were counting
on having it in Scotland. You see," he explained, "we've looked forward
to these next weeks for over a year. We've spent our summers together
ever since Eton days. If Julian goes, I've got to go too. And I should
look on such a necessity,"--he gazed upon the lady as he spoke, with
eyes well practised in conveying tender regretfulness--"I should look on
it as a personal misfortune."

The stricture about her mouth relaxed. The lips even trembled a little.

Napier couldn't imagine himself actually making love to Miss von
Schwarzenberg. But he could easily imagine himself kissing that
beautiful mouth of hers. So easily, indeed, that with some abruptness he
turned away.

It was lucky he had.

"There she is!" Out of a fiery cloud, Madge McIntyre, on tiptoe, looked
in at the window. Her schoolboy brother, behind her, was grinning.
"Bobby's won his bet!" she called out derisively to the world in
general. The wind of her scorn stirred in her flaming hair. Wildfire
tossed it back to say to her companion, "She has been able to tear
herself away from her American!"

"I've been looking for you," said Miss Greta, calmly. "Come round."

"Looking for me! Oh, _my_!" A final shake of the flaming mane, and as if
Wildfire's fury had shriveled her; had burnt both of them up, she and
Bobby vanished.

Napier made for the library, thanking his stars for the interruption.
What in the name of common sense had he been about to do? To saddle
himself with a flirtation--or a relation of some sort--with this foreign
young woman from whom, with considerable expenditure of skill, he had
kept clear for over a year!

"Mr. Napier,"--she overtook him on the library threshold--"I can't have
you thinking me ungrateful. I appreciate--_do_ believe me, how
particularly kind and thoughtful--yes, chivalrous, you've shown
yourself--"

With genuine amazement Napier faced her again. "What--a--I don't
understand...."

"Oh, I can well believe you do these things--these generous, delicate
things almost without thinking." Before he knew what she was about, she
had found his hand. She was pressing it in both of hers. She held up her
face--or, as it seemed, her lips. He backed away. "I shall _never_
forget," she said in her intense whisper, "your putting me on my guard
like this. And I may be able to be of use to you before we've done.
Meggie, where are you, child?"




CHAPTER IV


The thing happened with a remarkable regularity. An expedition would be
proposed by Julian, vetoed by Greta. Julian would stir Nan's enthusiasm.
Greta would dampen it. Yet Napier soon realized that, if Nan were
determined to come, Miss Greta was equally determined to come, and have
an eye on her.

So it fell out that the von Schwarzenberg's schemes, first to banish and
later to sequestrate the American, were set at naught through the agency
of Mr. Julian Grant. With a perfectly careless transparency he showed
that no plan of a social nature stood the smallest chance of enlisting
him unless it included the American. Whatever Miss Greta described in
the future, she must have known that at that moment her only chance of
seeing more of Napier was to fall in with Julian's program. After all,
exceptional as her position at Kirklamont was acknowledged to be, she
was far too level-headed an expert to leave her special charge out of
any proposed diversion. Since Madge had to be included, Bobby would come
too--when he wasn't off with the head keeper, or fishing with the
Pforzheims. If "those children" were added to the party, Miss Greta
would be left the freer to cultivate her cautiously conducted
friendliness with the secretary. For the rest, Miss Greta bothered
herself extraordinarily little about the friend who had come so far for
her sake.

Lady McIntyre and Sir William were everything that was kind and
hospitable. No later than the third morning after the arrival of Miss
Ellis, Lady McIntyre made Sir William stop the motor at the inn and
invite the young lady to dine with them that evening.

       *       *       *       *       *

Poor Julian! It's all up with him, Napier decided, between sympathy and
malicious satisfaction, as the girl slipped her long satin cloak off her
shoulders in the hall.

Sir William eyed the apparition with the appraising glance of the
connoisseur in feminine good looks. Plainly she passed muster.

"Well, Miss Ellis, and shall I ask you, as your compatriots do me when
I've been only a few hours in the place, 'What do you think of this
country?'"

"If you did, I could tell you a-plenty right now. And a great deal more
to-morrow!"

"Why to-morrow?"

"Because--" She interrupted herself to go forward upon the flustered
entrance of the hostess. Lady McIntyre's manner was that of the person
so inured to being late that she got no good out of being on time. But
to this manifestation Napier had long been accustomed. What mildly
intrigued him was the manner of the girl. She had put on a different
grace along with her evening gown. Her slower movements had even a touch
of stateliness, as though to match the trailing elegance of embroidered
chiffons.

"Come now, Miss Ellis," Sir William repeated, "why could you tell me
more about your impressions after to-morrow?"

"Because Mr. Grant is going to show us a castle. And Greta has promised
to take pictures of it. I suppose you know how splendid Greta is at
taking pictures? You don't? Well, she's every bit as good as a
professional."

"What castle?" Lady McIntyre asked. "Glenfallon?"

Miss von Schwarzenberg had come into the hall, with Madge clinging on
her arm.

"We have some delightful foreigners at Glenfallon. Germans. We owe them
a great debt of gratitude--" Every one there, except Miss Ellis, knew
that Lady McIntyre was going on to tell, as she invariably did to each
newcomer, the story of Frau Lenz and the providential result of taking
her advice. No one knew better than Madge how this repetition bored and
annoyed Miss Greta. When her mother had got as far as "debt of
gratitude," Madge threw in the information that "the old man wore
goggles! And goes scudding about the firth in the dead of night in a
motor launch. Simply bogey, I call it!"

"It is bogey enough," said Miss Greta, gently, "to be nearly blind and
not able to sleep."

Julian's entry did not disturb the group at the fire.

"If they're so kind, those Pforzheims, I wish," Miss Ellis went on,
"they'd take us out in their launch some time."

"Take us out? Not they!" said Madge.

"They won't? How do you know, miss?" Sir William pulled Madge's ear.

"They won't take people out in their boat. Won't even take me. Asked
'em."

"Meggie!" Lady McIntyre's tone was shocked, but the look she cast round
said, "There's a spirited young person for you!"

Bobby came in, and Julian joined the others in time to celebrate the
superior attractions of a sailboat over a beastly launch. "I'll take you
out and you'll see!" The person who was apparently to do the seeing was
Miss Ellis.

Greta von Schwarzenberg caught Napier's eye. "These innocents!" she
seemed to say. It was the sort of cautious interchange that punctuated
the entire evening. It went on across the flowers during dinner. It went
on across the bridge table after dinner. The silent interchange advanced
immeasurably the sense of understanding between Miss Greta and Sir
William's secretary. Perhaps he owed himself this relaxation. Though why
Napier felt something owing, wasn't yet clear to him. What was clear was
the surprise, not unmixed with ironic amusement, of the man accustomed
to be first at the goal of feminine interest, who sees a person commonly
quite out of the running pass him with easy stride.

Napier found in the unusual experience of looking on at this kind of
scene, instead of playing the chief part in it, something that appealed
both to his sense of the ludicrous and, since the person concerned was
Julian, to his generosity. So good for Julian!

At dinner Napier had almost pointedly ignored Miss Ellis. She must talk
to Julian. But by no canon of friendship could Napier be asked not to
have a little fun out of the spectacle. It ministered too temptingly
(especially with Miss Greta opposite) to that sense of the ludicrous
which other people's emotional adventures are apt to inspire in us. And
the more acutely and exquisitely is this pleasure provided if either of
the "parties" has hitherto neglected or been deprived of this element in
human experience. Not to know the ropes is to provide amusement to the
old salt. Napier, in the character of the Old Salt upon the seas of
sentiment, sat and smiled.

It was only when the party broke up that he stood a minute beside the
girl, while Julian discussed his sailing plans with the others.

"Why do you look at Miss Greta like that?" Napier demanded in an
undertone.

She laughed a little consciously. "Am I looking at her like that?"

"Yes. As if you didn't know whether Julian's plan was a good plan till
she'd endorsed it."

"It's quite true," she answered in a rush of confidence. "I don't always
follow her advice, but I always wish I had. Heavens! the things Greta
has saved me from!"

"And what were some of your greatest escapes?"

"Oh, the usual things. Thinking I'd better marry this one, and then
that."

"But why did you think you'd better marry them?"

"Because I thought they'd be so awfully hurt if I didn't." She joined in
his laughter, and then seriously: "You must understand they were _quite_
nice too. I rather loved them, as you say over here."

"And would you always be ready to give up the idea of marrying anybody
Greta disapproved?"

"I--don't--know," she said.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Are you really going to motor her to Abergarry?" Napier demanded, after
Miss Ellis' departure.

"Oh, you heard that!" Julian laughed. "We thought it was a secret."

"A secret? 'Oh, my, I'd love to see your home!'" he mimicked. "'And is
it really three hundred years old? Oh, my!'"

"Look here, Gavan," Julian stopped short in the middle of the moonlit
road--"don't say you aren't going to like her."

"I don't see my way not to liking her," he said grudgingly, "but I felt
to-night, if she said, 'Oh, my,' again, I should probably wring her
neck."

"What's wrong with it? Bless my soul! It's harmless enough. Some of our
up-to-date young women _swear_."

"Oh, if _you_ don't mind, I suppose I must put up with it. But, I say,
you aren't going to take her alone to Abergarry, are you?"

"Why not?" Julian was smiling. "Do _you_ want to come?"

"I was only thinking," Napier said, "it was rather marked, your not
including the von Schwarzenberg."

"Why should we always have to lug that German woman along?" The question
came out with uncommon rancor.

"Nan," Julian went on, already with the proprietary air, "is under the
most complete illusion about the von Schwarzenberg." Something watchful
came into the face he showed to the moonlight--almost suspicious,
totally un-Julianesque. "_I_ thought the reason Nan was going away so
meekly to London was that she was dependent on von Schwarzenberg."

Napier said that he, too, had received the impression that Miss Greta
was financing her "little friend."

Madge certainly thought so. But Madge has a way of getting to the bottom
of things.

She had done it when she came over to say good night to Julian and Nan.

"Miss Greta was very kind to you at school, wasn't she?"

"Very, very kind."

"And she gives you your holidays? Pays your expenses?"

Miss Ellis stared. "Expenses!"--and then broke into a little laugh.
"Why, no. You are a funny girl."

Madge threw back her hair. She didn't relish being called a funny girl.
She ached to bring this interloper down off her high horse. "Was it a
very expensive school Miss von Schwarzenberg sent you to?"

"Sent me--to school? Oh, you haven't understood her. I had my mother to
send me. And she sent Greta, too. Mother used to say,"--Miss Ellis was
still talking more to Mr. Grant than to the girl--"she considered it a
very great privilege to put opportunities in the way of a person like
Greta."

       *       *       *       *       *

Ever since the days of "wet bob" prowess, Julian was at his best, Napier
had always thought, on the water. But sailing was the sport he gave his
soul to. He forgot his troublesome theories, his quarrel with the
world's ordering, and yielded himself with delight to a comradely tussle
with the difficulties of navigation, on a rock-bound, "chancy" bit of
coast, as he called it.

He looked his best too. The lithe activity of body, the extraordinary
quickness of eye, showed the dreaming gone; instead of it, a mastery in
alertness. His girlish brown hands, endowed with a steadiness as of
steel.

The person who was distinctly not at her best under these conditions was
Miss Greta. She had opposed the boating plan as long as she could. The
moment she grasped the fact that Nan and Julian, and probably Napier,
were going on the water with or without Miss Greta, Miss Greta saw her
course with characteristic clarity. She adored sailing! It was only her
"sense of responsibility" which had made her hesitate.

Her sense of responsibility, if it was that, went far to spoil her
pleasure. She had a curious idea that, though the coast hereabouts was
dangerous, the farther out you went the more you tempted fortune. "Those
horr_chi_ble, rock-bound islands!"

Napier smiled to himself. He did a good deal of covert smiling during
those perfect July days, though he didn't pretend to himself that he was
specially happy.

The initial reason he gave himself for his state of mind was the
breath-taking speed of your inexperienced person, once he is started.
While Napier had been giving a secretly humorous welcome to Julian's
little distraction, here was that rash youth planning to motor the girl
to Abergarry. The only thing, so far as Napier could judge, that
prevented Julian from introducing the girl forthwith as his future wife
was the trifling circumstance that Sir James and Lady Grant had just
telegraphed to say they would be detained a fortnight longer at Bad
Nauheim.

There were times when, if Napier had been forced to stand and deliver
the reasons for his secret depression, he would have been inclined to
say they rose, not out of the fact that Julian was probably going to
marry this girl, but out of a growing conviction that she wouldn't "fit
in" in the life over here. She was "crude," as Miss Greta had said. And
she was too independent; too impulsive; too ... what was it? No repose.
You never knew where she'd break out next, either in speech or act. It
wasn't so much that what she said was wrong, or that what she did was
amiss; only both might be unexpected. She kept you on the jump. No
thoroughly nice woman, certainly no wife, should keep you on the jump.

Curiously, to Napier's mind, Julian was fashing himself on the score of
the influence which Greta von Schwarzenberg exercised over Nan Ellis. "I
tell you," he said one night, "the woman's hold over her is uncanny.
Part of the trouble lies in Nan's sense of loyalty. It's a drawbridge
and a moat and an army--horse, foot, and dragoons. I can't get past it.
It's a thing I haven't so far been able to talk openly to her about. And
there's only one other thing of that kind,"--Julian's face was quite
beautiful in that moment--"she doesn't know yet--unless she guesses."

"Oh, you haven't said anything yet?"--Napier breathed freer.

He was only waiting, Julian said, to get one thing clear. Not his
caring! And not any doubt of her. It was only that he couldn't share his
wife with anybody, least of all with von Schwarzenberg. "I've got to
know what that woman counts for."

"Why don't you find out?" Napier said. His own impatience, his sense of
suppressed irritation at the idea of the Schwarzenberg's uncanny hold,
surprised Napier--though he would have said it was a natural expression
of sympathy for his friend. "_I'd_ find out 'what she counts for' ... if
it were my affair!"

"I was going to yesterday," Julian said. "I'm thinking I will to-night."

Napier took out his watch. "Ten minutes to eleven," he remarked.

"Hang the Schwarzenberg!" Her inventing to see Nan home in the motor
that evening had been a low-down device to cheat Julian Grant of his
rights!

