He was silent so long that Miss Erith finally looked up questioningly. McKay's face had become white and stern, and in his fixed gaze there was something dreadful.

"Please," she faltered, "go on."

He looked at her absently; the colour came back to his face; he shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, yes. What was I saying? Yes—about that vast ledge up there under the mountains... I stayed there three days. Partly because I couldn't find any way down. There seemed to be none.

"But I was not bored. Oh, no. Just anxious concerning my situation. Otherwise I had plenty to look at."

She waited, pencil poised.

"Plenty to look at," he repeated absently. "Plenty of Huns to gaze at. Huns? They were like ants below me, there. They swarmed under the mountain ledge as far as I could see—thousands of busy Boches—busy as ants. There were narrow-gauge railways, too, apparently running right into the mountain; and a deep broad cleft, deep as another valley, and all crawling with Huns.

"A tunnel? Nobody alive ever dreamed of such a gigantic tunnel, if it was one!... Well, I was up there three days. It was the first of August—thereabouts—and I'd been afield for weeks. And, of course, I'd heard nothing of war—never dreamed of it.

"If I had, perhaps what those thousands of Huns were doing along the mountain wall might have been plainer to me.

"As it was, I couldn't guess. There was no blasting—none that I could hear. But trains were running and some gigantic enterprise was being accomplished—some enterprise that apparently demanded speed and privacy—for not one civilian was to be seen, not one dwelling. But there were endless mazes of fortifications; and I saw guns being moved everywhere.

"Well, I was becoming hungry up on that fir-clad battlement. I didn't know how to get down into the valley. It began to look as though I'd have to turn back; and that seemed a rather awful prospect.

"Anyway, what happened, eventually, was this: I started east through the forest along that pathless tableland, and on the afternoon of the next day, tired out and almost starved, I stepped across the Swiss boundary line—a wide, rocky, cleared space crossing a mountain flank like a giant's road.

"No guards were visible anywhere, no sentry-boxes, but, as I stood hesitating in the middle of the frontier—and just why I hesitated I don't know—I saw half a dozen jagers of a German mounted regiment ride up on the German side of the boundary.

"For a second the idea occurred to me that they had ridden parallel to the ledge to intercept me; but the idea seemed absurd, granted even that they had seen me upon the ledge from below, which I never dreamed they had. So when they made me friendly gestures to come across the frontier I returned their cheery 'Gruss Gott!' and plodded thankfully across. ... And their leader, leaning from his saddle to take my offered hand, suddenly struck me in the face, and at the same moment a trooper behind me hit me on the head with the butt of a pistol."

The girl's flying pencil faltered; she lifted her brown eyes, waiting.

"That's about all," he said—"as far as facts are concerned.... They treated me rather badly.... I faced their firing-squads half-a-dozen times. After that bluff wouldn't work they interned me as an English civilian at Holzminden.... They hid me when, at last, an inspection took place. No chance for me to communicate with our Ambassador or with any of the Commission."

He turned to her in his boyish, frank way: "But do you know, Miss Erith, it took me quite a while to analyse the affair and to figure out why they arrested me, lied about me, and treated me so hellishly.

"You see, I was kept in solitary confinement and never had a chance to speak to any of the other civilians interned there at Holzminden. There was no way of suspecting why all this was happening to me except by the attitude of the Huns themselves and their endless questions and threats and cruelties. They were cruel. They hurt me a lot."

Miss Erith's eyes suddenly dimmed as she watched him, and she hastily bent her head over the pad.

"Well," he went on, "the rest, as I say, is pure surmise. This is my conclusion: I think that for the last forty years the Huns have been busy with an astounding military enterprise. Of course, since 1870, the Boche has expected war, and has been feverishly preparing for it. All the world now knows what they have done—not everything that they have done, however.

"My conclusion is this: that, when Mount Terrible shrugged me off its northern flank, the snow slide carried me to an almost inaccessible spot of which even the Swiss hunters knew nothing. Or, if they did, they considered it impossible to reach from their own territory.

"From Germany it could be reached, but it was Swiss territory. At any rate I think I am the only civilian who has been there, and who has viewed from there this enormous work in which the Huns are engaged.

"And I belive that this mysterious, overwhelmingly enormous work is nothing less than the piercing—not of a mountain or a group of mountains—but of that entire part of Switzerland which lies between Germany and France.

"I believe that a vast military road, deep, deep, under the earth, is being carried by an enormous tunnel from far back on the German side of the frontier, under Mount Terrible, under all the mountains, hills, valleys, forests, rivers—under Switzerland, in fact—into French territory.

"I believe it has been building since 1871. I believe it is nearly finished, and that it will, on French territory, give egress to a Hun army debouching from Alsace, under Switzerland, into France behind the French lines. That part of the Franco-Swiss frontier is unguarded, unfortified, uninhabited. From there a Hun army can strike the French trenches from the rear—strike Toul, Nancy, Belfort, Verdun—why, the road is open to Paris that way—open to Calais, to England!"

"This is frightful!" cried the girl. "If such a dreadful—"

"Wait! I told you that it is merely a surmise. I don't know. I guess. Why I guess it I have told you.... They were savage with me—those Huns.... They got nothing out of me. I lied steadily, even when drunk. No, they got nothing out of me. I denied I had seen anything. I denied—and truly enough—that anybody had accompanied me. No, they wrenched nothing out of me—not by starving me, not by water torture, not by their firing-squads, not by blows, not even by making of me the drunkard I am."

The pencil fell from Miss Erith's hand and the hand caught McKay's, held it, crushed it.

"You're only a boy," she murmured. "I'm not much more than a girl. We've both got years ahead of us—the best of our lives."

"YOU have."

"You also! Oh, don't, don't look at me that way. I'll help you. We've got work to do, you and I. Don't you see? Don't you understand? Work to do for our Government! Work to do for America!"

"It's too late for me to—"

"No. You've got to live. You've got to find yourself again. This depends on you. Don't you see it does? Don't you see that you have got to go back there and PROVE what you merely suspect?"

"I simply can't."

"You shall! I'll make this right with you! I'll stick to you! I'll fight to give you back your will-power—your mind. We'll do this together, for our country. I'll give up everything else to make this fight."

He began to tremble.

"I—if I could—"

"I tell you that you shall! We must do our bit, you and I!"

"You don't know—you don't know!" he cried in a bitter voice, then fell trembling again with the sweat of agony on his face.

"No, I don't know," she whispered, clutching his hand to steady him. "But I shall learn."

"You'll learn that a drunkard is a dirty beast!" he cried. "Do you know what I'd do if anybody tried to keep me from drink? ANYBODY!—even you!"

"No, I don't know." She shook her head sorrowfully: "A mindless man becomes a demon, I suppose. ... Would you—injure me?"

He was shaking all over now, and presently he sat up in bed and covered his head with one desperate hand.

"You poor boy!" she whispered.

"Keep away from me," he muttered, "I've told you all I know. I'm no further use.... Keep clear of me.... I'm sorry—to be—what I am."

"When I leave what are you going to do?" she asked gently.

"Do? I'll dress and go to the nearest bar."

"Do you need it so much already?"

He nodded his bowed head covered by the hand that gripped his hair: "Yes, I need it—badly."

She rose, loosened his clutch on her slender hand, picked up her muff:

"I'll be waiting for you downstairs," she said simply.

His face expressed sullen defiance as he passed through the waiting-room. Yet he seemed a little taken aback as well as relieved when Miss Erith did not appear among the considerable number of people waiting there for discharged patients. He walked on, buttoning his fur coat with shaky fingers, passed the doorway and stepped out into the falling snow. At the same moment a chauffeur buried in coon-skins moved forward touching his cap:

"Miss Erith's car is here, sir; Miss Erith expects you."

McKay hesitated, scowling now in his perplexity; passed his quivering hand slowly across his face, then turned, and looked at the waiting car drawn up at the gutter. Behind the frosty window Miss Erith gave him a friendly smile. He walked over to the curb, the chauffeur opened the door, and McKay took off his hat.

"Don't ask me," he said in a low voice that trembled slightly like a sick man's.

"I DO ask you."

"You know what's the matter with me, Miss Erith," he insisted in the same low, unsteady voice.

"Please," she said: and laid one small gloved hand lightly on his arm.

So he entered the car; the chauffeur drew the robe over them, and stood awaiting orders.

"Home," said Miss Erith faintly.

If McKay was astonished he did not betray it. Neither said anything more for a while. The man rested an elbow on the sill, his troubled, haggard face on his hand; the girl kept her gaze steadily in front of her with a partly resolute, partly scared expression. The car went up Park Avenue and then turned westward.

When it stopped the girl said: "You will give me a few moments in my library with you, won't you?"

The visage he turned to her was one of physical anguish. They sat confronting each other in silence for an instant; then he rose with a visible effort and descended, and she followed.

"Be at the garage at two, Wayland," she said, and ascended the snowy stoop beside McKay.

The butler admitted them. "Luncheon for two," she said, and mounted the stairs without pausing.

McKay remained in the hall until he had been separated from hat and coat; then he slowly ascended the stairway. She was waiting on the landing and she took him directly into the library where a wood fire was burning.

"Just a moment," she said, "to make myself as—as persuasive as I can."

"You are perfectly equipped, Miss Erith—"

"Oh, no, I must do better than I have done. This is the great moment of our careers, Mr. McKay." Her smile, brightly forced, left his grim features unresponsive. The undertone in her voice warned him of her determination to have her way.