But all the same here he was, briskly leading the way along the
cross-cut to the inn. "She's often late getting to bed."

"How do you know?" Napier demanded.

"Going over the hill, I've seen the light in her window.... Do you
notice," he broke off to say, "how, when we're sailing, Nan always wants
to go farther out?" He waited a moment, eager for Napier's tribute to
the spirit of the girl. "And not foolhardy either!"

"You are making a very tolerable sailor of her," Napier admitted.

"Steady as any old hand," the other went on eagerly. "And that woman
always interfering. 'Be careful, Nanchen; leave it to Mr. Grant.' 'We
must turn back now; look how far we've come!'"

There had been, indeed that very afternoon, a spirited argument, in the
course of which a number of prickly observations were made, chiefly by
Bobby and Miss Greta. With sole exception of the lady, everybody in the
boat enthusiastically--Bobby even violently--in favor of going out to
the Islands. The project was opposed by the one person with a
pertinacity that Julian was sure could mean only one thing. A jealous
woman's determination to preserve her ascendancy. To make a test case.
She's afraid she's losing hold. She must make a stand somewhere. She
makes it at Gull Island. "We aren't to land there if von Schwarzenberg
dies for it. I tell you what it is, Gavan. I'll get Nan out to Gull
Island to-morrow, or I'll know the reason why!" The face Julian turned
to his friend in the starlight was lit with radiances Napier had never
thought to see there.

"This way." Julian began to tread his way on in front, among the rocks
and underbrush. "I shall go and wait in the gorse by the inn till von
Schwarzenberg takes herself off."

A sense of utter joylessness fell on Napier, as for a few minutes longer
he kept the pace at Julian's heels. He struggled consciously against the
absurd illusion of being left out in the cold. He, with his hosts of
friends, his hosts of "affairs," scattered broadcast through the last
ten years, the Gavan Napier of enviable worldly lot, had an instant's
keen perception of the externality of all these things. He had never
lived through an hour like this that was Julian's.

"I'll turn back now," Napier said aloud. The figure in front neither
turned nor tarried. On and on.

Napier smiled. His friend was hurrying along under the stars toward a
planet mightier for light and leading than any in the heavens--a candle
set in the window of a girl.

Before Napier had finished sorting the next morning's letters, the
Grants' chauffeur drove up to Kirklamont with a note.

     _Must_ see you before the others come. Car will wait and bring
     you to the landing.

     J. G.

The slight figure was prancing up and down the strip of sand between
encircling rocks. Never a look toward his beloved boat, riding with
transfigured sails at the entrance to the cove. As far away as Napier
could see his friend, he felt the nervous force that was being expended
in that absorbed prowl.

"I nearly routed you out in the middle of the night," was the way Julian
began.

"You remember last night, just to prevent me from taking Nan home, that
woman took Nan home herself? Well, she stayed at the 'Queen' a mortal
hour. As if that wasn't enough in all conscience, Nan was for seeing her
home! 'No, darling, no!' I heard the von Schwarzenberg say. And then
with that acrid break in her sugariness, 'I don't want to be taken
half-way!'

"There was something I lost. Then, 'My dear child,' I heard her say,
'you must allow me here to know what is appropriate, what is expected.
What isn't expected, is that an inexperienced girl, strange to the
place, should be running about dark roads this time of night. You would
be misunderstood. I should be misunderstood if I let you.' Then Nan was,
'_So_ sorry!' and 'Forgive me, Greta!' They kissed. Nan went slowly back
to the inn. Then, instead of turning into the Kirklamont footpath,
Schwarzenberg came up the hill. I laughed to myself to think of her
surprise when she should come across me. But she turned to the left and
cut across the west flank. I thought maybe the woman had got bewildered,
going in unaccustomed places at night. But she wasn't walking like a
bewildered person at all. Do you know what she _was_ walking like? Like
a person who has done the same thing before. She was making straight as
a die for that old shepherd's hut the bracken cutters use. She went into
that hut and stayed there three quarters of an hour."

"_No!_"

"And when she came out, Ernst Pforzheim was with her. They came along so
near me that I began to be sorry for them. They were heading straight
for a nasty jar when they should see me. Well, they didn't see me. They
went by not five yards away from the stone pile I was leaning
against--talking hard in German, till I lost sound and sight of them."

"God bless me!"

"I'm sorry, Gavan." To Napier's amazement, Julian was looking at him
with pitying eyes. Evidently, he thought, in spite of his friend's air
of humorous detachment, he had been cherishing some genuine feeling for
Miss Greta.

The idea, especially in view of the revelation, offended Napier's _amour
propre_. "I hadn't thought it necessary to tell anybody," he said, "but
I knew there was--or there had been--a Pforzheim friendship under the
rose."

"You didn't think it necessary to tell...."

"I was in the Schwarzenberg's confidence before ... all this. I couldn't
give her away, could I?"

"You needn't have given her away. The merest hint would have warned me.
You might have thought of Nan!" he burst out passionately.

"Oh, everybody can't be thinking of Nan, to the exclusion of everybody
else."

The other man looked into Napier's eyes. And Napier laughed out. It was
so patent that old Julian, newly enlightened as to the part love plays,
had conceived the idea that his poor friend was the victim of a
tenderness for Miss Greta.

Gavan caught in the toils of a woman like that!--the tragedy of it
softened Julian. His face cleared. The motor was coming back with the
others.

But the only others who were in the car were Madge, distinctly scowling,
and Bobby, cheerful as usual. "Miss Greta's got a headache. Not coming!"
the boy called out.

       *       *       *       *       *

Julian was in the car as soon as they were out. "I'll go and get Miss
Ellis."

"You can't. She won't leave 'her friend'!" said Madge, jerking her head
away.

They didn't sail that day.

Julian haunted Kirklamont all the afternoon and evening. No sign of
either lady.

"I shouldn't have thought she would be so obvious!" Julian burst out, as
he and Napier sat smoking at the far end of the terrace. "To stick in
bed all day just so as to prevent Nan--"

"What's the good? There's always to-morrow."

"She thinks twenty-four hours will block the business pretty completely,
and maybe even take the edge off Nan's keenness about the island for
good. Anyway,"--his forehead drew up into lines of anxiety--"twenty-four
hours will give her time to draw the reins tighter. She's drawing the
reins tighter this minute." Julian looked up at the pile of Kirklamont,
somewhere in whose innermost Nan Ellis was in attendance on a so-called
sick-bed instead of being, where she ought to be, out sailing with
Julian. "I'll tell you what it is, Gavan,"--he drove a fist into the
palm of his hand. "You may take my word for it I'll get Nan Ellis out to
Gull Island to-morrow somehow. You see if I don't."

"You said that last night."

"No. I said last night I'd get her out there or I'd know the reason why.
Well, now I know the reason against it." He nodded toward the two
windows whose blinds were drawn.

"The reason doesn't seem to mind so much your wandering about the
mainland with her 'little friend,'" Napier reflected out loud. "She
seems to have a special scunner against islands. Why?"

"Especially against Gull Island," Julian agreed. And he too echoed,
"Why?"

       *       *       *       *       *

To the general surprise, Nan Ellis had risen early and vanished. Miss
Greta had fallen asleep and, opening her eyes at eight--no Nan. The
disappearance exercised a strikingly curative effect upon Miss Greta.
She rose and dressed, and herself conducted a search. "_I_ know!" she
said at last. "Nan has gone to get fresh clothes. She has a mania for
never wearing twice what she calls a 'shirt waist.'"

Sir William had already left the breakfast table, and every one but
Napier had finished. Still Miss Greta lingered. "She _must_ come
soon--after leaving me like that."

And come she did; across the lawn, in full view of the dining-room
windows, walking at Julian Grant's side, looking up into his face;
Julian, talking with great earnestness, his right hand, palm upward, now
raised, now lowered, with that weighing action Napier knew so well. They
parted when they reached the path, and Nan came on alone, "Julian," she
announced with no apparent self-consciousness in use of his
name--"Julian's coming back to take me for a sail, whether anybody else
wants to go or not."

"Oh, really!" Miss Greta exchanged a look with Napier.

"Thank you!" said Madge at her prickly pertest. "Since you are so
pressing--"

"We must wait for the letters!" It was so that Miss Greta, coming out
into the hall, announced her intention of being one of the party. So,
too, she betrayed her cherished hope that Napier might join them.

"Of course Gavan must go." He, Sir William, wasn't going to be a
spoil-sport! And he announced the fact with a roguish significance that
made Miss Greta cast down her eyes. When she lifted them, there was the
bag. It proved a light post. Sir William tore open two or three
envelopes while he stood there.

"Anything in the papers?" Miss Greta asked Napier.

A glance at the outsides of her own letters seemed to satisfy her. Did
she read other people's with the same facility?

"The papers don't seem to have come," Napier answered.

"Not come! I wonder why!" She listened while he explained, in the easy
British fashion, "that now and then the fella at the Junction would
forget to throw the papers out."

"And you stand that? Sir William doesn't get the man dismissed?"

"What the devil...!" Sir William broke out. Apparently there were things
which Sir William could not stand! One of them was in the letter he held
as he went fuming toward the library, with Napier at his heels.

"Shut the door! Look here. The fact of that confidential memorandum
being in the hands of the British Government is known. Known in the
Hamburg shipping center, of all things! Here, you see what they say."
Sir William thrust under the eyes of his secretary the highly
disconcerting letter he had just received from the Board of Trade.
"Well--? It certainly didn't happen in _my_ department. Damned
impudence!" Sir William burst out, "to suppose that any of _our_
people...." He glared at an invisible cross-examiner, "It's never been
out of our hands!"

"Except," Napier threw in, "to come into the translator's."

"Translator!" his chief echoed pettishly. Sir William, like many men not
at home in foreign languages, quite particularly objected to being
reminded of the fact. "Translator! They aren't worrying about the
translator. It's what you're here for."

"I wasn't the translator of that particular document. You gave it to
Miss von Schwarzenberg to do."

"To be sure! But remembering that doesn't help us."

"I wonder!" said Gavan Napier.

"Come, come!" said Sir William. "It's annoying to have secret
information go astray, but it needn't warp our common sense."

Napier's duty, as he saw it, to try to turn his chief's mind toward a
possible culprit under his own roof was discounted at the start, as the
younger man well knew, by Sir William's chivalrous view of women. That
wasn't really what was the matter with his view, but that was the name
it went by. Sir William had married his butterfly lady for her painted
wings. Finding but little underneath the blue and golden dust, he
loyally concluded that the only difference between Lady McIntyre and
other men's wives was a difference in the hue and the degree of their
gold and blue--or their leaden and dun, as the case might be.

Even if women were told things, they could never distinguish what was
important from what was trivial, and they forgot as quickly the precise
point as the general bearing. Sir William had lived many happy years in
the comfort of these convictions.

"I tell you, Gavan, the use of that document would argue a relationship
with affairs quite grotesque to suppose on the part of any woman."

The thought of the Pforzheims flashed across Napier, bringing a kind of
relief. Miss Greta might quite innocently have remembered and retailed
enough to Mr. Ernst for him to turn to account.

For the first hour and a half of that memorable sail, the _Kelpie_ ran
lightly before a delicate breeze. An eager girl at the prow, a watchful
woman at the stern, youth and manhood on board--a cargo of fair hopes
borne along under skies of summer to airs of extreme sweetness. It was
the very light opera of seafaring and of life. No faintest hint of the
weightier merchandise--for which mankind takes risks.

Julian looked back at the receding coast-line. "How gloriously
Glenfallon stands!" He quoted, "'A great sea mark outstanding every
flaw!'"

Innocent as it was, the comment seemed not to please Miss Greta. She
thought the castle was "probably not so great a 'sea mark' as it looks
to us."

Julian assured her that you could see Glenfallon tower, "Well, a long
way beyond those cruisers."

"What cruisers?" All eyes except Miss Greta's swept the horizon. And all
found it featureless, till Bobby picked out a couple of dun-gray shapes.

Nan looked at Julian with frank admiration. "My! what wonderful eyes you
must have! I can't see a thing!"

"Pooh! Mr. Grant isn't a patch on Ernst Pforzheim," said Bobby.

"Oh, you and your Pforzheims!" Julian scoffed.

With his Scotch tenacity, Bobby stuck to his guns. "All I'm saying is,
Mr. Ernst can do better than see a ship when it's so far away nobody
else knows there's a ship there at all. _He_ can tell you what she is!"

"Any one with good sight," said Miss Greta, "can be trained." In German
schools, she went on, a study of silhouettes was just part of the
ordinary discipline of the eye.

Julian was deflecting Madge's course to the left of Gull Island.

"Oh, _do_ let us go a _little_ nearer!" the girl implored.

"No!" came from Miss Greta's cushions in the stern; "the ... the channel
isn't safe!"

Julian began to tell about bird-nesting over there when he was a boy.
And a cave the smugglers had used--

"Oh, my!" came the familiar note. "We simply _must_ go and explore!"

"No," said Miss Greta decisively. "_No!_"

Napier caught Julian's eye. "Why?" they both asked silently.

And now even the devoted Nan was ready with, "Dearest Greta, why not?"

"Because it--it's too dangerous, I tell you!" She had carried a
handkerchief to her lips. Over the handkerchief the eyes looked out to
the Gull rocks, with an expression not easy to define. But Napier felt
as clearly as ever he'd felt anything in his life: she will do something
to prevent those two from wandering away together on Gull Island. What
would she do? What _could_ she do? He lay in the boat and speculated.

Certainly Miss Greta's conception of her responsibility for the safety
of her charges had produced a curious agitation in that lady. While the
others were arguing, she dashed her handkerchief down from her lips,
that were seen to be trembling, and called out roughly, "_Madge!_ I
forbid it!"

"Why ... Miss Greta?" said the astonished girl, staring at her altered
idol with wide eyes.

"You must turn back," said the lady, her bosom heaving.

Whether Julian didn't hear, or wouldn't hear, Napier didn't know. Nan
Ellis had turned to look at the island. She leaned far out over the bow.
Motionless as a figure-head, she faced the islands and the outer sea.
The wind drowned Greta's protest--it blew the girl's loose hair straight
back--it made a booming in the sail.

"Mr. Grant, I _refuse_ to let them land!"

Julian stared at her. Miss Greta made an effort to speak in a more
normal tone. "It's too--_too_ dangerous," she said hoarsely.

"Oh, very well," Julian said. "They can stay in the boat."

"Then why,"--her voice rose again--"why are you going so near? You just
want to tantalize them!"

"They won't be half so tantalized, will you, Madge, if somebody goes and
brings back the news. I haven't been there for a dozen years--nor
anybody else, I should say."

The boat was cutting through the bright water at a great speed. The wind
sang in the sail.

Miss von Schwarzenberg half rose. "Stop!" she cried out. "I--I'm
dizzy--I'm sick!" She lurched; she flung out her hands. Before anybody
had time to catch her, or, indeed, had any conception of the need to,
Miss von Schwarzenberg had lost her balance. She was over the side of
the boat.

Napier sprang to his feet just a second too late. Greta, in five fathoms
of water, was crying for help.

The first Nan knew of what had happened, Madge was screaming with horror
and Julian was tearing off his coat. But Napier was nearer. Miss Greta
needn't have lifted her arms out of the water as the foolish do, calling
frantically, "Mr. Napier! Mr. Nap--!" before, most horribly, she
disappeared. Napier was out of the boat and swimming toward a hat. He
dived and came up, supporting a dripping yellow head on one arm.

Julian helped to lift Miss Greta in. They covered her with coats. The
two girls chafed her hands. Julian, silent with remorse, as fast as he
could was bringing the _Water Kelpie_ home.

As Napier supported Miss Greta down the little gangway, she pressed his
arm. Under her breath, "You've saved my life," she murmured. "For all
that's left of it, I shall remember."

She wouldn't wait till they could get a motor. In her clinging, soaking
clothes she insisted on walking those three quarters of a mile from the
landing to Kirklamont.

Oh, Greta von Schwarzenberg was game, for all her pardonable panic at
the sudden prospect of death. Napier admitted as much to Miss Ellis, as
the heroine of the day hurried on before them, nobly concerned to tone
down the story with which Madge and Bobby were so pleasantly occupied in
freezing their mother's blood.

Nan lingered a moment at Julian's side in the lobby, but it was to
Napier she was talking. "'Peril of death'?" she repeated, under cover of
the repercussions of Lady McIntyre's consternation and thankfulness.
"Why do you say that?"

"Well, I don't want to make much of the little I did--but suppose I
hadn't been there, and suppose Julian couldn't swim!"

"But Greta can."

Both men stared at the girl incredulously.

"It's none the less good of you--what you did. And very horrid for poor
Greta, with all her nice clothes on--"

"She can _swim_?"

"Like a fish."




CHAPTER V


Upon Miss von Schwarzenberg's reappearance after luncheon, the family
welcomed her with affectionate enthusiasm. Lady McIntyre established the
rescued one on the sofa. Nan Ellis brought a footstool. Sir William
stirred the fire.

Napier was struck by the picture of amenity and cheerfulness presented
by the group.

"No, Miss Greta," said Madge, "you needn't be looking round; the papers
_haven't_ come, I'm glad to say. You've got to rest and be taken care
of." She spread the shawl over Miss Greta's knees. Sir William, from the
hearth-rug, beamed upon the scene.

"Eh? What? Speaking from London?" he said to the servant, who had come
in with a message. "All right." So little was Sir William prepared for
any important communication, he didn't even go into the library to
receive it. He crossed to the telephone on the opposite side of the
hall.

Napier would probably have concerned himself about the message no more
than Lady McIntyre or Madge, but for the chance that made him aware of
how intently Greta was taking in the swift change that came over the
amiable, fussy, little figure with the receiver at his ear.

"What? _What?_ Say that again. _When?_ Six o'clock last night? You
don't mean it was official.... God bless my soul! No, not a word. Our
papers haven't come." Then a pause. "How long did you say they'd give?
Not _this_ Saturday? Why, that's to-morrow!" A pause of thirty seconds
followed, Sir William hanging on to the receiver, listening.

"I'll think it over," he said excitedly. "I'll call you up later.
Good-by." When he had hung up the receiver, he still stood there,
rooted, looking through the wall at some astonishing happening far off.

"William," Lady McIntyre started up, "it's not about the boys!"

"Boys? No. God bless my soul! nothing whatever to do with the boys."

"Oh, only some government matter." With a clearing brow she settled
again in her corner.

Sir William turned about, and went with quick, fussy, little steps into
the library.

Napier followed his chief a moment after, only to be told to go and send
a couple of messages. "Hall telephone." Sir William spoke shortly. He
sat, elbows on table, head in hands, staring straight before him at some
staggering vision.

As Napier stood waiting to get his call through, Miss Greta came over to
the writing-table and took the address-book out of the stand. Madge
hitched herself up on the end of the table nearest the telephone and sat
swinging her long legs.

"What's up?" she demanded, with her laughing impudence.

"Is anything up?" Napier asked.

"There, Miss Greta, didn't I tell you? It's boring enough of _Father_ to
pinch up his lips and go out of the room like that when he gets some
news that would be so nice and interesting for us all."

"Sir William is quite right. A member of the Government never talks in
private about official business."

"Oh, doesn't he?"--Wildfire tossed back her mane. "You know perfectly
well Father's discretion lasts only as long as the first shock of any
piece of news. He thinks he's done all he's called on to do when he
doesn't tell us that minute. If you wait, you're safe to hear what it's
all about."

"My dear Madge!" remonstrated Miss Greta, sweetly. It was taking her a
long time to verify that address.

Patience incarnate at the telephone having refused to deal with two
underlings in turn, waited now for the station master to be fetched. "Is
that the station master? Well, look here. Is the new express running
yet? Yes, what time? I'm speaking from Kirklamont for Sir William
McIntyre. He must catch that train. Yes, motoring to--Yes. You could
hold it a minute or two, I suppose, if--All right." He had no sooner
rung off, than he rang on. "Give me the motor-house." And still Miss
Greta sat there, till she heard that the new car was to come round in
time for Sir William to catch the four o'clock express at the junction.

As Napier rang off again, his chief was back in the hall, giving
directions to a servant about packing a traveling bag. Sir William's
family appeared not the least excited at the prospect of the sudden
journey. They were too well accustomed to his bustling ways. But Sir
William himself had the air of being even more wrought up, now that he'd
had time to think over his news, than he had been on receiving it. He
stood frowning and working his eyebrows as the conversation in the hall
died and the company waited for the enlightenment which Madge had
foretold was sure to come.

"Madness!" He flung it out to an invisible audience. "Madness!"

"Oh, Ireland!" said Lady McIntyre, certain of the inevitable connection.

"Ireland? Not at all. Austria."

Miss Greta, her envelope in hand, had turned about in her chair and
looked over the back of it, her round head slightly on one side in an
attitude of polite attention. Very different from the form adopted by
the ladies of Sir William's own family, secure as they were in their
knowledge that Sir William would unburden himself.

They seemed disposed to look upon the news, when it did come, as
something of an anticlimax, for Sir William preceded his launching of
the fact with an increased activity of eyebrow and a furious jingling of
seals. "Austria," he said, "has sent an ultimatum to Servia."

"Oh, is that all?" Lady McIntyre's last lingering fear was laid to rest.

"Couched in such terms," Sir William went on, "as no self-respecting
nation could accept."

Miss Greta's air of elaborate deference suffered no change. She heard
that the Austrian Government was plainly composed of a set of
Bedlamites, "scratching matches in a powder-magazine."

Sir William seemed to have his excitement, his anxiety, all to himself,
till Mr. Grant came in with Nan Ellis. Even then, Sir William had only
one person with whom to share the graver implications in the news.

You'd say Julian neither heard nor saw the girl he had been frankly
adoring as they came in. Question after question he fired at Sir
William, rather as though that gentleman were responsible for the
_impasse_. "_What!_ Servia is to take it or leave it _en bloc_ by
to-morrow night? Why, that means there's less than twenty hours between
Europe and--" he stopped appalled.

They still called it Servia at this date.

"Europe?" said Miss Greta, gently. "You mean Servia."

The butler came in with the belated papers.

Sir William snatched up the "Times." He glanced quickly at headlines.

"They don't make much of it," Napier said.

"Naturally," Miss Greta excused them. "They are full of their own
difficulty."

"What do you call their own difficulty?" Napier asked, as he paused to
turn the paper.

"Why, Ireland," she answered promptly.

Napier found himself looking at her.

"There are some sane people even in Ireland," Sir William threw out over
the top of his paper. "But this--this Austrian madness. No warning, no
parley; a pistol to Servia's head!"

Julian's voice over-topped Sir William's. "It amounts to the abject
humiliation of Servia--or war."

"Servia will accept Austria's terms," said Miss Greta, quietly.

"Never!" Julian shouted. "All the chancelleries of Europe will join in
protest."

Sir William paused in his trot up and down that end of the hall. "If
Russia goes in, Germany can't stay out. This time to-morrow Europe may
be ablaze."

The supposition, sounding through those piping times of peace, rang
fantastic. Napier remembered, long after, how he had looked round
Kirklamont hall and saw that apart from Sir William there wasn't a soul
there who believed in the possibility of war, except one. That one--Miss
Greta.

"Monstrous as it would be to force Servia into political slavery,"
Julian admitted gravely, "there would be one thing worse."

Nan at last lifted her voice. "What would the worst thing be?"

"War," answered Julian.

"What, what!" Sir William caught him up. "There are worse things than
war, young man."

"There's nothing worse than war. Fortunately, we've reached a place
where the mass of the people know that."

       *       *       *       *       *

As the awful prospect unfolded, people were not appalled, though they
said they were. They weren't even unhappy. They were far too excited.
And to be excited about matters of world-wide importance is to be lifted
out of the petty round and to catch at the crumbs of greatness.

Napier went up to town with Sir William. At close quarters with official
minds, the younger man shared those hours of anxious hope, bred by the
earlier interchange between Petersburg and Berlin, London and Belgrade.

Still, and without ceasing, though too late, as was seen in the
retrospect, England worked for peace.

Not even the formal declaration of war on Servia, made by Austria on the
Tuesday following that fateful Friday, arrested the effort of the
British Government to avert the catastrophe.

Five days after the ultimatum discussion in Kirklamont Hall, the German
demand was made for British neutrality and the first shots were fired at
Belgrade.

Julian's letters in those days registered merely the seething and
boiling in the caldron of his separatist soul. His horror of the
Mittel-Europa plot, as it began to unroll, was lost in his horror of the
spread, the deliberate inflammation, of what he called the "war cancer."

Napier flung the letters into the waste-paper basket and forgot them.
But as he went about his work, transmitting cryptic telephone calls or
hurrying to and fro with confidential messages, all incongruously a
girl's face would flicker before him like a white flower before the eyes
of one running at top speed through danger-haunted woods at night.

Those were the hours when Great Britain was pressing the most momentous
question ever framed by diplomacy: Was France, was Germany, going to
respect the neutrality of Belgium? Then the moment when France cried,
"Yes," and Germany's silence was louder in the instructed ear than roar
of cannon.

Sir William had sat in the war councils, and hour after hour sat in
smaller groups, laboring with the best minds to find a way to stay the
spread of the contagion. When Sir William came to a place where nothing
more could be hoped for or immediately be done, he found that, for the
first time in his life, he was unable to sleep. Country air, home, if
only for a single round of the clock.

They came back to Kirklamont to find, in outward seeming, all unchanged.
The fact struck sharply on the strained senses of the two men who drove
up from Inverness toward noon on the first Monday in that fateful
August. Late Saturday night Germany had declared war on Russia, and
France was already invaded.

In the hall at Kirklamont Lady McIntyre sat with her family, her Russian
embroidery, and her boarhounds. She came to meet her husband with,
"William, dear! And what's the news?"

Madge ran, her red hair all abroad, to embrace her father. Bobby, on the
point of going upstairs, changed his mind.

Sir William met interrogation testily.

Gavan Napier's first impression on entering the hall had been of the
still intensity of Miss Greta's gaze; perhaps he was the more struck by
it because it wasn't on himself. On Sir William. As she closed the book
she'd been reading aloud and rose, the look was gone. Amid the heats of
midsummer and of war she stood cool, pearl-powdery, sweet, with a smile
for Napier now, and an expression of deferential welcome for Sir
William. Miss Greta left to other folk all worrying questions aimed at
jaded and travel-worn men.

No, Sir William wasn't going to sleep till after luncheon. But he was
hot and dusty, he would go up....

They would have tackled Napier, but he, too, escaped hard upon Sir
William's heels.

As Napier followed his chief down three quarters of an hour later, a
laugh floated up. Nan Ellis.

She and Bobby sat on the sofa, taking and giving lessons in the tying of
sailors' knots. She looked up carelessly enough at Napier's appearance.
"How do you do? Do you know any good knots? I thought you wouldn't."

"She is prettier than I remembered," he said to himself.

Sir William, on the hearth-rug, showed a man already refreshed.

"What's this about the papers?" This raised voice commanded the hall.

"Yes, my dear William, for the third time. That was why we had to try to
get our news from London. But they were horrid, yesterday, about telling
us anything. It's not very pleasant,"--Lady McIntyre revealed her
conception of the use of war news--"when neighbors call, expecting us to
know the latest, and find we haven't heard a word since Saturday
morning."

"Well, then,"--Sir William filled the hiatus with a single sentence--"at
seven o'clock on Saturday evening Germany declared war on Russia."

Instantly the hall was full of hubbub. The excitement bred by that
tremendous fact reached even Lady McIntyre. "Dear me! I wonder what the
Pforzheims will say to that. They _will_ be astonished."

Miss Greta went through the motions of surprise. "Has it really come?"

Napier, observing her narrowly, said to himself. "She knew." And then,
"How did she know?"

Julian Grant came hurrying in with excited face. Before he had spoken to
anybody else or so much as looked at Nan: "Tell us, Sir William; it's
only in the country, isn't it, that people are talking wildly about
England being mixed up in this horrible business?"

"People talk everywhere," Sir William said crustily.

After Sir William's rebuff, Julian had gone over and sat down by Nan. It
was Miss Greta who did the talking.

Napier saw her leaning across Nan to engage Mr. Grant. Most gentle she
was, ingratiating. As he strolled nearer, Napier heard one or two of her
leading questions, put with an air of having no idea how straight they
went to the heart of the matter.

"Oh, you think that? I should _so_ like to know why."