He took an involuntary step toward the door like a caged thing that sees a loophole, halted as she barred his way, turned his marred young visage and glared at her. There was something terrible in his intent gaze—a pale flare flickering in his eyes like the uncanny light in the orbs of a cornered beast.

"You'll wait, won't you?" she asked, secretly frightened now.

After a long interval, "Yes," his lips motioned.

"Thank you. Because it is the supreme moment of our lives. It involves life or death.... Be patient with me. Will you?"

"But you must be brief," he muttered restlessly. "You know what I need. I am sick, I tell you!"

So she went away—not to arrange her beauty more convincingly, but to fling coat and hat to her maid and drop down on the chair by her desk and take up the telephone:

"Dr. Langford's Hospital?"

"Yes."

"Miss Erith wishes to speak to Dr. Langford. ... Is that you, Doctor?... Oh, yes, I'm perfectly well.... Tell me, how soon can you cure a man of—of dipsomania?... Of course.... It was a stupid question. But I'm so worried and unhappy... Yes.... Yes, it's a man I know.... It wasn't his fault, poor fellow. If I can only get him to you and persuade him to tell you the history of his case... I don't know whether he'll go. I'm doing my best. He's here in my library.... Oh, no, he isn't intoxicated now, but he was yesterday. And oh, Doctor! He is so shaky and he seems so ill—I mean in mind and spirit more than in body.... Yes, he says he needs something.... What?... Give him some whisky if he wants it?... Do you mean a highball?... How many?... Oh... Yes... Yes, I understand ... I'll do my very best.... Thank you. ... At three o'clock?... Thank you so much, Doctor Langford. Good-bye!"

She hung up the receiver, took a look at herself in the dressing-glass, and saw reflected there a yellow-haired hazel-eyed girl who looked a trifle scared. But she forced a smile, made a hasty toilette and rang for the butler, gave her orders, and then walked leisurely into the library. McKay lifted his tragic face from his hands where he stood before the fire, his elbows resting on the mantel.

"Come," she said in her pretty, resolute way, "you and I are perfectly human. Let's face this thing together and find out what really is in it."

She took one armchair, he the other, and she noticed that all his frame was quivering now—his hands always in restless, groping movement, as though with palsy. A moment later the butler came with a decanter, ice, mineral water and a tall glass. There was also a box of cigars on the silver tray.

"You'll fix your own highball," she said carelessly, nodding dismissal to the butler. But she looked only once at McKay, then turned away—pretence of picking up her knitting—so terrible it was to her to see in his eyes the very glimmer of hell itself as he poured out what he "needed."

Minute after minute she sat there by the fire knitting tranquilly, scarcely ever even lifting her calm young eyes to the man. Twice again he poured out what he "needed" for himself before the agony in his sickened brain and body became endurable—before the tortured nerves had been sufficiently drugged once more and the indescribable torment had subsided. He looked at her once or twice where she sat knitting and apparently quite oblivious to what he had been about, but his glance was no longer furtive; he unconsciously squared his shoulders, and his head straightened up.

Without lifting her eyes she said: "I thought we'd talk over our plans when you feel better."

He glanced sideways at the decanter: "I am all right," he said.

She had not yet lifted her eyes; she continued to knit while speaking:

"First of all," she said, "I shall place your testimony and my report in the hands of my superior, Mr. Vaux. Does that meet with your approval?"

"Yes."

She knitted in silence a few moments. He kept his eyes on her. Presently—and still without looking up—she said: "Are you within the draft age?"

"No. I am thirty-two."

"Will you volunteer?"

"No."

"Would you tell me why?"

"Yes, I'll tell you why. I shall not volunteer because of my habits."

"You mean your temporary infirmity," she said calmly. But her cheeks reddened and she bent lower over her work. A dull colour stained his face, too, but he merely shrugged his comment.

She said in a low voice: "I want you to volunteer with me for overseas service in the Army Intelligence Department.... You and I, together.... To prove what you have surmised concerning the German operations beyond Mount Terrible.... And first I want you to go with me to Dr. Langford's hospital .... I want you to go this afternoon with me. ... And face the situation. And see it through. And come out cured." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Will you?" And in his altering gaze she saw the flicker of half-senseless anger intensified suddenly to a flare of hatred.

"Don't ask anything like that of me," he said. She had grown quite white.

"I do ask it.... Will you?"

"If I wanted to I couldn't, and I don't want to. I prefer this hell to the other."

"Won't you make a fight for it?"

"No!" he said brutally.

The girl bent her head again over her knitting. But her white fingers remained idle. After a long while, staring at her intently, he saw her lip quiver.

"Don't do that!" he broke out harshly. "What the devil do you care?"

Then she lifted her tragic white face. And he had his answer.

"My God!" he faltered, springing to his feet. "What's the matter with you? Why do you care? You can't care! What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into hell again? Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?... A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all—a burnt-out thing with neither mind nor manhood left—"

She got to her feet, trembling and deathly white.

"I can't let you go," she whispered.

Exasperation almost strangled him and set afire his unhinged brain.

"For Christ's sake!" he cried. "What do you care?"

"I—I care," she stammered—"for Christ's sake ... And yours!"

Things went dark before her eyes.... She opened them after a while on the sofa where he had carried her. He was standing looking down at her. ... After a long while the ghost of a smile touched her lips. In his haunted gaze there was no response. But he said in an altered, unfamiliar voice: "I'll go if you say so. I'll do all that's in me to do. ... Will you be there—for the first day or two?"

"Yes.... All day long.... Every day if you want me. Do you?"

"Yes.... But God knows what I may do to you.... There'll be somebody to—watch me—won't there?... I don't know what may happen to you or to myself.... I'm in a bad way, Miss Erith... I'm in a very bad way."

"I know," she murmured.

He said with an almost childish directness: "Do men always live through such cures?... I don't see how I can live through it."

She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength.

"Let us win through," she said, not looking at him. "I think you will suffer more than I shall. A little more.... Because I had rather feel pain than give it—rather suffer than look on suffering.... It will be very hard for us both, I fear."

Her butler announced luncheon.



CHAPTER IV

WRECKAGE



The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December—the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.

Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.

Was THIS, then, their cursed cure?—this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible—conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingratitude.

But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.

"That meddling woman," he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness. "Curse her!" he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.

Then a meaningless anger grew with him: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of hell is entitled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself.

But how about that "cure"?

Was THIS it—this terrible blankness—this misty unreality of things? Surcease from craving—yes. But what to take its place—what to fill in, occupy mind and body? What sop to his restless soul? What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction? A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost? And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void to live in—Curse her!

There were no lights showing aboard the transport; all ports remained screened. Arrows, painted on the decks in luminous paint, pointed out the way. Below decks, a blue globe here and there emitted a feeble glimmer, marking corridors which pierced a depthless darkness.

No noise was permitted on board, no smoking, no other lights in cabin or saloon. There was scarcely a sound to be heard on the ship, save the throbbing of her engines, the long, splintering crash of heavy seas, and the dull creak of her steel vertebrae tortured by a million rivets.

As for the accursed ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his stupid acquiescence in convalescence.

He hated the sea. It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour—always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of endless motion.

He loathed it: he detested the livid skies by day against which tossing waves showed black: he hated every wave at night and their ceaseless unseen motion. McKay had been "cured." McKay was very, very ill.

There came to him, at intervals, a girl who stole through the obscurity of the pitching corridors guiding him from one faint blue light to the next—a girl who groped out the way with him at night to the deck by following the painted arrows under foot. Also sometimes she sat at his bedside through the unreal flight of time, her hand clasped over his. He knew that he had been brutal to her during his "cure."

He was still rough with her at moments of intense mental pressure—somehow; realised it—made efforts toward self-command—toward reason again, mental control; sometimes felt that he was on the way to acquiring mental mastery.

But traces of injury to the mind still remained—sensitive places—and there were swift seconds of agony—of blind anger, of crafty, unbalanced watching to do harm. Yet for all that he knew he was convalescent—that alcohol was no longer a necessity to him; that whatever he did had now become a choice for him; that he had the power and the authority and the will, and was capable, once more, of choosing between depravity and decency. But what had been taken out of his life seemed to leave a dreadful silence in his brain. And, at moments, this silence became dissonant with the clamour of unreason.

On one of his worst days when his crippled soul was loneliest the icy seas became terrific. Cruisers and destroyers of the escort remained invisible, and none of the convoyed transports were to be seen. The watery, lowering daylight faded: the unseen sun set: the brief day ended. And the wind went down with the sun. But through the thick darkness the turbulent wind appeared to grow luminous with tossing wraiths; and all the world seemed to dissolve into a nebulous, hell-driven thing, unreal, dreadful, unendurable!

"Mr. McKay!"

He had already got into his wool dressing-robe and felt shoes, and he sat now very still on the edge of his berth, listening stealthily with the cunning of distorted purpose.

Her tiny room was just across the corridor. She seemed to be eternally sleepless, always on the alert night and day, ready to interfere with him.

Finally he ventured to rise and move cautiously to his door, and he made not the slightest sound in opening it, but her door opened instantly, and she stood there confronting him, an ulster buttoned over her nightdress.

"What is the matter?" she said gently.

"Nothing."

"Are you having a bad night?"

"I'm all right. I wish you wouldn't constitute yourself my nurse, servant, mentor, guardian, keeper, and personal factotum!" Sudden rage left him inarticulate, and he shot an ugly look at her. "Can't you let me alone?" he snarled.

"You poor boy," she said under her breath.

"Don't talk like that! Damnation! I—I can't stand much more—I can't stand it, I tell you!"

"Yes, you can, and you will. And I don't mind what you say to me." His malignant expression altered.

"Do you know," he said, in a cool and evil voice, "that I may stop SAYING things and take to DOING them?"

"Would you hurt me physically? Are you really as sick as that?"

"Not yet.... How do I know?" Suddenly he felt tired and leaned against the doorway, covering his dulling eyes with his right forearm. But his hand was now clenched convulsively.

"Could you lie down? I'll talk to you," she whispered. "I'll see you through."

"I can't—endure—this tension," he muttered. "For God's sake let me go!"

"Where?"

"You know."

"Yes.... But it won't do. We must carry on, you and I."

"If you—knew—"

"I do know! When these crises come try to fix your mind on what you have become."

"Yes.... A hell of a soldier. Do you really believe that my country needs a thing like me?" She stood looking at him in silence—knowing that he was in a torment of some terrible sort. His eyes were still covered by his arm. On his boyish brow the blonde-brown hair had become damp.

She went across and passed her arm through his. His hand rested, fell to his side, but he suffered her to guide him through the corridors toward a far bluish spark that seemed as distant as Venus, the star.

They walked very slowly for a while on deck, encountering now and then the shadowy forms of officers and crew. The personnel of the several hospital units in transit were long ago in bed below.

Once he said: "You know, Miss Erith, it is not I who behaves like a scoundrel to you."

"I know," she said with a dauntless smile.

"Because," he went on, searching painfully for thought as well as words, "I'm not really a brute—was not always a blackguard—"

"Do you suppose for one moment that I blame a man who has been irresponsible through no fault of his, and who has made the fight and has won back to sanity?"

"I—am not yet—well!"

"I understand."

They paused beside the port rail for a few moments.

"I suppose you know," he muttered, "that I have thought—at times—of ending things—down there. ... You seem to know most things. Did you suspect that?"

"Yes."

"Don't you ever sleep?"

"I wake easily."

"I know you do. I can't stir in bed but I hear you move, too.... I should think you'd hate and loathe me—for all I've done—for all I've cost you."

"Nurses don't loathe their patients," she said lightly.

"I should think they'd want to kill them."

"Oh, Mr. McKay! On the contrary they—they grow to like them—exceedingly."

"You dare not say that about yourself and me."

Miss Erith shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I don't have to say anything, do I?"

He made no reply. After a long silence she said casually: "The sea is calmer, I think. There's something resembling faint moonlight up among those flying clouds."

He lifted his tragic face and gazed up at the storm-wrack speeding overhead. And there through the hurrying vapours behind flying rags of cloud, a pallid lustre betrayed the smothered moon.

There was just enough light, now, to reveal the forward gun under its jacket, and the shadowy gun-crew around it where the ship's bow like a vast black, plough ripped the sea asunder in two deep, foaming furrows.

"I wish I knew where we are at this moment," mused the girl. She counted the days on her fingertips: "We may be off Bordeaux.... It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

To him it had been a century of dread endured through half-awakened consciousness of the latest inferno within him.

"It's been very long," he said, sighing.

A few minutes later they caught a glimpse of a strangled moon overhead—a livid corpse of a moon, tarnished and battered almost out of recognition.

"Clearing weather," she said cheerfully, adding: "To-morrow we may be in the danger zone.... Did you ever see a submarine?"

"Yes. Did you?"

"There were some up the Hudson. I saw them last summer while motoring along Riverside Drive."

The spectral form of an officer appeared at her elbow, said something in a low voice, and walked aft.

She said: "Well, then, I think we'd better dress. ... Do you feel better?"

He said that he did, but his sombre gaze into darkness belied him. So again she slipped her arm through his and he suffered himself to be led away along the path of shinning arrows under foot.

At his door she said cheerfully: "No more undressing for bed, you know. No more luxury of night-clothes. You heard the orders about lifebelts?"

"Yes," he replied listlessly.

"Very well. I'll be waiting for you."

She lingered a moment more watching him in his brooding revery where he stood leaning against the doorway. And after a while he raised his haunted eyes to hers.

"I can't keep on," he breathed.

"Yes you can!"

"No.... The world is slipping away—under foot. It's going on without me—in spite of me."

"It's you that are slipping, if anything is. Be fair to the world at least—even if you mean to betray it—and me."

"I don't want to betray anybody—anything." He had begun to tremble when he stood leaning against his door. "I—don't know—what to do."

"Stand by the world. Stand by me. And, through me, stand by your own self."

The young fellow's forehead was wet with the vague horror of something. He made an effort to speak, to straighten up; gave her a dreadful look of appeal which turned into a snarl.

He whispered between writhing lips: "Can't you let me alone? Can't I end it if I can't stand it—without your blocking me every time—every time I stir a finger—"

"McKay! Wait! Don't touch me!—don't do that!"

But he had her in a sudden grip now—was looking right and left for a place to hurl her out of the way.

"I've stood enough, by God!" he muttered between his teeth. "Now I'm through—"

"Please listen. You're out of your mind," she said breathlessly, not struggling to free herself, but striving to twist both her arms around one of his.

"You hurt me," she whimpered. "Don't be brutal to me!"

"I've got to get you out of my way." He tried to fling her across the corridor into her own cabin, but she had fastened herself to him.

"Don't!" she panted. "Don't do anything to yourself—"

"Let go of me! Unclasp your arms!"

But she clung the more desperately and wound her limbs around his, almost tripping him.

"I WON'T give you up!" she gasped.

"What do you care?" he retorted hoarsely, striving to tear himself loose. "I want to get some rest—somewhere!"

"You're hurting! You're breaking my arm! Kay! Kay! what are you doing to me?" she wailed.

Something—perhaps the sound of his own name falling from her lips for the first time—checked his mounting frenzy. She could feel every muscle in his body become rigidly inert.

"Kay!" she whispered, fastening herself to him convulsively. For a full minute she sustained his half-insane stare, then it altered, and her own eyes slowly closed, though her head remained upright on the rigid marble of her neck.

The crisis had been reached: the tide of frenzy was turning, had turned, was already ebbing. She felt it, was conscious that he also had become aware of it. Then his grasp slackened, grew lax, loosened, and almost spent. She ventured to unwind her limbs from his, to relax her stiffened fingers, unclasp her arms.

It was over. She could scarcely stand, felt blindly for support, rested so, and slowly unclosed her eyes.

"I've had to fight very hard for you," she whispered. "But I think I've won."

He answered with difficulty.

"Yes—if you want the dog you fought for."

"It isn't what I want, Kay."

"All right, I guess I can face it through—after this.... But I don't know why you did it."

"I do."

"Do you? Don't you know I'm not a man, but a beast? And there are half a hundred million real men to replace me—to do what you and the country expect of real men."

"What may be expected of them I expect of you. Kay, I've made a good fight for you, haven't I?"

He turned his quenched eyes on her. "From gutter to hospital, from hospital to sanitarium, from sanitarium to ship," he said in a colourless voice. "Yes, it was—a—good—fight."

"What a Calvary!" she murmured, looking at him out of clear, sorrowful eyes. "And on your knees, poor boy!"

"You ought to know. You have made every station with me—on your tender bleeding knees of a girl!" He choked, turned his head swiftly; and she caught his hand. The break had come.

"Oh, Kay! Kay!" she said, quivering all over, "I have done my bit and you are cured! You know it, don't you? Look at me, turn your head." She laid her slim hand flat against his tense cheek but could not turn his face. But she did not care; the palm of her hand was wet. The break had come. She drew a deep, uneven breath, let go his hand.

"Now," she said, "we can understand each other at last—our minds are rational; and whether in accord or conflict they are at least in contact; and mine isn't clashing with something disordered and foreign which it can't interpret, can't approach."

He said, not turning toward her: "You are kind to put it that way.... I think self-control has returned—will-power—all that.... I won't-betray you—Miss Erith."

"YOU never would, Mr. McKay. But I—I've been in terror of what has been masquerading as you."

"I know.... But whatever you think of such a—a man—I'll do my bit, now. I'll carry on—until the end."

"I will too! I promise you."

He turned his head at that and a mirthless laugh touched his wet eyes and drawn visage:

"As though you had to promise anybody that you'd stick! You! You beautiful, magnificent young thing—you superb kid—"

Her surprise and the swift blaze of colour in her face silenced him.

After a moment, the painful red still staining his face, he muttered something about dressing.

He watched her turn and enter her room; saw that she had closed her door-something she had not dared do heretofore; then he went into his own room and threw himself down on the bunk, shaking in every nerve.

For a long while, preoccupied with the obsession for self-destruction, he lay there face downward, exhausted, trying to fight off the swimming sense of horror that was creeping over him again..... Little by little it mounted like a tide from hell.... He struggled to his feet with the unuttered cry of a dreamer tearing his throat. An odd sense of fear seized him and he dressed and adjusted his clumsy life-suit. For the ship was in the danger zone, now, and orders had been given, and dawn was not far off. Perhaps it was already day! he could not tell in his dim cabin.