Sir William, pretending not to listen, pretending to talk to Madge, lost
no word; neither Julian's denunciation of the idea of England's
interfering, nor Miss Greta's, "Well, it would be quixotic. And whatever
her enemies may say, England is not quixotic." It was the kind of little
compliment with a sting in its tail that Miss Greta could deliver with
an innocence that must, Napier decided, console her for many an enforced
piece of self-suppression.

"'Quixotic!'" Julian began to tell how much worse it would be than that.

Fury rose in Sir William. Napier saw it getting into his eyebrows. Miss
Greta saw it, too, Napier could have sworn. Oh, she knew perfectly what
she was about. "It _is_ difficult,"--she supplemented Julian's
assurance--"very difficult, to see how England could come in, with civil
war ready to break out at any minute. She would be sacrificing herself
for what?" Miss Greta inquired in her suave voice.

"The statesman who would advocate it," said Julian, "would be committing
suicide."

Sir William swung round. "You're wide enough of the mark _this_ time."

"You don't mean--"

"Our obligations to France--" Sir William began.

"What obligations?" the young man demanded. "The country hasn't endorsed
any obligations." He jumped up and faced Sir William on the hearth-rug.
"If behind our backs they've gone and committed us--" Julian's dark eyes
flashed a threat of dire reprisal. Provisionally he wiped the floor with
those (including, all too flagrantly, the Laird of Kirklamont) who
might, "in their colossal ineptitude, want to commit this nation to
war."

"That's _your_ opinion," said Sir William, growing bright red under the
friction. "You seem to think we have no right to ours."

Julian halted an instant before the problem. "How much right _has_ a man
to the wrong opinion?" Upon the answer to that, he knew, had hung much
of the history of politics and religion. In another mood Julian would
have maintained, till all was blue, that an intelligent bricklayer had
as much right to a voice in the policy of the country as a peer of the
realm. None the less, in his heart of hearts, as Napier was whimsically
aware, Sir Julian felt that, for all Sir William's official position, he
_hadn't_ any such valid right to press his views as had a Grant of
Abergarry. Between mirth and consternation, Napier realized that this
was the key to the renewed outpouring. It was not so much Julian, but a
Grant, very properly telling a McIntyre things good for him to know.

In the heat and fury of the discussion which she had so adroitly
precipitated, Miss Greta stretched out a hand and took up her knitting.
She sat there with bent head.

"Who? The democracy of England!" Julian was crying to Sir William's
angry, "Who is going to prevent?"

"If politicians don't know that, they'll learn it to their cost. English
participation in this war is impossible."

"So little impossible," Sir William barked back, "that we'll be in it up
to the neck."

There was a moment's hush in the hall, before everybody, except Miss
Greta, began to talk at once. Miss Greta never lifted her head. She did
not so much as lift her eyes. Napier saw that she was following the
success of her ruse with an intensity that held her hands immovable, as
though the rapid fingers had been caught, tied fast, in those
"field-gray" filaments she wove, as though her palms had been skewered
through by the shining steel of her long needles. They stuck out at
right angles, seeming to transfix the rigid, death-white hands.

"Never! never!" Julian had cried out at the top of his voice.

"And if we weren't in it," Sir William shouted, "we'd be wiped off the
map. What's more, we'd deserve to be."

"I tell you," Julian vociferated, "England will never consent to be
dragged into this quarrel."

"England won't be dragged in. She will go in because it would be a shame
to keep out. She _is_ in!"

Napier sat damning himself with uncommon vigor. Idiot! that he hadn't
foreseen the Von Schwarzenberg's agile apprehension of this new use to
which Nanchen's lover might be put. Too late the realization that her
baulked eagerness for official news had made her egg on Julian to engage
his fellow Scot at their real "national game"--which isn't golf at all.
Debate's the name of it. Those two played it with passion. Nothing could
stop them now. Sir William trumpeted at Julian, and Julian skirled
wildly back. The hall was in confusion.

"You said England never _would_," Nan cried across to Miss Greta.

"I said she wouldn't be so ill-advised," was the barely audible answer.

The shell-shock of Sir William's bomb had shaken even Greta von
Schwarzenberg. From that first impact she recovered her mental poise at
a price. Her face was white with the cost of it, or under the tension of
some immediate decision. It suddenly came over Napier: she wants more
than anything on earth to warn the Pforzheims.

She made a slight movement. It brought the clock within range. Five
minutes to luncheon time. "Five minutes," Napier said to himself, "in
which to get the news to Glenfallon," if he didn't prevent her.




CHAPTER VI


It suddenly flashed over Napier that he might learn more by letting her
communicate with the Pforzheims than by preventing her. A highly
important conclusion about Miss Greta herself might thus be reached in
the only possible way. And the harm done by the Pforzheims knowing? The
die was already cast. The German Government knew that. The whole world
would know it in a few hours. The Pforzheims couldn't even gamble on the
tip. The stock exchange was closed.

There was yet another consideration very present to Napier's cautious
type of mind. Suppose he were mistaken as to the woman's designs. Such a
mistake, besides being intensely disagreeable to any one of decent
feeling, would "do" for you with the McIntyres. Undoubtedly would "do"
for you with Nan.

All the same, an expressionless intensity of the Schwarzenberg's
stillness, in the midst of the hubbub all about her, kept the observing
mind alert.

She stirred, she half rose. In the midst of his excitement, Napier
caught himself smiling faintly. He caught himself, because Miss Greta
had caught him.

"Devil take her acuteness! She wouldn't be sitting down calmly at the
luncheon-table if she didn't know I had my eye on her," he said to
himself. He might as well have said it aloud. She smiled at him across
the board. The china-blue eyes were as hard as big alley marbles. She
raised her cider-glass to her lips.

Nan turned to her impulsively. "Do you still think--" She stared at the
smashed tumbler and the cascade down Miss Greta's pink frock.

"Oh, Nan dear, my new dress!"

"Me? Do you mean--did I do that? Oh, my! I'm most terribly sorry!"

"If I sponge it off instantly--" Greta rose. Nan rose.

Madge rose. "I'll help you," she said.

"Certainly not!" Miss Greta cast back a look not to be mistaken, and
hurried off, holding her skirt out in front of her and looking at it
with a very passion of concern.

Should he bolt after her? Ridiculous! How could he dog the steps of a
woman going upstairs to sponge her frock!

Should he go outside and waylay the messenger? He hadn't even the
flimsiest excuse, except one that wasn't producible, unless he could
catch her red-handed. To catch her sending a note to Ernst Pforzheim,
what would that prove? Wouldn't any of us in her place want to share
such tremendous news with our compatriots, let alone with a lover?

She was away less than eleven minutes. Napier timed her. When she came
back she had on a different skirt and a subtly different expression.
Whatever had been on her mind as well as on her dress, she had got rid
of both. The others still argued and speculated. The staggering news was
new to them. Curiously, it was already old to Napier, old and grim and
implacable. He shoved it wearily aside. While Miss Greta's head was bent
and she thought him covertly eyeing her, Napier drank refreshment out of
the face at her side. The little girl from over the water, what was it
she did to him? The mystery of these things.

Napier took Julian out on the terrace to cool off, though he said it was
to smoke. "I say, day and night for over a week I've heard nothing but
war. Talk to me about something pleasant," he said. It was a plain lead,
but Julian was a mole of a man.

"What do you call pleasant in a world like this?"

"Oh, several things." From where they sat they could see Nan Ellis under
the trees at the entrance to the park, and Wildfire flying back and
forth through the air--as Nan urged the swing.

Napier remembered that, in all the heady talk before and during
luncheon, Julian had hardly looked at the girl. When she spoke he didn't
hear. Napier sat now studying his friend. "Don't say I didn't warn you.
There's one person who'll be precious tired of all this war-talk if it
goes on."

Julian lifted absent eyes. "Nan? Not a bit of it. You don't know Nan.
Whenever I stray to personal affairs, it's, 'Come and show me on the map
where Luxemburg is,' and, 'Just where have they crossed the French
border?'"

"I suppose you're not by any chance so taken up telling her where the
Germans are in France that you don't know whereabouts you are with
America?"

He _didn't_ know. He'd been waiting till he could see his way clear to
detach the girl from Miss Greta. And then this appalling business--

Napier's silence seemed to convey to Julian some hint of an unspoken
arraignment. She had written to her mother, he said, in extenuation.
"Yes, about me. She is devoted to her mother. Yes, I've been thinking it
over. You see, the Germans--"

"God bless my soul! Let's leave the Germans to stew in their own juice
an hour or two!" Gavan got up and walked back and forth in front of the
two garden chairs and of the man left sitting there. More than by any
previous extravagance of Julian's, some of the things he said at
luncheon had angered Napier. They fairly made Sir William choke. They
were of a character to make Sir James Grant incline to choke the
speaker. _That_ was the knowledge which opened the door to the fear that
clutched at Napier--fear of himself. Fear of the temptation revealed in
this growing conviction of his, that if he let Julian drift on the new
tide that was sweeping in, it would carry him away, far beyond the
securities, the privileges of a favored son of the old order. Almost
certainly it would carry him away from Nan Ellis. Whether an illusion or
not, Napier felt that he had only to sit there in the other chair and do
nothing, to see Julian blindly "do for" himself. As he walked up and
down, Napier discoursed upon woman.

"You mean," Julian said, with the air of the docile disciple receiving a
brand-new doctrine, "you mean that, in spite of feeling sure of
her--bless her!--you think I ought to get something definite settled
this afternoon?"

"You certainly ought to find out where you stand. You _can't_ let it
drift." He knew that what he really meant was that _he_ couldn't. He got
up and walked away toward the loch.

On his way back, Julian was coming with that nervous step to meet him.
Well, he'd spoken to her. She admitted she was fond of him. "But I don't
want to marry you," she had said. "I told her," he went on, "that I
couldn't believe that. Fortunately for me, for I didn't see how I could
bear it. 'You don't want to marry _any_body just now?' I suggested. And
what on earth do you think she said?"

"How do _I_ know!" Napier returned irritably.

"She said, 'Well, I'll just see about that! You mustn't go pulling me up
by the roots to see how I'm growing,' she said. 'It puts me back.' And
then I very nearly took hold of her. But all I did was to sit tight and
say: 'Which _way_ are you growing, Nan? If _I_ can't find out, I'll have
to get Gavan to.' 'You'd ask Gavan!' And she looked so startled, I
laughed. 'So you don't want Gavan to know how you behave,' I said. I
wasn't surprised!"

He brought it out with an incredible lightheartedness. If underneath his
surface equability Julian was really agitated, shaken, torn, it was not
on the score of his own and Nan's future. It was for the immediate fate
of Europe. He swung back to it as they came in sight of the hall. "I was
thinking as I came along that our diplomacy for the last twenty years--"

A servant crossed the lawn to meet them with two telegrams for Sir
William.

"And the telephone, sir. Sir William left word that you--Yes, London,
sir." Napier hurried back to his post.

Tommy Durrant was at the other end--a message for Sir William from the
Prime Minister. Napier wrote it down. He'd ring Tommy up before six. Any
more news? King Albert's letter, asking for the support of England, had
been read in the House with immense effect. "In spite of some labor
opposition, they'll vote the credit to-night; you'll see. If the German
fleet molests the French, we'll be on hand!" cried Tommy along the wire.
"Army? Mobilizing over night. Kitchener's back from Egypt."

Under the renewal of the hammer-strokes, Napier's sense of a world
blindly driven to some incredible doom gave to the family group, when he
rejoined it, an air of unreality. And this in spite of the fact that
Miss Greta did not make the mistake of ignoring the subject which in all
minds usurped the foreground.

She made her own little contribution with an air of engaging frankness.
"If the war were going to be fought out on sea, the British fleet, of
course--But you wouldn't say yourself, would you, that the British were
a military people?"

"Not in the sense that Germany is," Napier agreed.

"In no sense at all," said Julian.

"But Germany! Every son of Germany is a soldier!" Miss Greta's tone was
just a trifle too superior.

But wasn't she right? Even the Pforzheims. They, too, were soldiers.
These friendly, slightly ridiculous neighbors underwent in Napier's mind
a sudden and violent transformation. They stripped off their stage
tweeds, their check shirts, their superabundant jewelry; they stood in
uniform. Severe, infinitely _praktisch_, six foot, each, of formidable
enemy.

After tea there was a general movement.

"Coming for a stroll?" Julian stood looking down at Nan.

"Yes, but it _is_ cold toward sunset in this Scotland of yours. I must
have my jacket."

"Oh, well, where is it?" he demanded, with a touch of his absent-minded
impatience.

She looked at him. "_I_ don't know. In the coat-room, perhaps. You'll
find it somewhere."

"Do you think I shall?" he questioned dubiously. "What's it like?"

"Well, of all things!" She sat up very straight. "You mean to say you
never noticed? It isn't the _very least_ like anybody else's."

"Oh, I dare say I'll remember it all right when I see it." Julian
retired meekly to the coat-room.

Nan brought her eyes down from the florid, gilt molding above the window
to the level of Napier's face.

"You look worried," she announced.

"I am worried."

"Just about the war--nothing particular?"

Yes, there was one thing in particular. "One thing I can't honestly say
I'm happy about." His speech slowed under the quick shifting of light
and shadow in her eyes. What did she think he had been going to say when
he began that brought that darkening as he ended, "I can't honestly say
I am happy about Julian."

"About _Julian_!"

"Yes. He tells me you and he aren't engaged, and he doesn't know why."

"Is that all you've got to worry you?"

"Doesn't it seem to you enough to justify any friend--"

She was dumb.

Napier took refuge in a rapid survey of Julian's character and
advantages.

"Do you know," she broke in, "you're talking to me about Mr. Grant as if
you were recommending a chauffeur. He belongs, I gather, to a reputable
family; he's steady; he was a long time in his last place; sober, very,
_very_ sober! But I really don't need any testimonials to Mr. Grant's
character," she wound up under her breath, as that young man emerged
gloomily from the room at the bottom of the hall.

"I say, there are _millions_ of coats here."

"Oh, very well, I'll come."

He _had_ been an ass! The sole gain, as Napier saw it, out of a rather
ridiculous encounter was to establish the fact of the girl's
sensitiveness for Julian's dignity.