And after he was completely accoutred for the hazard of the Hun-cursed seas he turned and looked down at his bunk with the odd idea that his body still lay there—that it was a thing apart from himself—something inert, unyielding, corpse-like, sprawling there in a stupor—something visible, tangible, taking actual proportion and shape there under his very eyes.

He turned his back with a shudder and went on deck. To his surprise the blue lights were extinguished, and corridor and saloon were all rosy with early sunlight.

Blue sky, blue sea, silver spindrift flying and clouds of silvery gulls—a glimmer of Heaven from the depths of the pit—a glimpse of life through a crack in the casket—and land close on the starboard bow! Sheer cliffs, with the bonny green grass atop all furrowed by the wind—and the yellow-flowered broom and the shimmering whinns blowing.

"Why, it's Scotland," he said aloud, "it's Glenark Cliffs and the Head of Strathlone—my people's fine place in the Old World—where we took root—and—O my God! Yankee that I am, it looks like home!"

The cape of a white fleece cloak fluttered in his face, and he turned and saw Miss Erith at his elbow.

Yellow-haired, a slender, charming thing in her white wind-blown coat, she stood leaning on the spray-wet rail close to his shoulder.

And with him it was suddenly as though he had known her for years—as though he had always been aware of her beauty and her loveliness—as though his eyes had always framed her—his heart had always wished for her, and she had always been the sole and exquisite tenant of his mind.

"I had no idea that we were off Scotland," he said—"off Strathlone Head—and so close in. Why, I can see the cliff-flowers!"

She laid one hand lightly on his arm, listening; high and heavenly sweet above the rushing noises of the sea they heard the singing of shoreward sky-larks above the grey cliff of Glenark.

He began to tremble. "That nightmare through which I've struggled," he began, but she interrupted:

"It is quite ended, Kay. You are awake. It is day and the world's before you." At that he caught her slim hand in both of his:

"Eve! Eve! You've brought me through death's shadow! You gave me back my mind!"

She let her hand rest between his. At first he could not make out what her slightly moving lips uttered, and bending nearer he heard her murmur: "Beside the still waters." The sea had become as calm as a pond.

And now the transport was losing headway, scarcely moving at all. Forward and aft the gun-crews, no longer alert, lounged lazily in the sunshine watching a boat being loaded and swung outward from the davits.

"Is somebody going ashore?" asked McKay.

"We are," said the girl.

"Just you and I, Eve?"

"Just you and I."

Then he saw their luggage piled in the lifeboat.'

"This is wonderful," he said. "I have a house a few miles inland from Strathlone Head."

"Will you take me there, Kay?"

Such a sense of delight possessed him that he could not speak.

"That's where we must go to make our plans," she said. "I didn't tell you in those dark hours we have lived together, because our minds were so far apart—and I was fighting so hard to hold you."

"Have you forgiven me—you wonderful girl?"

His voice shook so that he could scarcely control it. Miss Erith laughed.

"You adorable boy!" she said. "Stand still while I unlace your life-belt. You can't travel in this."

He felt her soft fingers at his throat and turned his face upward. All the blue air seemed glittering with the sun-tipped wings of gulls. The skylark's song, piercingly sweet, seemed to penetrate his soul. And, as his life-suit fell about him, so seemed to fall the heavy weight of dread like a shroud, dropping at his feet. And he stepped clear—took his first free step toward her—as though between them there were no questions, no barriers, nothing but this living, magic light—which bathed them both.

There seemed to be no need of speech, either, only the sense of heavenly contact as though the girl were melting into him, dissolving in his arms.

"Kay!"

Her voice sounded as from an infinite distance. There came a smothered thudding like the soft sound of guns at sea; and then her voice again, and a greyness as if a swift cloud had passed across the sun.

"Kay!"

A sharp, cold wind began to blow through the strange and sudden darkness. He heard her voice calling his name—felt his numbed body shaken, lifted his head from his arms and sat upright on his bunk in the dim chill of his cabin.

Miss Erith stood beside his bed, wearing her life-suit.

"Kay! Are you awake?'

"Yes."

"Then put on your life-suit. Our destroyers are firing at something. Quick, please, I'll help you!"

Dazed, shaken, still mazed by the magic of his dream, not yet clear of its beauty and its passion, he stumbled to his feet in the obscurity. And he felt her chilled hand aiding him.

"Eve—I—thought—"

"What?"

"I thought your name—was Eve—" he stammered. "I've been—dreaming."

Then was a silence as he fumbled stupidly with his clothing and life-suit. The sounds of the guns, rapid, distinct, echoed through the unsteady obscurity.

She helped him as a nurse helps a convalescent, her swift, cold little fingers moving lightly and unerringly. And at last he was equipped, and his mind had cleared darkly of the golden vision of love and spring.

Icy seas, monstrous and menacing, went smashing past the sealed and blinded port; but there was no wind and the thudding of the guns came distinctly to their ears.

A shape in uniform loomed at the cabin door for an instant and a calm, unhurried voice summoned them.

Corridors were full of dark figures. The main saloon was thronged as they climbed the companion-way. There appeared to be no panic, no haste, no confusion. Voices were moderately low, the tone casually conversational.

Miss Erith's arm remained linked in McKay's where they stood together amid the crowd.

"U-boats, I fancy," she said.

"Probably."

After a moment: "What were you dreaming about, Mr. McKay?" she asked lightly. In the dull bluish dusk of the saloon his boyish face grew hot.

"What was it you called me?" she insisted. "Was it Eve?"

At that his cheeks burnt crimson.

"What do you mean?" he muttered.

"Didn't you call me Eve?"

"I—when a man is dreaming—asleep—"

"My name is Evelyn, you know. Nobody ever called me Eve.... Yet—it's odd, isn't it, Mr. McKay? I've always wished that somebody would call me Eve.... But perhaps you were not dreaming of me?"

"I—was."

"Really. How interesting!" He remained silent.

"And did you call me Eve—in that dream?... That is curious, isn't it, after what I've just told you?... So I've had my wish—in a dream." She laughed a little. "In a dream—YOUR dream," she repeated. "We must have been good friends in your dream—that you called me Eve."

But the faint thrill of the dream was in him again, and it troubled him and made him shy, and he found no word to utter—no defence to her low-voiced banter.

Then, not far away on the port quarter, a deck-gun spoke with a sharper explosion, and intense stillness reigned in the saloon.

"If there's any necessity," he whispered, "you recollect your boat, don't you?"

"Yes.... I don't want to go—without you." He said, in a pleasant firm voice which was new to her: "I know what you mean. But you are not to worry. I am absolutely well."

The girl turned toward him, the echoes of the guns filling her ears, and strove to read his face in the ghastly, dreary light.

"I'm really cured, Miss Erith," he said. "If there's any emergency I'll fight to live. Do you believe me?"

"If you tell me so."

"I tell you so."

The girl drew a deep, unsteady breath, and her arm tightened a trifle within his.

"I am—so glad," she said in a voice that sounded suddenly tired.

There came an ear-splitting detonation from the after-deck, silencing every murmur.

"Something is shelling us," whispered McKay. "When orders come, go instantly to your boat and your station."

"I don't want to go alone."

"The nurses of the unit to which you—"

The crash of a shell drowned his voice. Then came a deathly silence, then the sound of the deck-guns in action once more.

Miss Erith was leaning rather heavily on his arm. He bent it, drawing her closer.

"I don't want to leave you," she said again.

"I told you—"

"It isn't that.... Don't you understand that I have become—your friend?"

"Such a brute as I am?"

"I like you."

In the silence he could hear his heart drumming between the detonations of the deck-guns. He said: "It's because you are you. No other woman on earth but would have loathed me... beastly rotter that I was—"

"Oh-h, don't," she breathed.... "I don't know—we may be very close to death.... I want to live. I'd like to. But I don't really mind death. ... But I can't bear to have things end for you just as you've begun to live again—"

Crash! Something was badly smashed on deck that time, for the brazen jar of falling wreckage seemed continuous.

Through the metallic echo she heard her voice:

"Kay! I'm afraid—a little."

"I think it's all right so far. Listen, there go our guns again. It's quite all right, Eve dear."

"I didn't know I was so cowardly. But of course I'll never show it when the time comes."

"Of course you won't. Don't worry. Shells make a lot of noise when they explode on deck. All that tinpan effect we heard was probably a ventilator collapsing—perhaps a smokestack."

After a silence punctured by the flat bang of the deck-guns:

"You ARE cured, aren't you, Kay?"

"Yes."

She repeated in a curiously exultant voice: "You ARE cured. All of a sudden—after that black crisis, too, you wake up, well!"

"You woke me."

"Of course, I did—with those guns frightening me!"

"You woke me, Eve," he repeated coolly, "and my dream had already cured me. I am perfectly well. We'll get out of this mess shortly, you and I. And—and then—"He paused so long that she looked up at him in the bluish dusk:

"And what then?" she asked.

He did not answer. She said: "Tell me, Kay."

But as his lips unclosed to speak a terrific shock shook the saloon—a shock that seemed to come from the depths of the ship, tilt up the cabin floor, and send everybody reeling about.

Through the momentary confusion in the bluish obscurity the cool voice of an officer sounded unalarmed, giving orders. There was no panic. The hospital units formed and started for the deck. A young officer passing near exchanged a calm word with McKay, and passed on speaking pleasantly to the women who were now moving forward.