       *       *       *       *       *

For Sir William, the Kirklamont charm worked well. Again the next
morning he slept late. There was in consequence rather more bustle than
usual attendant on his departure. Nan Ellis had rushed over early to say
good-by. It struck Napier that she was both grave and excited. She
joined him for an instant at the table, where he stood putting some
papers into the despatch box.

"Do _you_ want me to?" she asked in a low voice, as though continuing a
conversation.

"To--"

"Yes, to marry Julian." Then, quick as the darting of a dragon-fly, she
pounced on his possible answer. "I sha'n't do it--not even for you. But
if that's what you _want_, I'd just like to know." She waited. Napier,
too, for once in his life tongue-tied.

"Well, good-by everybody. Isn't that lazy dog Bobby down yet?" Sir
William demanded.

"He's where he always is these days," answered Madge; "gone off to
Glenfallon."

"Wrong!" Bobby was striding into the hall by the side door. He looked
rather glum for Bobby.

"Find your friends out of sorts?" Sir William inquired, with his shrewd
look. "Nasty jar for Carl and Ernst, opening their newspapers this
morning." Sir William was not forgetting to keep an eye on the private
case and the summer mackintosh on their way into the car. "Well, what do
they think about the war _now_? Eh, what?"

"I don't suppose I shall ever know what they think," his son answered.

"I can't think why you say that, dear," his mother remonstrated. "I
don't find them at all reserved. They talk with perfect freedom to
_me_."

"Well, they won't any more. They're gone," said Bobby.

"Gone where?"

"I don't know. And, what's more, the caretaker doesn't know."

"You don't mean to say they've gone for good?" Madge sounded a sharp
regret.

Bobby nodded. "Glenfallon's shut up."

"But they _can't_ be gone for good. _Can_ they?" Lady McIntyre turned to
Miss Greta.

"How should I know?" The answer came a trifle too quickly.

Sir William got into the car. Napier followed him. He leaned over the
slammed door. "When do you say they went?" he asked Bobby.

"Late last night. Bag and baggage."




CHAPTER VII


Those were the days when all thoughts turned to the fleet. The expected
leave of Jim McIntyre, and of many a sailor son, had been cancelled.
Terrible and glorious things were happening in the element ruled by
Britannia. Only the stern discretion of the Admiralty prevented detailed
knowledge. Maintenance of this self-denying ordinance on the part of the
authorities could not prevent the rumors, which ran about, of a decisive
naval engagement. Lady McIntyre, lying awake at night, distinctly heard
the boom of guns off the Dogger Bank. Her beloved Jim (God keep him!)
was crumpling up the Germans in the North Sea.

It was something to have Colin home from Aldershot and Neil from
Shorncliffe. The fact that the two young soldiers were granted leave
because they were going off on active service was hidden from their
mother.

The knowledge brought Sir William post-haste from London. His proud eyes
went from the natty-looking Neil, to the taller, elder soldier with the
ugly, honest face. The father's gaze rested longest there. "If you knew
the trouble I had--I sha'n't try it again. This place is too far away at
such a time."

Lady McIntyre inquired anxiously for admiralty news.

"Well, the Turks have got the _Breslau_ and the _Goeben_." Sir William
glanced at his sons. They said nothing.

"Oh, _that_," said his wife. "I mean about the great North Sea
engagements."

"The movements of the fleet aren't published."

"Published! Of _course_ not," retorted Lady McIntyre. "But that's no
reason they shouldn't tell you."

"Well, I'm afraid they haven't."

"Nonsense! It's just because you've grown so secretive all of a sudden.
You're nearly as bad as Colin. I _do_ wish Jim would write!" A rush of
tears blurred the blueness of her eyes. Evidently the presence of the
other sons only emphasized for the mother the absence of her sailor.
"Surely, William, you know about the naval battle. Why, I hear the guns
all night long!"

"In your head, my dear," said Sir William, gently.

There was a moment's poignant silence. In truth, the reverberation of
those guns of rumor shook all hearts.

"Well, Neil, go on,"--Madge returned to her low chair at Miss Greta's
other side. "You were telling us about the new army regulations. Go on."

Miss Greta had fixed her eyes on Napier with that "savior of my life,"
expression that he was coming to know. He made an ungrateful return.
"And how is your 'little friend'?"

"Oh, Nan is well, thank you."

"She ought to be back by now." Lady McIntyre was making a brave effort
to put away fears for her sailor. "Nan," she explained to Napier, "very
kindly agreed to take the car and do an errand or two which Miss Greta's
slight headache--"

The thought flashed across Napier's mind of the far worse pang it would
have cost Miss Greta to be away when official news was arriving hot and
hot. She listened now to Sir William's reasons why Liege could hold out
indefinitely.

Over the shrubberies the winged hat of the girl messenger rose against
the landscape, and again, hardly had the car swerved round to the door,
before, with that same blackbird-over-the-hedge action, she was out of
the car and coming into the hall. "Yes, I did all the commissions, and
in about half the time you said. Oh, Sir William!" She went up and shook
hands. "You see, I am here still." She stood childishly in front of him,
as if waiting for a further extension of playtime.

"That's right, and you look as if it agreed with you."

"Oh, it _does_!" She gave her hand to Napier. And then, turning with one
of her quick movements, she found a singular thing to say to a captain
of the Black Watch and a young gentleman who held a commission in the
Seaforths. "I've seen soldiers, Scotch soldiers! They _did_ look funny!"

"Funny!" said Sir William. The two elder sons turned away their eyes.
Bobby grinned and contorted his legs....

"Yes, soldiers wearing aprons."

"I suppose you mean kilts," said Sir William. "Did you never see--"

"Oh, yes, of course, on the stage, and in pictures. But these soldiers
had on the funniest little brown aprons _over_ their kilts."

"Temporary measure," said Colin, slowly. "They'll soon be all in khaki."

"And it was awfully difficult to get your check cashed." She turned
toward Lady McIntyre. "They say now there isn't any silver left in
Scotland. And in _your_ town there isn't even copper. I hope you don't
mind; I had to take stamps in change. There,"--she produced a roll of
postal-orders--"are what we'll have to use for money now, they say."

Lady McIntyre protested, but Sir William indorsed the news. Like the
khaki aprons, a "temporary measure." Miss Nan made her accounting.

"All these horrid little scraps of paper!" Lady McIntyre complained.

"You can always change them for gold," Neil said.

"If you do, you must keep it circulating," warned Sir William. "No
hoarding of gold!"

"But we can't get any more--that's just the trouble."

"You ought to have asked Miss Nan," said Madge.

"But I did, and Nan hadn't any."

"Why, I saw _piles_ of gold on your table when I went up to the inn with
Miss Greta's note yesterday!"

"Yes; I'd got it out for her--all I had."

Miss von Schwarzenberg was leaning against the back of the settle. "What
a pity!" she said quietly. "I wish I'd known you wanted gold."

"But, _dear_ Greta, I _said_--"

"Did you? I couldn't have taken it in. It's gone now. To a poor person
in desperate straits--A stranded American. That was why I borrowed it."

"Bor-_ch_-rowed it," she said, with the vanishing "ch" like a ghost of
the final sound in the Scots word "loch."

Captain Colin was looking at her from under his thick, whitey-yellow
eyebrows--in spite of the fact that his father was talking to him very
earnestly about the tactics of the German Army. Beyond a doubt,
consciousness of Miss Greta's foreignness was growing. Her slight
burring of the "r" had never sounded so marked as it did to-day. For all
her long residence in the States, Miss Greta was far more German than
anybody in the Kirklamont circle had quite realized until the war. And
now very plainly this "Germanism" was taking its place as a bar to
conversation, a something still not productive of hostility so much as
of _gene_.

"I'd be so grateful, my dear," Lady McIntyre said half aside to Nan, "if
you'd make Greta bathe her temples and lie down."

"Yes, let us go. All this--" Nan looked round the hall through a sudden
bewilderment of compunction which fell like a veil over her
brightness--"all this is dreadful for you."

"For me! Oh, no!"--Miss Greta held her head higher than ever--"it's not
dreadful for _me_." She smiled a little fiercely,--to Napier's sense--as
she left the hall, Madge on one side and Nan on the other.

When Sir William went off with his three sons for a stroll, Lady
McIntyre accompanied them as far as the gate.

She brought back into the hall a face more agitated than Napier had ever
seen it. Irresolute, miserable, she paused on her way to the sofa where
Napier sat, trying to read. "Colin," she jerked out in a guarded voice,
"has the _strangest_ notions!" The pale eyes looked round more helpless
than ever. "He says Greta tried to pump him about army matters, and he's
sorry he didn't warn Neil! He's going to. Colin said,--oh, in the
unkindest way! 'That woman ought to go home!' 'Home?' I said, 'why, this
is Greta's home!' 'No, it isn't,' he said; 'Germany's her home, and she
ought to go there!' Oh, Colin can be very hard when he likes!" She
choked back her tears, as Miss Ellis came running down the stairs. "What
is it?" Lady McIntyre started to her feet. "Is Greta worse?"

"Oh, no. It's only Ju--Mr. Grant has got back. We saw him coming across
the--"

He stood in the doorway. Nan went forward, hand out, welcome in every
lineament, a kind of all-enfolding affection in the forward inclination
of the whole, lightly poised figure.

Napier looked on dully.

Though Julian was smiling as he took the girl's hand, she said, with
quick intuition of his mood, "What's happened?" And after he'd come in
and greeted the others, "Aren't they well, your father and mother?" she
persisted gently. "They haven't come? I _am_ sorry! I knew something was
wrong." She folded her sympathy round him like a cloak.

"It isn't their not coming." He dropped into a chair. "It's the stuff
I've had to listen to in town. And in the railway carriages too. The
colossal tomfoolery--the--the indecent way people were jubilating over
the greatest disaster in history. This is the kind of fierce test that
people go down under. They'd be ashamed to be unfair, lying, and greedy
for themselves. They think it's a merit to be unfair, lying, and greedy
for England."

Lady McIntyre cast her eye up the staircase, whither her thoughts had
already gone. She was in the act of getting up, when Julian broke out
moodily, "And the way people already are beginning to talk and behave
about the Germans in England!" He had his instances.

Napier pointed out that, regrettable as these manifestations were, they
were fewer and of a much milder character with us than in other
countries. He spoke of ill-treatment in Germany and Austria of retiring
ambassadors and even of neutrals. He turned to Nan Ellis. "_Your_
countrymen could tell you a tale of these last days that would make you
open your eyes. Ask your ambassador."

"If the Germans really did," Julian began; but Napier picked him up
smartly, "You forget, we _know_."

"Well, well, it's one proof the more, if we needed the more, that war
brutalizes noncombatants as well as combatants."

Lady McIntyre shook her ear-rings desparingly. "Aromatic vinegar," she
murmured, as she went upstairs.

While Julian exposed diplomacy and denounced governments, Nan sat, chin
in hand, drinking it in, as if she recognized in these doctrines that
true faith for which all her life she had been thirsting. Under the
subtle flattery, Julian, in spite of weariness, waxed yet more eloquent.
Napier pulled out his watch and made a low exclamation, intended to
indicate some pressing business overdue. He went up the stairs two steps
at a time. And yet the pace wasn't quick enough to please him. Away, he
must get away. Julian had been pitying Colin and Neil, "pawns in the
great game." Napier knew now that he envied them. Oh, that he too might
go and fight! He walked to and fro in his room in the first access of
that fever that was to beset him sore until he should be standing in the
trenches of the Somme. With Julian's denunciation of war nagging at his
ears, Napier hailed war as the Great Simplification. Not only of
international troubles, but of private ones. Instead of ten thousand
struggles, one.

Well, at all events, he couldn't, as he now realized (and happily, by
reason of the great crisis, he wasn't going to be asked to) stay here in
Scotland and look on at this love-making! War had its uses, even to the
civilian.

       *       *       *       *       *

An hour later he was still sitting there, back to the window, smoking
innumerable cigarettes and trying to read his novel. A light, rattling
sound made him turn round. A fine hail on the window-panes this
cloudless August evening. He looked out.

Julian was down below with a handful of coarse sand. A sign: Come down.

What now?

The hall was empty, except of the footmen beginning to lay tea. Outside
Julian waited.

"You're off to London to-morrow, too," he began. "Is that the idea?"

"Yes, that was the idea."

"Well, then there's precious little time." He was threading a way
through the shrubberies to a half-concealed garden bench.

"I've been wanting your advice, Gavan. The fact is,"--he smiled as he
made the confession--"I don't know quite where I am."

"I should have thought you must be in a happier place than most
mortals." Napier sat down on a half-concealed wooden seat.

Julian joined him with an eager, "What makes you say that?"

"Well, it must be plain to the blindest she is very fond of you."

"You think she is?" He sat wondering. Then he presented the grievance
closest to hand. "She wouldn't let me kiss her just now, and I've been
away three whole days."

"She has let you before?"

"Yes."

"As if she was in love with you?"

"She _must_ be, or else she wouldn't, would she, now? A girl like that?"

Napier tried to ask if these scenes were of frequent occurrence, whether
they were courted or evaded. The question stuck in his throat. And then,
exactly as if he had spoken, Julian answered.

"She's a little capricious about that kind of thing. But,"--he turned
trustfully to his friend--"girls often _are_, aren't they?"

Napier sat there without speaking. "I wondered," Julian went on, "if it
could possibly mean the sort of disapproval that's putting me into other
people's black books--about this devil's mess of a war. But you saw she
took quite a rational view about that."

"I saw she took _your_ view. As to its being rational--"

"Oh, well, we won't say any more about that _now_. I've talked war till
I'm sick. I thought I was coming back here to--something I don't find."

Into Napier's silence Julian dropped the suggestion. "It may only be
that I don't understand women." In his quandary Napier wondered aloud
whether you ever did understand a person brought up in a different
country.

"Or in your own," Julian said moodily. "People I've known since I was a
baby I begin to realize I've never known at all!"

"Oh, come, it isn't as bad as that, though we're all of us having our
eyes opened these days. Those Pforzheims now; I'm persuaded they got
hold of the Kirklamont newspapers and kept them back with the express
idea of giving Greta an excuse for getting the official news they
wanted."

Julian stared, and then he turned his head wearily away. "What rot!"

The tone nettled Napier. "You seem to have forgotten your own suspicions
of that woman."