McKay said to Miss Erith: "It seems that we've been torpedoed. We'll go on deck together. You know your boat and station?"

"Yes."

"I'll see you safely there. You're not afraid any more, are you?"

"No."

He gave a short dry laugh. "What a rotten deal," he said. "My dream was—different.... There is your boat—THAT one!... I'll say good luck. I'm assigned to a station on the port side. ... Good luck.... And thank you, Eve."

"Don't go—"

"Yes, I must.. We'll find each other—ashore—or somewhere."

"Kay! The port boats can't be launched—"

"Take your place! you're next, Eve."... Her hand, which had clung to his, he suddenly twisted up, and touched the convulsively tightening fingers with his lips.

"Good luck, dear," he said gaily. And watched her go and take her place. Then he lifted his cap, as she turned and looked for him, and sauntered off to where his boat and station should have been had not the U-boat shells annihilated boat and rail and deck.

"What a devil of a mess!" he said to a petty officer near him. A young doctor smoking a cigarette surveyed his own life-suit and the clumsy apparel of his neighbours with unfeigned curiosity!

"How long do these things keep one afloat?" he inquired.

"Long enough to freeze solid," replied an ambulance driver.

"Did we get the Hun?" asked McKay of the petty officer.

"Naw," he replied in disgust, "but the destroyers ought to nail him. Look out, sir—you'll go sliding down that slippery toboggan!"

"How long'll she float?" asked the young ambulance driver.

"This ship? SHE'S all right," remarked the petty officer absently.

She went down, nose first. Those in the starboard boats saw her stand on end for full five minutes, screws spinning, before a muffled detonation blew the bowels out of her and sucked her down like a plunging arrow.

Destroyers and launches from some of the cruisers were busy amid the wreckage where here, on a spar, some stunned form clung like a limpet, and there, a-bob in the curling seas, a swimmer in his life-suit tossed under the wintry sky.

There were men on rafts, too, and several clinging to hatches; there was not much loss of life, considering.

Toward midday a sea-plane which had been releasing depth-bombs and hovering eagerly above the wide iridescent and spreading stain, sheered shoreward and shot along the coast.

There was a dead man afloat in a cave, rocking there rather peacefully in his life-suit—or at least they supposed him to be dead.

But on a chance they signalled the discovery to a distant trawler, then soared upward for a general coup de l'oeil, turned there aloft like a seahawk for a while, sheering in widening spirals, and finally, high in the grey sky, set a steady course for parts unknown.

Meanwhile a boat from the trawler fished out McKay, wrapped him in red-hot blankets, pried open his blue lips, and tried to fill him full of boiling rum. Then he came to life. But those honest fishermen knew he had gone stark mad because he struck at the pannikin of steaming rum and cursed them vigorously for their kindness. And only a madman could so conduct himself toward a pannikin of steaming rum. They understood that perfectly. And, understanding it, they piled more hot blankets upon the struggling form of Kay McKay and roped him to his bunk.

Toward evening, becoming not only coherent but frightfully emphatic, they released McKay.

"What's this damn place?" he shouted.

"Strathlone Firth," they said.

"That's my country!" he raged. "I want to go ashore!"

They were quite ready to be rid of the cracked Yankee, and told him so.

"And the boats? How about them?" he demanded.

"All in the Firth, sir."

"Any women lost?"

"None, sir."

At that, struggling into his clothes, he began to shed gold sovereigns from his ripped money-belt all over the cabin. Weatherbeaten fingers groped to restore the money to him. But it was quite evident that the young man was mad. He wouldn't take it. And in his crazy way he seemed very happy, telling them what fine lads they were and that not only Scotland but the world ought to be proud of them, and that he was about to begin to live the most wonderful life that any man had ever lived as soon as he got ashore.

"Because," he explained, as he swung off and dropped into the small boat alongside, "I've taken a look into hell and I've had a glimpse of heaven, but the earth has got them both stung to death, and I like it and I'm going to settle down on it and live awhile. You don't get me, do you?" They did not.

"It doesn't matter. You're a fine lot of lads. Good luck!"

And so they were rid of their Yankee lunatic.

On the Firth Quay and along the docks all the inhabitants of Glenark and Strathlone were gathered to watch the boats come in with living, with dead, or merely the news of the seafight off the grey head of Strathlone.

At the foot of the slippery waterstairs, green with slime, McKay, grasping the worn rail, lifted his head and looked up into the faces of the waiting crowd. And saw the face of her he was looking for among them.

He went up slowly. She pushed through the throng, descended the steps, and placed one arm around him.

"Thanks, Eve," he said cheerfully. "Are you all right?"

"All right, Kay. Are you hurt?"

"No.... I know this place. There's an inn ... if you'll give me your arm—it's just across the street."

They went very leisurely, her arm under his—and his face, suddenly colourless, half-resting against her shoulder.



CHAPTER V

ISLA WATER



Earlier in the evening there had been a young moon on Isla Water. Under it spectres of the mist floated in the pale lustre; a painted moorhen steered through ghostly pools leaving fan-shaped wakes of crinkled silver behind her; heavy fish splashed, swirling again to drown the ephemera.

But there was no moonlight now; not a star; only fog on Isla Water, smothering ripples and long still reaches, bank and upland, wall and house.

The last light had gone out in the stable; the windows of Isla were darkened; there was a faint scent of heather in the night; a fainter taint of peat smoke. The world had grown very still by Isla Water.

Toward midnight a dog-otter, swimming leisurely by the Bridge of Isla, suddenly dived and sped away under water; and a stoat, prowling in the garden, also took fright and scurried through the wicket. Then in the dead of night the iron bell hanging inside the court began to clang. McKay heard it first in his restless sleep. Finally the clangour broke his sombre dream and he awoke and sat up in bed, listening.

Neither of the two servants answered the alarm. He swung out of bed and into slippers and dressing-gown and picked up a service pistol. As he entered the stone corridor he heard Miss Erith's door creak on its ancient hinges.

"Did the bell wake you?" he asked in a low voice.

"Yes. What is it?"

"I haven't any idea."

She opened her door a little wider. Her yellow hair covered her shoulders like a mantilla. "Who could it be at this hour?" she repeated uneasily.

McKay peered at the phosphorescent dial of his wrist-watch:

"I don't know," he repeated. "I can't imagine who would come here at this hour."

"Don't strike a light!" she whispered.

"No, I think I won't." He continued on down the stone stairs, and Miss Erith ran to the rail and looked over.

"Are you armed?" she called through the darkness.

"Yes."

He went on toward the rear of the silent house and through the servants' hall, then around by the kitchen garden, then felt his way along a hedge to a hutchlike lodge where a fixed iron bell hung quivering under the slow blows of the clapper.

"What the devil's the matter?" demanded McKay in a calm voice.

The bell still hummed with the melancholy vibrations, but the clapper now hung motionless. Through the brooding rumour of metallic sound came a voice out of the mist:

"The hours of life are numbered. Is it true?"

"It is," said McKay coolly; "and the hairs of our head are numbered too!"

"So teach us to number our days," rejoined the voice from the fog, "that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

"The days of our years are three-score years and ten," said McKay. "Have you a name?"

"A number."

"And what number will that be?"

"Sixty-seven. And yours?"

"You should know that, too."

"It's the reverse; seventy-six."

"It is that," said McKay. "Come in."

He made his way to the foggy gate, drew bolt and chain from the left wicket. A young man stepped through.

"Losh, mon," he remarked with a Yankee accent, "it's a fearful nicht to be abroad."

"Come on in," said McKay, re-locking the wicket. "This way; follow me."

They went by the kitchen garden and servants' hall, and so through to the staircase hall, where McKay struck a match and Sixty-seven instantly blew it out.

"Better not," he said. "There are vermin about."

McKay stood silent, probably surprised. Then he called softly in the darkness:

"Seventy-seven!"

"Je suis la!" came her voice from the stairs.

"It's all right," he said, "it's one of our men. No use sittin' up if you're sleepy." He listened but did not hear Miss Erith stir.

"Better return to bed," he said again, and guided Sixty-seven into the room on the left.

For a few moments he prowled around; a glass tinkled against a decanter. When he returned to the shadow-shape seated motionless by the casement window he carried only one glass.

"Don't you?" inquired Sixty-seven. "And you a Scot!"

"I'm a Yankee; and I'm through."

"With the stuff?"

"Absolutely."

"Oh, very well. But a Yankee laird—tiens c'est assez drole!" He smacked his lips over the smoky draught, set the half-empty glass on the deep sill. Then he began breezily:

"Well, Seventy-six, what's all this I hear about your misfortunes?"

"What do you hear?" inquired McKay guilelessly.

The other man laughed.

"I hear that you and Seventy-seven have entered the Service; that you are detailed to Switzerland and for a certain object unknown to myself; that your transport was torpedoed a week ago off the Head of Strathlone, that you wired London from this house of yours called Isla, and that you and Seventy-seven went to London last week to replenish the wardrobe you had lost."

"Is that all you heard?"

"It is."

"Well, what more do you wish to hear?"

"I want to know whether anything has happened to worry you. And I'll tell you why. There was a Hun caught near Banff! Can you beat it? The beggar wore kilts!—and the McKay tartan—and, by jinks, if his gillie wasn't rigged in shepherd's plaid!—and him with his Yankee passport and his gillie with a bag of ready-made rods. Yellow trout, is it? Sea-trout, is it! Ho, me bucko, says I when I lamped what he did with his first trout o' the burn this side the park—by Godfrey! thinks I to myself, you're no white man at all!—you're Boche. And it was so, McKay."