"They were never of _that_ sort, thank God!" Julian flung out. "I didn't
like the idea of Nan's friend carrying on a doubtful love affair--But
that's all pettiness. The awful actualities of war have brought fine
things to the surface in Greta von Schwarzenberg's character."

Napier told himself that he knew what had been brought to the surface,
and what effect that bringing had had on Julian.

The spectacle of injustice, or even the danger of injustice, would at
any time make Julian Grant forget his own interests and yours and
anybody's who wasn't being actively oppressed.

"Have you been to Gull Island since?"

"I've had no time for picnicking," Julian answered shortly.

"Well, since you're championing Schwarzenberg, it's your business to see
she isn't made a tool of. You heard how the Pforzheims vanished. I've
wondered,"--Napier found it curiously difficult to go on. There was a
quality--he had noticed it before--a something in Julian's frankness
which put astuteness out of countenance, something that made suspicion
seem not only vulgar but melodramatic. Napier felt obliged to throw a
dash of whimsicality, of confessed extravagance, into the speculation,
"Whether the reason we weren't allowed to land on Gull Island was those
Pforzheims. They may have made an emergency camp out of your Smugglers'
Cave."

Julian's weary disgust lightened a little. "I had no notion you were so
romantic, Gavan."

"Very well, then. If you won't look into the matter, I must get some one
else. And set afoot a new crop of rumors. Risk involving Sir William in
responsibility for--"

"Oh, see here! I'll go, and hold an inquisition on the gulls and
cormorants."

Napier thanked him a little sheepishly. "Of course I don't expect you to
find anything. I only feel we've got to make sure."




CHAPTER VIII


Sir William and Napier returned to London to face those days of
intolerable suspense, when men carried about like a waking nightmare the
new proof that an impregnable fortress was a thing of the past. The
defenses of Liege had failed. A vast system of forts had been pounded
into ruin. Through breach after breach, the German hosts were pouring.
People far away from the scenes of carnage and chaos woke in the night
under a clutch of dread. What is it? What's the matter with life? _The
Germans!_ On and on they were coming, and nothing, it seemed, could stop
them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then came the Mons retreat and the Battle of the Marne. Belgium was in
ruins, but the German flood had been stayed. Sir William, worn and aged
after a second heart attack, carefully concealed from every one except
the doctor, and Gavan came down from London to spend Saturday night and
Sunday at the place he had taken on the Essex coast. Apart from public
anxieties, Sir William had been subject to the annoyance of questions in
the House, about his chauffeur--a member of his Majesty's Government
couldn't be driven about by an unnaturalized German. A new chauffeur had
brought Sir William from town.

"Do say you are going to like the house, William, dear!" his wife
implored on the familiar note, before he had time to see anything beyond
the entrance and the drawing-room. "Remember how little time we had to
find anything near enough for you. But talk about it's being a
_furnished_ house!"

"Great luck to find such a place," Napier reassured her. "How did you
hear of it?"

Lady McIntyre shook her head, as with an effort to shake some clear
recollection out of the inner disorder. "We heard of so many! But
this--I think Greta saw an advertisement somewhere about this one. I had
to come and do the inspecting because of that silliness about getting a
permit for Greta."

"Seems all right," said Sir William, rattling his seals as he joined
Napier in the bay-window.

"Well, you wouldn't have said that if you'd seen it as those people left
it. When I went back to Kirklamont, I told Greta, the hideous
bareness--oh, it would never do! But she simply insisted on my going to
bed." Lady McIntyre smiled at confession of that helplessness which for
long years had, after her beauty, been her strongest card. "Greta said
everything would be all right. You had arranged about the silly permit,
and the very next day she came down, all by herself, and just took
hold."

Sir William glanced at Napier, as he asked his wife where Miss Greta was
now.

"She's closing up Kirklamont. That is, she _has_ closed it up. They're
coming at five forty-five, Greta and the children and Miss Ellis. I've
come to like that Ellis girl. And I believe Madge has, too, though she
won't say so."

Sir William had been walking about, opening doors, looking out of
windows. "Seems the very thing. Capital view, too! I congratulate you,
my dear."

She beamed, "Don't congratulate me. It's Greta."

"Even the chairs are just right!" Sir William sank down in one by the
open French window.

Lady McIntyre laughed, delighted. "It's your own chair! out of the
library at Kirklamont."

"Never!" said Sir William, staring down at the arms, first on one side
and then on the other.

"Greta _said_ you'd be glad of your own special chair when you came home
tired!"

"Well, she's right." He abandoned himself a moment to the embrace of his
old friend.

"I _knew_ you'd be surprised!" Lady McIntyre pattered on. "_I_ was. I
should have thought of chairs and things myself, if it hadn't been
called 'a furnished house.' And _charged_ for as a furnished house! But
I should never have thought of furnishing a furnished--And even if I
_had_, I should have been appalled at the idea of packing up heavy
furniture and moving it about this way. Linen and silver, of course, and
a few vases, and my china cats, just to give a feeling of home, but a
thing like a great hulking arm-chair _with a reading desk_--!"

"Yes," Sir William indulged her, "I should as soon have thought of
hoicking up my bed."

"Your bed has been hoicked up," she triumphed. "Greta didn't forget you
were very particular about your bed."

"You don't say so."

"Oh, yes. You said once the reason you'd never been back to Germany was
because of the beds. I was afraid at the time she'd feel that. But you
see how _beautifully_ she's taken it. And what about the war, William?"
she said, in exactly the same tone.

Sir William was feeling absently for his cigar-case. "Are they still
slaughtering those poor Belgians? Matches? I'm sure there must be
matches somewhere." She got up and looked vaguely about the big room, as
though she expected the matches to come running like a dog that hears
its name called. "Anybody but Greta might forget a little thing like
that. There! I told you so!" she exclaimed, as Napier produced a box
from the far side of the clock. "What do _you_ say, Mr. Napier? Will it
be over by Christmas? Greta is sure it will."

"H'm! H'm! About Miss Greta,"--Sir William struck in with that same
exchange of glances the name had called forth at the beginning. "Gavan
and I met the inspector of police as we came through the station. New
broom. In a great taking. He'd been hauled over the coals, it seems, by
an old retired colonel hereabouts--fella called McManus. Has a place a
little way down the coast. These retired men are the devil. They don't
know they're retired. This fella McManus got wind of a German lady who
was here for a week and who, he said, went about poking her nose
everywhere."

"She _had_ to poke her nose to get housemaids and an odd man. But
McManus! _He_ must be an old horror."

"Well, that's what he said, 'Poking her nose everywhere,' when he lodged
his complaint with the inspector. Very decent fella, the inspector."

"Lodged a complaint!" Lady McIntyre echoed. "Against a member of our
household."

"Yes, yes. It's all right. I told the inspector we knew all about Miss
von Schwarzenberg, and could absolutely vouch for her."

"Here she is," said Napier from the window.

In another minute Madge and Bobby were bursting in, followed by the
other two. Miss von Schwarzenberg, wearing a new look of subdued
triumph. The American, eager, stirred, smiling in Napier's direction,
and yet far from seeming as happy as the girl adored by Julian should
be.

Madge and Bobby filled the room with their accounts of the queer
journey, the long stoppages, the waiting for government trains to pass,
and the way the troops seemed to be moving about the country.

"Miss Greta thought it wasn't soldiers," Bobby threw in. "_She_ says,
coal for the fleet."

"That was only at first," Madge defended Miss Greta, "before we found
out that we were held up for another--a perfectly _thrilling_ reason!
But it's a dead secret, isn't it, Miss Greta?"

"The deadest kind," she answered, as she bent her head for Nan to unpin
her veil.

"_Russians!_" said Madge in a loud stage whisper. "They're sending
_armies_ of 'em."

"Russians?" Lady McIntyre blinked rapidly and looked at the door in a
perturbed way.

"Yes, to fight the--" Bobby turned tactfully to his father. "I'll be
bound _you_ know all about it."

"Not a syllable."

Madge laughed. "Dear old Daddy!" she said patronizingly. "Well, _we_
know, so you needn't keep it up. And it's an awfully good dodge. Think
of the surprise it'll be."

"It would be a surprise, right enough," her father admitted.

"You see," Bobby continued, to enlighten his mama, "the North Sea's full
of mines, so they've shipped the Russian troops from Archangel, landed
'em in Scotland, and they're rushing 'em through England to the front."

Whether Sir William had any knowledge of this spirited proceeding or
not, Bobby had plenty. He'd collected impressions on the journey.

Sir William was occupied in paying facetious tribute to Miss Greta for
her manipulation of beds and arm-chairs. "Eh? what?" he interrupted
himself to say to a footman whom he discovered unexpectedly behind the
barrier of the reading-desk. "Didn't you hear? Tea for these ladies."

"Beg pardon, Sir William, but there's an inspector of police--"

"Inspector! What's he want _now_?"

"He--a--well, sir, he'd like to speak to you for a moment, sir."

Sir William rose rather testily and went out. He took the precaution to
turn back and shut the door, after the footman had followed him across
the threshold.

"Well," said Miss Greta brightly to Madge, "I am wondering whether you
will like your room. You'll find it next mine. You remember the plan I
drew?"

"Oh, yes. I'll go up after tea. Simply ravenous!"

Miss Greta bent toward the girl. "We aren't fit to sit down to tea."

Wildfire turned to protest. She seemed to read in the soft face a
resolution no stranger would have detected either there, or in the
words, "I'm going up too, in a minute. I'll come for you." Madge went
quietly out.

Through the open window only the voices from the next room were audible,
not the words. Lady McIntyre was all too aware of them.

Miss Greta joined Napier at the window. "Pretty view, don't you think?"
She, too, listened to those accents in the next room.

As the door opened, her eyelids fluttered, but she never looked round.
The footman was back again with an excuse instead of tea.

"It's the range, m'lady. It _seems_,"--hurriedly he appeared to
apologize for a stove suspected of an untimely desire for taking a
stroll--"it _seems_ to 'ave gone hout. But the tea won't be long. And
Sir William says will Miss von Sworsenburg kindly step into the next
room."




CHAPTER IX


Miss Von "Sworsenburg" had obliged with a cloudless face. It was Lady
McIntyre who looked disturbed, even guilty. She took refuge in a
work-bag, which she unhooked from the back of her chair. She jerked it
open hurriedly on her knees and bent her head to rummage in the depths.
Conversation between Napier and Nan languished. Both were listening to
those voices in the next room.

The door opened abruptly and in bustled Sir William, ruffling up the
little hair he had left and looking the very picture of discomfort.

"Perfect dolt, that fella!" he threw over his shoulder to Miss Greta.

She followed Sir William with an air of calmness, not to say detachment,
that even she, past mistress in the art of conveying the finer shades of
superiority, had never excelled. "I left my gloves, I think," she said.

Sir William had gone to the bell and rung twice. "That fella says she
ought to go and register. Makes out he'll get into trouble if she
doesn't go at once."

"_Register_, William? What nonsense! Why on earth should _she_?"

"Why? Oh, the permit was informal, and only for a given time. Silly
idiots!"

"Well, well," his wife soothed him, "tell the creatures, if they're in
such a ridiculous hurry--she'll motor over to-morrow."

"To-morrow won't do. He's had orders. It's got to be to-night." Sir
William spoke in his most testy tone.

Nan had sprung up and gone to her friend. Napier, too, had come forward.
He picked up the missing gloves.

"Oh, thank you," said Miss Greta, with her smile. But it was the look on
Nan's face that struck Napier--a look that haunted him afterwards. If it
hadn't been absurd, he would have thought she was thanking him with all
her soul; was _giving_ him something. Something of unbelievable
sweetness, "just because I stooped to pick up that woman's gloves!"

It was all in a flash. The next moment Nan stood buttoning up the coat
she had so lately unbuttoned, and saying, "If you really must, I'm
coming too!"--her eyes angry, her face ashamed. Miss von Schwarzenberg
made no answer. Lady McIntyre was jerking out a succession of nervous
questions which nobody took the trouble to notice.

"What we're coming to, _I_ don't know." Sir William fumed and strutted
up and down.

"Yes, Sir William." The servant stood there.

"Where's the _tea_?" Lady McIntyre in a sinking ship would have cried,
"Where's the lifeboat?" with much the same accent and look of
desperation.

"It's coming, m'lady. It's on the way up."

"Didn't I tell you five minutes ago"--the footman was catching it on the
other side now--"you were to telephone for the car?"

"Yes, Sir William. It's coming round now, Sir William."

"Come, then," Miss Greta said, as though Nan were the person desired by
the police. "I'm afraid I must carry you off."

"Oh, my dear!" Lady McIntyre rose with precipitation. Her work-bag
rolled to the ground, but she didn't notice. Her blue eyes were on
Greta's face a second, and then turned beseechingly on her husband.

"William!" She hurried over to him. "Surely, William, _you_--"

"Mere red-tape--mere red-tape, my dear," he said to his wife. "Though,
if Lord Dacre wasn't coming over at half-past six on official
business--I'd go with you," he said handsomely to Miss von
Schwarzenberg. Miss von Schwarzenberg murmured politely in her veil that
she wouldn't on any account have Sir William take so much trouble.

Lady McIntyre had jerked her head at Napier. But Napier seemed not to
know his part in this scene. He stood silent, looking at the indignant
face of Miss Greta's "little friend."

"It's too dreadful to let you go without one of us!" Lady McIntyre
wailed. "Shall _I_ come, Greta dear?" And then, a good deal unstrung at
the possibility of having her offer accepted: "N-not that I'd be much
good, I'm afraid. I was never in a police station in my life."

"I don't imagine," said Miss Greta, with her fine mixture of tolerance
and delicate contempt, "that any of us have been much in police
stations."

Recollections of Lord Dacre had not brought entire repose to Sir
William. He twisted round in the comfortable chair:

"What do you say, Gavan? You won't mind representing me in this
little--" he paused as the butler passed between them with a tray. A
footman at his heels announced the car.

"Oh, she _can't_ go without tea!" Lady McIntyre cried. Then with extreme
felicity she added, "Why, before they hang people they give them tea!"
Nan bit her lip.

The incomparable Greta smiled. "It doesn't the least matter about tea,
dear Lady McIntyre. And I'd rather get to Newton Hackett before the
po--the place shuts." The fraction of an instant her eyes rested on the
servants, and then, as she went toward the door, "_So_ good of you, so
_kind_ to let me have the motor!"

Miss Greta contrived, with economy of means beyond all praise, to give
the expedition an air of being devised for her special convenience.

Sir William was plainly ruffled at Napier's obvious reluctance to
accompany Miss Greta to Newton Hackett. Sir William was sorry it was
such a bore.... If Colin or Neil had been at home, he wouldn't have had
to ask anything so admittedly outside the range of a private secretary's
functions. Presented like that, there was nothing for it but that Napier
should, in Sir William's phrase, represent him in this little matter.

As the three were getting into the car, Madge leaned out of an upper
window. "Well, I _do_ think; sending me up here to wait for you! Where
are you going?"

"Newton Hackett, dearest. Back soon." Miss Greta waved her
handkerchief.

In a long bare room, a figure in uniform confronted them, on the other
side of a table like a counter.

"Are you Inspector Adler?" Napier began.

Yes, the big fair man with a high color and heavy jowl was Inspector
Adler.

"You were telephoned to, I believe?"

Yes, Inspector Smith had telephoned from Lamborough.

"Then you know all about this lady's errand." Napier stood aside for
Miss Greta.

The interrogation went forward.

"Your surname is Sworsenberg?"

"No; von Schwarzenberg."

He seemed not greatly to like having his pronunciation corrected.

"Will you spell it?"

She spelt it.

"Your Christian name?"

"Johanna Marguerite."

"Please spell them."

She obliged.

"Where were you born?"

"At Ehrenheim."

"Will you spell it?" And when she had done so, he looked at the word
with suspicion. "Where is it?"

"In Hanover."

"In Germany, you mean."

"In Hanover, Germany."

"In Germany." He put down the word about which already such a host of
new connotations had begun to cling.

Nan lifted her eyes from the register to the man's face. He was taking
this business too seriously, with his "Germany, you mean," as if Greta
had tried to pretend that Hanover was somewhere else.

"I'm not English, either," said Miss Ellis in an explanatory tone.

"No?" The Inspector fixed her with his serious, blue eyes. "What are
you?"

"American."

"Oh," he said, and lost interest.

"Now, Miss--a--Sworsenburger, what is the date of your birth?"

If Miss Greta hesitated a second, it seemed to be from a natural disgust
at hearing her name murdered.

"Born 1886--and the name is von Schwarzenberg." She must have been aware
of the touch of hauteur in the tone of her correction, for instantly she
changed it. "You, too,"--she smiled at the burly inspector--"you have a
German name."

"_Me?_"

"Adler is one of the most com--usual names in Germany."

"My name's not _Ah_dler. It's Adler."

"That's only a corruption," she said, less cautiously than was her wont.

"No corruption about it," he spoke roughly.

"She only means--" Napier began.

"Never 'eard in me life of a corrupt Adler. What's your business over
'ere?"

"This lady," Napier intervened, "came into the family of Sir William and
Lady McIntyre as a governess."

"She has become a valued personal friend," Miss Ellis put in stiffly.
"Haven't you heard that by telephone? You have only to ring up Sir
William himself--"

"We are not supposed to take our information by telephone. How long do
you want to stay in this country?"

"She lives here, as I've told you," said Napier, "in the family of--"

The interrogatory went on, Nan more and more furious, appealing silently
to Napier from time to time; Miss Greta taking it all with a dignity
that made even Napier feel that he had never yet seen her to such
advantage. The inspector, too, must in his way have felt that this
foreigner who had accused him of being a German (_him_, James Adler, for
the love of God!) and had accused the Adlers of being corrupted, was
somehow getting the best of the interview. He was already accustomed
(and the war was as yet counted by weeks) to seeing the few Germans who
had presented themselves to be registered adopt an attitude either
humorous (accompanied by offers of cigars), or uneasy, or tending toward
the apologetic. Napier was sure that Adler lorded it a little even over
people who knew how to treat an inspector proper.

"I don't see how you can stay here at all now they've made this into a
proscribed area," he said with a touch of pride at being inspector of a
place so distinguished.

"Oh, so they have!" Miss Greta smiled. "I _ought_ to have remembered,
when Sir William took the trouble to see about a special permit." She
opened a bag and took out a paper.

Inspector Adler looked at it with suspicion. Just this kind of case
evidently hadn't come his way before.

"Maybe it's regular," he said cautiously as he handed the paper back.
"Better take care of it. You'll need it if you do stay and ever want
permission to go outside the five-mile radius."

Miss Greta maintained a lofty silence.

"How does she get such a further permission?" said Napier.

"By applying to the proper authority," said Mr. Adler; "in this case to
me." The inspector was dabbing some purple ink on a pad. "Now your
finger-print, if you please."

Miss Greta drew back, scarlet. "A German is what I am, not a criminal."

"'Ere's where you go." He pointed downwards with a large, blunt thumb.

Napier in his embarrassment looked away from Miss Greta. His glance fell
upon Nan. The girl's eyes had filled. "It's an outrage," she said in a
choked voice. "_That_ kind of identification is meant for rogues and
murderers."

But Miss Greta had recovered herself. "And _that_ sort of person," she
said, "of course must object very much. But, after all, why
_should_--people like us?"

Nan pressed close to Greta's side. "Yes, you must finger-print me, too!"
she said between pleading and command. "I'm every bit as much an alien
as this lady."

"Not if you're an American. _She's_ an enemy alien."

"She's _not_ an enemy. You oughtn't to say such things."

"Maybe you know what I ought to say better than the Gover'ment."




CHAPTER X


When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there
was extremely on edge--except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her
dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in
his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled
spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.

Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant
walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.

"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre
threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents'
arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from
Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints
of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant
had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the
Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian
seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.

"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort
than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.

"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than
for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which
Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the
ill-treatment of English _Kurgaest_ from the Foreign Office.

Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little
inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a
_Kurgaest_. It was a speech that did him no good in that company--being
far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their
son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.

Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain
that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights
of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. _They_ would never
cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a
little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.

So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously
thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only
wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to
complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of
Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others.
_They_ relate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No
trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because
they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note
of them. _I_ have--in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He
produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when
fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of
petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of
attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a
British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to
criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of
mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier
than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of
sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of
hospitality.

To Nan Ellis, Julian's espousal of the cause of the stranger within the
gate was as music in the ear and as honey in the mouth. Good! good! She
applauded him with hands and lips and eyes.

On leaving the dining-room, everybody began to put on hats and wraps.

"Oh, yes, hadn't you heard, Mr. Julian? Fearful excitement! A mine has
been washed up on the coast. And you, Madge," urged her father, who
needed no urging whatever, "you've got to come and look at it, too."

They all went down to the beach, and walked in the moonlight, by the
incoming tide, a quarter of a mile north of the pier.

Miss Greta carried her coat on her arm at first. _Would_ Mr. Napier be
so kind? He stopped to help her into the voluminous white canvas ulster.
"It isn't true, is it," she said in a low, earnest voice, "that you've
joined an O. T. C. and go drilling in the park after working hours?"

"Plenty of men do that," he said, struggling to enable Miss Greta to
find the armhole.

"_Not men like you!_" she whispered. "And when you aren't working with
Sir William, you go route marching, or trench digging for a holiday!"

Napier had been one of the first of his world who refused to accept the
fact of not being bred a soldier as an excuse for not becoming one. But
that Miss Greta should be one of the few to know the fact did not please
him. "Oh, the sleeve's wrong side out," he said; "that's why."

The ulster had to come off again. "Surely,"--she turned the sleeve with
deliberation--"surely you know that before you are nearly ready for a
commission, peace will be declared."

"You think peace will come soon, then?"

"Well, of course, when the Germans have taken Paris. There now--" she
stopped short again, making of her compunction an excuse to widen the
distance between themselves and the rest of the party. "I've gone in my
bungling way and said something I oughtn't to. I, who would rather
offend anybody on earth than you."

"I don't know why you should say that." He began to walk on.

"You don't know why?"

There was something unnerving in the appealing sorrow of the question.
Why, in the name of all the gods, hadn't he kept up with the others?

"I think you do know," she said, a pace or two behind his hurrying
figure.

Napier didn't look round, but he was sure that the tears in her voice
had risen to her eyes.

"Do you mind if I go on? I promised Julian--"

"Ah, you've already gone on."

"Gone--" he paused an instant.

"Yes, gone back inside that British arctic circle that you came out of
once--to save my life." She gained on him; she was panting at his elbow.
"I shall never forget that, Mr. Gavan; never as long as I live."

"Oh, you make too much of--"

"Too much of saving such a life as mine! That may be true."

"You know!"--he swung back a step--"that wasn't in the least what I
meant. I--you see--I say! _Julian!_"

When Napier had caught up with the two in front, Miss Greta wasn't far
behind.

Nan turned an excited face. "Does Gavan know?" she asked Julian.

Just as though Greta weren't now at his elbow, Julian jerked out, "He
can easily satisfy himself. Two hundred people on the Fourth of August
simply vanished from our common life. No public charge, no trial that
_was_ a trial according to English ideas--"

"Would you leave known spies free to do their work?" Napier asked
sharply.

"Do you know what happened to them?" Nan intervened.

"We can tell what happened to some of them. Set blindfolded against a
wall and shot."

"How perfectly awful!" breathed Nan.

"Miss Greta isn't as horrified as you are. She knows what Germany would
do with men--yes, and women--arrested on even slighter evidence."

"They'd never do that to _women_!" said Nan, aghast.

"Oh, wouldn't they!"

"Set a _woman_ against a wall and shoot her!"

"It's logical," was Miss Greta's comment.

"Logical!" echoed Nan. "It's--it's devilish."

"Risky but well paid," observed Napier, with his eyes on the rippled
sand.

"It should be well paid," pronounced the quiet voice of Greta von
Schwarzenberg. They had come up with Lady McIntyre, abandoned by the
advance-guard. Nan offered her arm. She and Greta adapted their pace to
the older woman's.

As the two men walked on, Julian spoke of the beauty of ships seen in
that transfiguring light. "Only two or three little fishing-smacks, and
yet the grace, the mystery--"

Napier's eyes had gone farther seaward. What were those other, vaguer
shapes? Was there a mystery more urgent there? The night was
unseasonably warm, but a chill invaded him as he asked, "Are they
English?"

Julian, with his hands clasped behind him, strolled on without troubling
to reply.

It was Napier who again broke silence.

"It's all very well to scoff at amateur detectives. Have you thought why
_we_ are on the coast?"

"Good air."

"And we breathe it just where we could so easily, if we were as
accomplished as some, make signals and receive them."

Julian uttered the audible sigh of much-tried patience.

"Well, think a moment. Little as there is of proscribed area as yet, why
are we in it? Because the McIntyres chose this place?"

"Certainly. Lady McIntyre told me herself about coming down to
inspect--"

"Exactly!--a house selected for her. We are in the proscribed area
because the enemy alien in the McIntyre family chose this place for
them."

"I tell you, Gavan, I'm not going to listen--"

"Yes, you are. I've listened to you often enough. You can listen to me
for once." He told him about the leakage of the shipping secret. The
loss it had been to us. The gain it had been to the enemy. "Old Colonel
McManus is right. She has poked her nose everywhere."

"All this makes me anxious," said Julian, gravely.

His friend breathed a free half-minute.

"Very anxious about _you_, Gavan."

"See here--" Napier stopped short--"because I was wrong about Gull
Island is no reason--"

"So you're satisfied you were wrong, are you?" Julian said lightly.

"Naturally, since you found nothing to report." Then it came out that
Julian had had "more serious things" to think about. He hadn't been near
the Island. It was the first serious quarrel of their lives.

Napier left his friend and caught up with Sir William. The pressure on
his mind did not suffer him to wait till he got his chief alone. When he
had asked and obtained Sir William's reluctant consent "to a few days
off," Napier broke through the little hail of questions, and commented
with, "Isn't that the mine?"

"It is! It is!"

Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father,
darling,"--as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise
a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't
long in publicly abandoning.

Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low
coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with
nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it
inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a
pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it
might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something
odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her
intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing,
Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "I _wish_ you
wouldn't, William!"

"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we
had come for the express purpose of examining it."

"Yes, but I--I didn't know it would be like that."

"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William
said as he went closer.

"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much
had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't--" Then, with
a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which
she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of
death. "William," she cried, "_make_ Madge come away."

"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the
part, you see--"

As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had
said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice
still higher. "Greta, do, _do_ bring Madge here!"

Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was
squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched
there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too,
looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure
staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered
like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable
capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was
kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a
mother might over her child.

"Mr. Napier,"--Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind
him--"_will_ you get Madge to come away?"

It was Nan who achieved the impossible. "Brr! I'm cold," she announced.
"If you weren't too grand, Mr. Napier, Madge and I would race you to
those rocks."

Mr. Napier wasn't too grand, and Miss Madge was elated by her victory.
"I'll race you back again," she cried, again off like the wind.

They sat down on the rocks where Madge left them. For several moments
there was no sound but the swish and rattle of pebbles as they swept up
shore in the advance, and then, deserted by the force behind, fell back
a little, clinging for a moment to the skirts of the retreating wave.

Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track
of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too,
but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.

"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of
terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I
ever--" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from
the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw
that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some
of the glitter of the sea. The adorable gentleness in them had given
place to a critical, sharp, little glance that affected Napier like a
breath from a glacier.

"Sir William seems immensely devoted to you--" To his over-sensitive ear
she seemed to imply that being devoted to Gavan Napier implied a
singular stretch of charity. Nor would she accept his silence. As though
he must himself share this view of his scant deserts. "Don't you think
it very nice of Sir William to let you go off on a holiday at such a
time as this?"

"Very nice indeed."

She sat with her chin in her hand, her face upturned again. But the soft
rapture was gone, gone utterly. "Julian is looking very tired, don't you
think?" she said.

"I thought he did look tired."

"He is going to help Mr. Wilkins.

"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"

"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war
meetings."

"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a
taste of it."

"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, I _wish_ you
wouldn't say things like that!"

"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she
won't love me, what does it matter?"

But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to
the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life--he knew that
now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never
having had this--

She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go
home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."

"Why is that?"