"Seventy-six," corrected McKay gently.

"That's better. It should become a habit."

"Excuse me, Seventy-six; I'm Scotch-Irish way back. You're straight Scotch—somewhere back. We Yankees don't use rods and flies and net and gaff as these Scotch people use 'em. But we're white, Seventy-six, and we use 'em RIGHT in our own fashion." He moistened his throat, shoved aside the glass:

"But this kilted Boche! Oh, la-la! What he did with his rod and flies and his fish and himself! AND his gillie! Sure YOU'RE not white at all, thinks I. And at that I go after them."

"You got them?"

"Certainly—at the inn—gobbling a trout, blaue gesotten—having gone into the kitchen to show a decent Scotch lassie how to concoct the Hunnish dish. I nailed them then and there—took the chance that the swine weren't right. And won out."

"Good! But what has it to do with me?" asked McKay.

"Well, I'll be telling you. I took the Boche to London and I've come all the way back to tell you this, Seventy-six; the Huns are on to you and what you're up to. That Boche laird called himself Stanley Brown, but his name is—or was—Schwartz. His gillie proved to be a Swede."

"Have they been executed?"

"You bet. Tower style! We got another chum of theirs, too, who set up a holler like he saw a pan of hogwash. We're holding him. And what we've learned is this: The Huns made a special set at your transport in order to get YOU and Seventy-seven!

"Now they know you are here and their orders are to get you before you reach France. The hog that hollered put us next. He's a Milwaukee Boche; name Zimmerman. He's so scared that he tells all he knows and a lot that he doesn't. That's the trouble with a Milwaukee Boche. Anyway, London sent me back to find you and warn you. Keep your eye skinned. And when you're ready for France wire Edinburgh. You know where. There'll be a car and an escort for you and Seventy-seven."

McKay laughed: "You know," he said, "there's no chance of trouble here. Glenark is too small a village—"

"Didn't I land a brace of Boches at Banff?"

"That's true. Well, anyway, I'll be off, I expect, in a day or so." He rose; "and now I'll show you a bed—"

"No; I've a dog-cart tied out yonder and a chaser lying at Glenark. By Godfrey, I'm not finished with these Boche-jocks yet!"

"You're going?"

"You bet. I've a date to keep with a suspicious character—on a trawler. Can you beat it? These vermin creep in everywhere. Yes, by Godfrey! They crawl aboard ship in sight of Strathlone Head! Here's hoping it may be a yard-arm jig he'll dance!"

He emptied his glass, refused more. McKay took him to the wicket and let him loose.

"Well, over the top, old scout!" said Sixty-seven cheerily, exchanging a quick handclasp with McKay. And so the fog took him.

A week later they found his dead horse and wrecked dog-cart five miles this side of Glenark Burn, lying in a gully entirely concealed by whinn and broom. It was the noise the flies made that attracted attention. As for the man himself, he floated casually into the Firth one sunny day with five bullets in him and his throat cut very horridly.

But, before that, other things happened on Isla Water—long before anybody missed No. 67. Besides, the horse and dog-cart had been hired for a week; and nobody was anxious except the captain of the trawler, held under mysterious orders to await the coming of a man who never came.

So McKay went back through the fog to his quaint, whitewashed inheritance—this legacy from a Scotch grandfather to a Yankee grandson—and when he came into the dark waist of the house he called up very gently: "Are you awake, Miss Yellow-hair?"

"Yes. Is all well?"

"All's well," he said, mounting the stairs.

"Then—good night to you Kay of Isla!" she said.

"Don't you want to hear—"

"To-morrow, please."

"But—"

"As long as you say that all is well I refuse to lose any more sleep!"

"Are you sleepy, Yellow-hair?"

"I am."

"Aren't you going to sit up and chat for a few—"

"I am not!"

"Have you no curiosity?" he demanded, laughingly.

"Not a bit. You say everything is all right. Then it is all right—when Kay of Isla says so! Good night!"

What she had said seemed to thrill him with a novel and delicious sense of responsibility. He heard her door close; he stood there in the stone corridor a moment before entering his room, experiencing an odd, indefinite pleasure in the words this girl had uttered—words which seemed to reinstate him among his kind, words which no woman would utter except to a man in whom she believed.

And yet this girl knew him—knew what he had been—had seen him in the depths—had looked upon the wreck of him.

Out of those depths she had dragged what remained of him—not for his own sake perhaps—not for his beaux-yeux—but to save him for the service which his country demanded of him.

She had fought for him—endured, struggled spiritually, mentally, bodily to wrench him out of the coma where drink had left him with a stunned brain and crippled will.

And now, believing in her work, trusting, confident, she had just said to him that what he told her was sufficient security for her. And on his word that all was well she had calmly composed herself for sleep as though all the dead chieftains of Isla stood on guard with naked claymores! Nothing in all his life had ever so thrilled him as this girl's confidence.

And, as he entered his room, he knew that within him the accursed thing that had been, lay dead forever.

He was standing in the walled garden switching a limber trout-rod when Miss Erith came upon him next morning,—a tall straight young man in his kilts, supple and elegant as the lancewood rod he was testing.

Conscious of a presence behind him he turned, came toward her in the sunlight, the sun crisping his short hair. And in his pleasant level eyes the girl saw what had happened—what she had wrought—that this young man had come into his own again—into his right mind and his manhood—and that he had resumed his place among his fellow men and peers.

He greeted her seriously, almost formally; and the girl, excited and a little upset by the sudden realisation of his victory and hers, laughed when he called her "Miss Erith."

"You called me Yellow-hair last night," she said. "I called you Kay. Don't you want it so?"

"Yes," he said reddening, understanding that it was her final recognition of a man who had definitely "come back."

Miss Erith was very lovely as she stood there in the garden whither breakfast was fetched immediately and laid out on a sturdy green garden-table—porridge, coffee, scones, jam, and an egg.

Chipping the latter she let her golden-hazel eyes rest at moments upon the young fellow seated opposite. At other moments, sipping her coffee or buttering a scone, she glanced about her at the new grass starred with daisies, at the daffodils, the slim young fruit-trees,—and up at the old white facade of the ancient abode of the Lairds of Isla.

"Why the white flag up there, Kay?" she inquired, glancing aloft.

He laughed, but flushed a little. "Yankee that I am," he admitted, "I seem to be Scot enough to observe the prejudices and folk-ways of my forebears."

"Is it your clan flag?"

"Bratach Bhan Chlaun Aoidh," he said smilingly. "The White Banner of the McKays."

"Good! And what may that be—that bunch of weed you wear in your button-hole?" Again the young fellow laughed: "Seasgan or Cuilc—in Gaelic—just reed-grass, Miss Yellow-hair."

"Your clan badge?"

"I believe so."

"You're a good Yankee, Kay. You couldn't be a good Yankee if you treated Scotch custom with contempt.... This jam is delicious. And oh, such scones!"

"When we go to Edinburgh we'll tea on Princess Street," he remarked. "It's there you'll fall for the Scotch cakes, Yellow-hair."

"I've already fallen for everything Scotch," she remarked demurely.

"Ah, wait! This Scotland is no strange land to good Americans. It's a bonnie, sweet, clean bit of earth made by God out of the same batch he used for our own world of the West. Oh, Yellow-hair, I mind the first day I ever saw Scotland. 'Twas across Princess Street—across acres of Madonna lilies in that lovely foreland behind which the Rock lifted skyward with Edinburgh Castle atop made out of grey silver slag! It was a brave sight, Yellow-hair. I never loved America more than at that moment when, in my heart, I married her to Scotland."

"Kay, you're a poet!" she exclaimed.

"We all are here, Yellow-hair. There's naught else in Scotland," he said laughing.

The man was absolutely transformed, utterly different. She had never imagined that a "cure" meant the revelation of this unsuspected personality—this alternation of pleasant gravity and boyish charm.

Something of what preoccupied her he perhaps suspected, for the colour came into his handsome lean features again and he picked up his rod, rising as she rose.

"Are there no instructions yet?" she inquired.

As he stood there threading the silk line through the guides he told her about the visit of No. 67.

"I fancy instructions will come before long," he remarked, casting a leaderless line out across the grass. After a moment he glanced rather gravely at her where she stood with hands linked behind her, watching the graceful loops which his line was making in the air.

"You're not worried, are you, Yellow-hair?"

"About the Boche?"

"I meant that."

"No, Kay, I'm not uneasy."

And when the girl had said it she knew that she had meant a little more; she had meant that she felt secure with this particular man beside her.

It was a strange sort of peace that was invading her—an odd courage quite unfamiliar—an effortless pluck that had suddenly become the most natural thing in the world to this girl, who, until then, had clutched her courage desperately in both hands, commended her soul to God, her body to her country's service.

Frightened, she had set out to do this service, knowing perfectly what sort of fate awaited her if she fell among the Boche.

Frightened but resolute she faced the consequences with this companion about whom she knew nothing; in whom she had divined a trace of that true metal which had been so dreadfully tarnished and transmuted.

And now, here in this ancient garden—here in the sun of earliest summer, she had beheld a transfiguration. And still under the spell of it, still thrilled by wonder, she had so utterly believed in it, so ardently accepted it, that she scarcely understood what this transfiguration had also wrought in her. She only felt that she was no longer captain of their fate; that he was now; and she resigned her invisible insignia of rank with an unconscious little sigh that left her pretty lips softly parted.

At that instant he chanced to look up at her. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in the world. And she had looked at him out of those golden eyes when he had been less than a mere brute beast.... That was very hard to know and remember .... But it was the price he had to pay—that this fresh, sweet, clean young thing had seen him as he once had been, and that he never could forget what she had looked upon.

"Kay!"

"Yes, Lady Yellow-hair."

"What are you going to do with that rod?"

"Whip Isla for a yellow trout for you."

"Isla?"

"Not our Loch, but the quick water yonder."

"You know," she said, "to a Yankee girl those moors appear rather—rather lonely."

"Forbidding?"

"No; beautiful in their way. But I am in awe of Glenark moors."

He smiled, lingering still to loop on a gossamer leader and a cast of tiny flies.

"Have you—" she began, and smiled nervously.

"A gun?" he inquired coolly. "Yes, I have two strapped up under both arms. But you must come too, Yellow-hair."

"You don't think it best to leave me alone even in your own house?"

"No, I don't think it best."

"I wanted to go with you anyway," she said, picking up a soft hat and pulling it over her golden head.

On the way across Isla bridge and out along the sheep-path they chatted unconcernedly. A faint aromatic odour made the girl aware of broom and whinn and heath.

As they sauntered on along the edge of Isla Water the lapwings rose into flight ahead. Once or twice the feathery whirr of brown grouse startled her. And once, on the edge of cultivated land, a partridge burst from the heather at her very feet—a "Frenchman" with his red legs and gay feathers brilliant in the sun.

Sun and shadow and white cloud, heath and moor and hedge and broad-tilled field alternated as they passed together along the edge of Isla Water and over the road to Isla—the enchanting river—interested in each other's conversation and in the loveliness of the sunny world about them.

High in the blue sky plover called en passant; larks too were on the wing, and throstles and charming feathered things that hid in hedgerows and permitted glimpses of piquant heads and twitching painted tails.

"It is adorable, this country!" Miss Erith confessed. "It steals into your very bones; doesn't it?"

"And the bones still remain Yankee bones," he rejoined. "There's the miracle, Yellow-hair."

"Entirely. You know what I think? The more we love the more loyal we become to our own. I'm really quite serious. Take yourself for example, Kay. You are most ornamental in your kilts and heather-spats, and you are a better Yankee for it. Aren't you?"

"Oh yes, a hopeless Yankee. But that drop of Scotch blood is singing tunes to-day, Yellow-hair."

"Let it sing—God bless it!"

He turned, his youthful face reflecting the slight emotion in her gay voice. Then with a grave smile he set his face straight in front of him and walked on beside her, the dark green pleats of the McKay tartan whipping his bared knees. Clan Morhguinn had no handsomer son; America no son more loyal.

A dragon-fly glittered before them for an instant. Far across the rolling country they caught the faint, silvery flash of Isla hurrying to the sea.

Evelyn Erith stood in the sunny breeze of Isla, her yellow hair dishevelled by the wind, her skirt's edge wet with the spray of waterfalls. The wild rose colour was in her cheeks and the tint of crimson roses on her lips and the glory of the Soleil d'or glimmered on her loosened hair. A confused sense that the passing hour was the happiest in her life possessed her: she looked down at the brace of wet yellow trout on the bog-moss at her feet; she gazed out across the crinkled pool where the Yankee Laird of Isla waded, casting a big tinselled fly for the accidental but inevitable sea-trout always encountered in Isla during the season—always surprising and exciting the angler with emotion forever new.

Over his shoulder he was saying to her: "Sea-trout and grilse don't belong to Isla, but they come occasionally, Lady Yellow-hair."

"Like you and I, Kay—we don't belong here but we come."

"Where the McKay is, the Key of the World lies hidden in his sporran," he laughed back at her over his shoulder where the clan plaid fluttered above the cairngorm.

"Oh, the modesty of this young man! Wherever he takes off his cap he is at home!" she cried.

He only laughed, and she saw the slim line curl, glisten, loop and unroll in the long back cast, re-loop, and straighten out over Isla like a silver spider's floating strand. Then silver leaped to meet silver as the "Doctor" touched water; one keen scream of the reel cut the sunny silence; the rod bent like a bow, staggered in his hand, swept to the surface in a deeper bow, quivered under the tremendous rush of the great fish.

Miss Erith watched the battle from an angle not that of an angler. Her hazel eyes followed McKay where he manoeuvred in midstream with rod and gaff—happily aware of the grace in every unconscious movement of his handsome lean body—the steady, keen poise of head and shoulders, the deft and powerful play of his clean-cut, brown hands.

It came into her mind that he'd look like that on the firing-line some day when his Government was ready to release him from his obscure and terrible mission—the Government that was sending him where such men as he usually perish unobserved, unhonoured, repudiated even by those who send them to accomplish what only the most brave and unselfish dare undertake.

A little cloud cast a momentary shadow across Isla. The sea-trout died then, a quivering limber, metallic shape glittering on the ripples.

In the intense stillness from far across the noon-day world she heard the bells of Banff—a far, sweet reiteration stealing inland on the wind. She had never been so happy in her life.

Swinging back across the moor together, he with slanting rod and weighted creel, she with her wind-blown yellow hair and a bunch of reed at her belt in his honour, both seemed to understand that they had had their hour, and that the hour was ending—almost ended now.

They had remained rather silent. Perhaps grave thoughts of what lay before them beyond the bright moor's edge—beyond the far blue horizon—preoccupied their minds. And each seemed to feel that their play-day was finished—seemed already to feel physically the approach of that increasing darkness shrouding the East—that hellish mist toward which they both were headed—the twilight of the Hun.

Nothing stained the sky above them; a snowy cloud or two drifted up there,—a flight of lapwings now and then—a lone curlew. The long, squat white-washed house with its walled garden reflected in Isla Water glimmered before them in the hollow of the rolling hills.

McKay was softly and thoughtfully whistling the "Lament for Donald"—the lament of CLAN AOIDH—his clan.

"That's rather depressing, Kay—what you're whistling," said Evelyn Erith.

He glanced up from his abstraction, nodded, and strode on humming the "Over There" of that good bard George of Broadway.

After a moment the girl said: "There seem to be some people by Isla Water."

His quick glance appraised the distant group, their summer tourist automobile drawn up on the bank of Isla Water near the Bridge, the hampers on the grass.

"Trespassers," he said with a shrug. "But it's a pretty spot by Isla Bridge and we never drive them away."

She looked at them again as they crossed the very old bridge of stone. Down by the water's edge stood their machine. Beside it on the grass were picnicking three people—a very good-looking girl, a very common-looking stout young man in flashy outing clothes, and a thin man of forty, well-dressed and of better appearance.

The short, stout, flashy young man was eating sandwiches with one hand while with the other he held a fishing-rod out over the water.

McKay noticed this bit of impudence with a shrug. "That won't do," he murmured; and pausing at the parapet of the bridge he said pleasantly: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but fishing isn't permitted in Isla Water."

At that the flashy young man jumped up with unexpected nimbleness—a powerful frame on two very vulgar but powerful legs.

"Say, sport," he called out, "if this is your fish-pond we're ready to pay what's right. What's the damage for a dozen fish?"

"Americans—awful ones," whispered Miss Erith.

McKay rested his folded arms on the parapet and regarded the advance of the flashy man up the grassy slope below.

"I don't rent fishing privileges," he said amiably.

"That's all right. Name your price. No millionaire guy I ever heard of ever had enough money," returned the flashy man jocosely.

McKay, amused, shook his head. "Sorry," he said, "but I couldn't permit you to fish."

"Aw, come on, old scout! We heard you was American same as us. That's my sister down there and her feller. My name's Jim Macniff—some Scotch somewhere. That there feller is Harry Skelton. Horses is our business—Spitalfields Mews—here's my card—" pulling it out—"I'll come up on the bridge—"

"Never mind. What are you in Scotland for anyway?" inquired McKay.

"The Angus Dhu stables at Inverness—auction next Wednesday. Horses is our line, so we made it a holiday—"

"A holiday in the Banff country?"

"Sure, I ain't never seen it before. Is that your house?"

McKay nodded and turned away, weary of the man and his vulgarity. "Very well, picnic and fish if you like," he said; and fell into step beside Miss Erith.

They entered the house through the door in the garden. Later, when Miss Erith came back from her toilet, but still wearing her outing skirt, McKay turned from the long window where he had been standing and watching the picnickers across Isla Bridge. The flashy man had a banjo now and was strumming it and leering at the girl.

"What people to encounter in this corner of Paradise," she said laughingly. And, as he did not smile: "You don't suppose there's anything queer about them, do you, Kay?" At that he smiled: "Oh, no, nothing of that sort, Yellow-hair. Only—it's rather odd. But bagmen and their kind do come into the northland—why, Heaven knows—but one sees them playing about."

"Of course those people are merely very ordinary Americans—nothing worse," she said, seating herself at the table.

"What could be worse?" he returned lightly.

"Boche."

They were seated sideways to the window and opposite each other, commanding a clear view of Isla Water and the shore where the picnickers sprawled apparently enjoying the semi-comatose pleasure of repletion.