She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence,
"Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking
and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave
enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the
curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these
views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed
stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the
sake of--oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! I _love_
those men."

"All of them?" Napier asked drily.

She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"

"I don't mock at Julian."

"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave
again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone
home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were
silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst
out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're
ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he
was _my_ son...."

Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"

"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she
wound up, with her astonishing candor.

Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk
among the boulders.

"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before
the tide reaches as far as where we are?"

"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes
outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder
against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and
out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a
dazzle of moonlit foam.

"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you
dizzy?" she said. "It does me."

"Then come higher up."

She shook her head. He showed a place at his side. "Sit here if you
feel--"

"Oh, but I _like_ to feel dizzy. That's the great difference between you
and me." Her laugh was gone in a second. With her eye on the receding
wave she asked hurriedly, "Where are you going for your holiday?"

His plans were dependent on other people, he said.

"You make me wonder what 'other people' you've got. How little I know
about you." She tumbled the sentences out.

"Well, come to that, how little I know about you."

"There isn't anything I'm not willing to tell you--if--if you cared to
know." She spoke more gently, even with a touch of wistfulness. "You
British are so reticent!" He didn't deny the charge. He felt her eyes on
his face, as she said, "I have an idea you wouldn't be--if you once got
started."

He laughed out again at that shot. "The only safe way then," he said,
"is not to get started."

"Oh, _do_ get started!" She said it with a touch of roguery lightening
her new seriousness. "I should so like to see you indiscreet for once."

Deliberately Napier didn't look at her again, till the danger-point was
safely rounded by her saying, "Greta thinks you're going to Scotland."

"Oh, _does_ she?" He looked at her straight enough now. "And does she
tell you why?"

"No; but you'll tell me that."

"Maybe I will," he answered a trifle grimly, "when I come back."

She studied him. "You are very serious." She leaned a trifle nearer.
"You are more serious, I think, than I ever saw you."

Napier smiled. In his heart he was thinking: "Before she is up in the
morning, I shall be gone. On the errand that will end even her surface
kindness to Greta's enemy. This is the last time. She will never again
stand so near and look at me with those eyes of faith."

"Aren't you rather serious, too?" he asked.

She spoke through his question, impulsively, lifting her voice a little
above the nearing thunder. "Lady McIntyre thinks you are going to see a
lady."

He made his small effort at jocularity. "I must speak to Lady McIntyre."

"_Are_ you such a fickle person?"

"Is that what they say?"

"They think you are fickle about women."

"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your
opinion, Miss Nan?"

"They don't understand you," she said gravely.

"And do _you_ understand me?" he laughed.

"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's
only that we haven't--_hadn't_"--she amended with that sudden summer
lightning in her eyes--"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still,
it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had
spoken--at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half
turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand
to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved
short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom
where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy
of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot
its rhythm.

"Always thinking--but why does your hand shake so?"--the girl's voice
was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on.
"Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong--till
one day--in the hall--" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her
question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"

"_Nan!_" he cried out.

And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried,
"Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together.
They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there
like one--as if through all the moons to come they would bide as
steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.

When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it
was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they
stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new
world.

She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to
her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils
had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man
cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.

"_Julian!_" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't
try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to
break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the
time.

"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.

"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found
the others waiting for them by the pier.




CHAPTER XI


It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied.
Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain
was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at
all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild
to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze
carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.

Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective,
which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of
the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some
compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after
landing.

Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might
mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.

"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than
he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man
who took Julian and me there when we were boys."

"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising
inflection.

"What! Have you seen something?"

"Na, na; but I have na lookit." He took the pipe out of his mouth and
knocked the ashes into the sea. "They'll be verra gude at smellin' oot."
It was so he indorsed Napier's generalship, and accepted service.

The only notice taken of the observation seemed to hint at a further
acuteness for McClintock to reckon with. "I'll tell you the plan in two
words," Napier said, "and then we'd best not be talking for the next
couple of hours." When he'd landed Napier, McClintock was to lie low in
his boat, just offshore, for about an hour and a half, unless one of two
things happened. If McClintock should see a light on the rocks at the
top of the gorge, he might, if he liked, come and see what was up, but
if he should hear a pistol-shot, whatever length of time he'd been left
alone, he was to wait half an hour longer. If, by then, Napier had
neither appeared nor shown a light, McClintock was to get along back to
Kirklamont and raise the hue and cry--an extremity, he was to
understand, which Napier particularly desired to avoid. And that was why
he was going by himself, going with extreme caution, just to establish
the fact that there was no reason why they shouldn't come back by
daylight safely enough and go over the old ground together. For a last
word, Napier remarked that he hadn't forgotten McClintock had taught him
and Julian more than fishing and sailing, and here was a pistol he'd
best keep handy.

The old man slipped the weapon into the pocket of his reefer as casually
as though it had been another pipe. But he remarked that he was more at
home in these days with a knife, whether for oysters "or whatever."
There was no doubt that McClintock was not only enlisted, but interested
at last.

He brought his boat softly up on the spit of sand left by the tide, sole
landing-place of this nature on all the little rock-bound coast. The
only sounds abroad were the shrill _keep, keep_, of the sea-pie, and a
swish of wings out of the cliff.

Without a word being exchanged, Napier went over the side, through a
shallow ripple to the little beach, so narrow as to be hardly more than
a window of gravel at the foot of the cliff. In a sense this was an
advantage once he was piloted safely to the sand spit. He remembered he
had only to hug the cliff till he came to that place--scene of many a
wreck, where the cliff fell sharply in a chaos of boulders tumbling out
to sea. By bearing inland, Napier would cross at its narrowest the neck
of what he used to think looked like the wreckage of a pier. Quite
suddenly he would come into a gentler region, a gradual acclivity that
led through willow and heather and bracken up to the apex of the height
which, midmost of the island, commanded all points of the compass. If
there was an installation, it would be there masked from the mainland,
among the rocks at the top of the gorge. And if the installation was
there, Napier would find it, provided somebody did not first find him.

The night was warm for September, but till he landed, the wet breeze had
struck cold. Here, on the island, summer seemed to linger. The air was
still full of the sun-quickened scent of pines. The sweetness of thyme
was stronger than the faint bitter of bracken. But these things reached
Napier vaguely. Those admirable servants, his eyes, were well used by
now to this half-darkness; but they could do little for him in
comparison with the two other allies, his hearing and the quickened
power of the humblest faculty of all. As he felt his way with foot and
shoulder, the new significance in contact seemed to extend from living
flesh and nerve to the rattan stick he carried. The soft alternate
strokes, now right, now left advised him of the gorse clumps, of a
solitary stone-pine, or an occasional rock half submerged in coarse
grass and heather. Every few yards he stopped to listen. Yet he got over
the ground with a quickness that brought him a jolt of surprise when,
the ascent grown suddenly steeper and less verdured, he found himself
near the top of the hangar. He had reached the place where the bony
shoulders of the island rose naked above her mantle of green and
heather-purple.

Though he could see virtually nothing of the wide prospect daylight
opened out from this point, he was too well aware of the prodigies of
vision possible to trained eyes for him to risk showing any faintest
shadow moving on the sky-line. Before he came to the top he was making
his progress bent nearly double; crouching to listen, and then creeping
along on hands and knees.

The comparatively uniform surfaces of the mother-rock showed no sign yet
of dropping down to chaos. But Napier knew where he was. The tinkle of
water told him. In two minutes he was craning over the lip of the gorge,
staring into the murk beneath him.

A mere gulf of shadow.

No man in his senses would venture farther on a night like this, unless
he had in his memory one of those indelible maps that only youth knows
the secret of engraving. It was such a map that Napier turned back to as
he lay there in the dark, getting not only the detail, but the order,
clear again in his head.

The remembered call of the water came up insistent. Almost Napier could
imagine that he made it out, that nook, a few yards below, which had
always been the boys' first stopping-place. In the driest summer a
thread of pure fresh water trickled out of a fissure in the granite down
there among the ferns. In spring the trickle would swell to a torrent.
It would go boiling over the worn boulders till it plunged down that
last lap in noise and foam into the tiny lake, the small rock basin of
steel-blue water, smiling in the sunshine of memory, but even in that
light set warningly about with nearly perpendicular walls on three
sides. On this southern arc, more terribly furnished still, with rocks
of sharper tooth, calved later from the mother in labor of heat and
frost.

After quenching their thirst, the boys' next stopping-place would be
Table Rock, a third of the way to the bottom. There they would lie
stretched out to the sun and eat their sandwiches. Then they would crawl
to the far edge and peer over for that dizzy view of the great boss, the
outcrop of granite eighteen to twenty feet below them on the left. By
virtue of place or special constitution, it had possessed a power to
resist the forces of disintegration. It treated the very torrent
cavalierly, for it butted the torrent aside with that Giant's Head, and
then bent leisurely over to look at itself in the lake.

There were days when the jutting forehead, with its crown of heather and
veil of creepers interlaced, was seen more clearly mirrored in the water
than when looked straight down upon from Table Rock or from the opposite
cliff across the lake. Neither point of view gave one the smallest
inkling of what was under the veil, behind the brow of granite.

Napier sniffed the wet air for smoldering wood. No whiff, no sound.

What the devil had been in Greta's mind? The cause of her panic,
whatever it was, no longer inhabited here. Napier would feel his way
down as quickly as due caution would permit, and in less than forty
minutes he'd be back in the boat with McClintock.

All he had to do was to steer clear of Table Rock and follow the
watercourse till it bore away to the left. Any one who knew his ground
and kept to the right could easily enough let himself down to that
comfortable ledge under the Giant's Head. Sometimes you found bilberries
there. Anyway, you found the niche that sheltered you from rain. And
then you went on to the discovery that took your breath.

In the old days you waited for McClintock with beating hearts, even if
there were two of you. Gavan eight and Julian seven, would follow behind
the old sou'wester to the end of the curving gallery, where a drop of
some four feet landed you in the irregular-shaped stone chamber where
the smugglers long ago had hid the contraband. How did they get it round
the Giant's Head? you asked, remembering the narrow way. They didn't get
it round. They lowered it over the top. McClintock could show you the
grooves worn in the granite. Good days, those!

Wet and a little chilled, but without misgiving, Napier let himself down
among the rocks. He began the descent with a swing of the rattan to take
his immediate bearings. Before he brought the stick full circle, he
dropped the hand that held it. What was this against the side of his
knee? He bent down and found his face a few inches from a steel cable,
screwed taut, and straining aslant skyward. His eye followed the outline
of the twisted strand till it met a slender rod planted discreetly among
the rocks. Planted so discreetly that it was completely masked from
observation on three points of the compass and would not easily be
detected on the fourth. Napier could not make out the wire connecting
the farther one of the antennae onto this one above his head; but he knew
that it was there. He knew that he had set his knee against one of the
guys of a wireless. He moved only a couple of inches away from that
significant companionship and stood quite still.

Was this installation a pre-war dodge, abandoned now? And if not
abandoned--

He found himself making his way down with his right hand in his
pistol-pocket. Gull Island was another place with that wand of magic set
up among the rocks.

He started as violently as if a gun had gone off. Only the vicious
snapping of a dry twig under foot; but, Lord, the racket! His caution
redoubled.

With horror he remembered that old pastime--rolling the rocks down. How
they bounded and crashed! Across the years he heard again the
reverberant thunder of that long falling. What if he should displace one
of these.... He drew his foot back, trembling from head to heel at the
slight rocking of a boulder. Could he venture down in this darkness?

Wasn't, after all, the darkness an indispensable part of his plan? He
stood and listened. Behind the sound of falling water there was nothing,
not even a bird's note. The stillness was piercing. Under its penetrant
impact he shrank inwardly.

What was that?

Something had sprung out of the shadow. Lord! Nothing but an infernal
rabbit; and the damned fool had dislodged a few little stones.

Napier sat crouching in the gorge a good four or five minutes after the
last of that pop-popping died. He had pulled off his cap and thrust it
into his pocket. He wiped his forehead. Whew! nothing but a damned
rabbit!

He listened an instant, and then went on down in the murk and the fine
rain. Suddenly he stood still again. There wasn't a sound his ear could
verify. But he held his breath, while horror moved like a wind in his
hair.

He wasn't alone.

How he knew, he couldn't have told. He plunged his hand into his
revolver pocket, braced himself, and waited. Waited while the seconds
passed. Waited till that first strong impression weakened, till he had
silently called himself a few unpleasant names, and had drawn out of his
pocket the cap he told himself his addled pate needed more than the
protection of firearms. He went on in the act of settling the cap firmly
on his head. He had heard nothing, seen nothing, when a blow on the back
all but felled him. He saved himself from falling flat only by plunging
a few paces down the gorge. He managed to recover, and wheeled about,
his hand at his pocket. Before he could get at his pistol, that hand and
the other arm were seized in a powerful grip. His hobnailed boot did him
the instant service of bringing his assailant down on one knee. But
Napier was dragged along with him in those arms of iron. It flashed over
Napier that the aim of this dumb enemy was not so much to kill as to
disarm him.

It was a battle for a pistol. The conviction grew in Napier's mind that
he would already be lying dead there among the rocks but for the man's
strange caution. He didn't want that pistol to go off; and so they
wrestled in a nightmare of blind silence. Now one, and now the other,
regained his footing and then lost it; and now they both went rolling
down together till the rocks stopped them. And still no word was spoken.

Twice Napier had his fingers almost on the trigger, and twice his hand
was wrenched away. The last time a thick voice whispered, "_Drop_ it!
Don't you know you're a dead man if you make a sound?" The voice of
Bloom, Sir William's chauffeur! He had got Napier down again; the full
weight of the assailant's body was on Napier's head; his left arm pinned
under him. In that strangling darkness Napier told himself the end had
come. He was dead already. Why was he resisting? He knew why, when he
felt Bloom's teeth on his right forearm. He felt the pistol go from his
bruised side. He heard the drop among the scant herbage of the rocks.

It was over. Resistance had been battered out of him. He was quite sure
of that. Why didn't Bloom let him alone? Why was the fellow dragging him
down?

It suddenly occurred to him that they couldn't be far from Table Rock.
_Bloom was going to throw him over!_

He had loosed his hold on Napier's shoulder. Breathing heavily, he had
come round and straddled across his victim's body. He fastened his hands
in Napier's torn collar, pulled him u

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