"That other man—the thin one—has not exactly a prepossessing countenance," she remarked.

"They can't travel without papers," he said.

For a little while luncheon progressed in silence. Presently Miss Erith reverted to the picnickers: "The young woman has a foreign face. Have you noticed?"

"She's rather dark. Rather handsome, too. And she appears rather nice."

"Women of that class always appear superior to men of the same class," observed Miss Erith. "I suppose really they are not superior to the male of the species."

"I've always thought they were," he said.

"Men might think so."

He smiled: "Quite right, Yellow-hair; woman only is competent to size up woman. The trouble is that no man really believes this."

"Don't you?"

"I don't know. Tell me, what shall we do after luncheon?"

"Oh, the moors—please, Kay!"

"What!" he exclaimed laughingly; "you're already a victim to Glenark moors!"

"Kay, I adore them! ... Are you tired? ... Our time is short-our day of sunshine. I want to drink in all of it I can ... before we—"

"Certainly. Shall we walk to Strathnaver, Lady Yellow-hair?"

"If it please my lord."

"Now?"

"In the cool of the afternoon. Don't you want to be lazy with me in your quaint old garden for an hour or two?"

"I'll send out two steamer-chairs, Yellow-hair."

When they lay there in the shadow of a lawn umbrella, chair beside chair, the view across Isla Water was unpolluted by the picnickers, their hamper, and their car.

"Stole away, the beggars," drawled McKay lighting a cigarette. "Where the devil they got a permit for petrol is beyond me."

The girl lay with deep golden eyes dreaming under her long dark lashes. Sunlight crinkled Isla Water; a merle came and sang to her in a pear-tree until, in its bubbling melody, she seemed to hear the liquid laughter of Isla rippling to the sea.

"Kay?"

"Yes, Yellow-hair." Their voices were vague and dreamy.

"Tell me something."

"I'll tell you something. When a McKay of Isla is near his end he is always warned."

"How?"

"A cold hand touches his hand in the dark."

"Kay!"

"It's so. It's called'the Cold Hand of Isla.' We are all doomed to feel it."

"Absurd!"

"Not at all. That's a pretty story; isn't it? Now what more shall I tell you?"

"Anything you like, Kay. I'm in paradise—or would be if only somebody would tell me stories till I fall asleep."

"Stories about what?"

"About YOU, Kay."

"I'll not talk about myself."

"Please!"

But he shook his head without smiling: "You know all there is," he said—"and much that is—unspeakable."

"Kay!"

"What?"

"Never, never speak that way again!"

He remained silent.

"Because," she continued in her low, pretty voice, "it is not true. I know about you only what I somehow seemed to divine the very moment I first laid eyes on you. Something within me seemed to say to me, 'This is a boy who also is a real man!' ... And it was true, Kay."

"You thought that when you knelt in the snow and looked down at that beastly drunken—"

"Yes! Don't use such words! You looked like a big schoolboy, asleep-that is what you resembled. But I knew you to be a real man."

"You are merciful, but I know what you went through," he said morosely.

She paid no attention: "I liked you instantly. I thought to myself, 'Now when he wakes he'll be what he looks like.' And you are!"

He stirred in his chair, sideways, and glanced at her.

"You know what I think about you, don't you?"

"No." She shouldn't have let their words drift thus far and she knew it. Also at this point she should have diverted the conversation. But she remained silent, aware of an indefinite pleasure in the vague excitement which had quickened her pulse a little.

"Well, I shan't tell you," he said quietly.

"Why not?" And at that her heart added a beat or two.

"Because, even if I were different, you wouldn't wish me to."

"Why?"

"Because you and I are doomed to a rather intimate comradeship—a companionship far beyond conventions, Yellow-hair. That is what is ahead of us. And you will have enough to weary you without having another item to add to it."

"What item?" At that she became very silent and badly scared. What demon was prompting her to such provocation? Her own effrontery amazed and frightened her, but her words seemed to speak themselves independently of her own volition.

"Yellow-hair," he said, "I think you have guessed all I might have dared say to you were I not on eternal probation."

"Probation?"

"Before a bitterly strict judge."

"Who?"

"Myself, Yellow-hair."

"Oh, Kay! You ARE a boy—nothing more than a boy—"

"Are you in love with me?"

"No," she said, astonished. "I don't think so. What an amazing thing to say to a girl!"

"I thought I'd scare you," he remarked grimly.

"You didn't. I—I was scarcely prepared—such a nonsensical thing to say! Why—why I might as well ask you if you are in—in—"

"In love with you? You wish to know, Yellow-hair?"

"No, I don't," she replied hastily. "This is—stupid. I don't understand how we came to discuss such—such—" But she did know and she bit her lip and gazed across Isla Water in silent exasperation.

What mischief was this that hid in the Scottish sunshine, whispering in every heather-scented breeze—laughing at her from every little wave on Isla Water?—counselling her to this new and delicate audacity, imbuing her with a secret gaiety of heart, and her very soul fluttering with a delicious laughter—an odd, perverse, illogical laughter, alternately tremulous and triumphant!

Was she in love, then, with this man? She remembered his unconscious head on her knees in the limousine, and the snow clinging to his bright hair—

She remembered the telephone, and the call to the hospital—and the message. ... And the white night and bitter dawn. ... Love? No, not as she supposed it to be; merely the solicitude and friendship of a woman who once found something hurt by the war and who fought to protect what was hers by right of discovery. That was not love. ... Perhaps there may have been a touch of the maternal passion about her feeling for this man. ... Nothing else—nothing more than that, and the eternal indefinable charity for all boys which is inherent in all womanhood—the consciousness of the enchantment that a boy has for all women. ... Nothing more. ... Except that—perhaps she had wondered whether he liked her—as much as she liked him.... Or if, possibly, in his regard for her there were some slight depths between shallows—a gratitude that is a trifle warmer than the conventional virtue—

When at length she ventured to turn her head and look at him he seemed to be asleep, lying there in the transformed shadow of the lawn umbrella.

Something about the motionless relaxation of this man annoyed her. "Kay?"

He turned his head squarely toward her, and 'o her exasperation she blushed.

"Did I wake you? I'm sorry," she said coldly.

"You didn't. I was awake."

"Oh! I meant to say that I think I'll stroll out. Don't come if you feel lazy."

He swung himself up to a sitting posture.

"I'm quite ready," he said. ... "You'll always find me ready, Yellow-hair—always waiting."

"Waiting? For what?"

"For your commands."

"You very nice boy!" she said gaily, springing to her feet. Then, the subtle demon of the sunlight prompting her: "You know, Kay, you don't ever have to wait. Because I'm always ready to listen to any pro—any suggestions—from you."

The man looked into the girl's eyes:

"You would care to hear what I might have to tell you?"

"I always care to hear what you say. Whatever you say interests me."

"Would it interest you to know I am—in love?"

"Yes. ... With wh—whom are—" But her breath failed her.

"With you. ... You knew it, Yellow-hair. ... Does it interest you to know it?"

"Yes." But the exhilaration of the moment was interfering with her breath again and she only stood there with the flushed and audacious little smile stamped on her lips forcing her eyes to meet his curious, troubled, intent gaze.

"You did know it?" he repeated.

"No."

"You suspected it."

"I wanted to know what you—thought about me, Kay."

"You know now."

"Yes ... but it doesn't seem real. ... And I haven't anything to say to you. I'm sorry—"

"I understand, Yellow-hair."

"—Except-thank you. And-and I am interested. ... You're such a boy.... I like you so much, Kay.... And I AM interested in what you said to me."

"That means a lot for you to say, doesn't it?"

"I don't know. ... It's partly what we have been through together, I suppose; partly this lovely country, and the sun. Something is enchanting me. ... And you are very nice to look at, Kay." His smile was grave, a little detached and weary.

"I did not suppose you could ever really care for such a man as I am," he remarked without the slightest bitterness or appeal in his voice. "But I'm glad you let me tell you how it is with me. ... It always was that way, Yellow-hair, from the first moment you came into the hospital. I fell in love then."

"Oh, you couldn't have—"

"Nevertheless, and after all I said and did to the contrary. ... I don't think any woman remains entirely displeased when a man tells her he is in love with her. If he does love her he ought to tell her, I think. It always means that much tribute to her power. ... And none is indifferent to power, Yellow-hair."

"No. ... I am not indifferent. I like what you said to me. It seems unreal, though—but enchanting—part of this day's enchantment. ... Shall we start, Kay?"

"Certainly."

They went out together through the garden door into the open moor, swinging along in rhythmic stride, side by side, smiling faintly as dreamers smile when something imperceptible to the waking world invades their vision.

Again the brown grouse whirred from the whinns; again the subtle fragrance of the moor sweetened her throat with its clean aroma; again the haunting complaint of the lapwings came across acres of bog and furze; and, high in the afternoon sky, an invisible curlew sadly and monotonously repeated its name through the vast blue vault of space.

On the edge of evening with all the west ablaze they came out once more on Isla Water and looked across the glimmering flood at the old house in the hollow, every distant window-pane a-glitter.

Like that immemorial and dragon-guarded jewel of the East the sun, cradled in flaky gold, hung a hand's breadth above the horizon, and all the world had turned to a hazy plum-bloom tint threaded with pale fire.

On Isla Water the yellow trout had not yet begun to jump; evening still lingered beyond the world's curved ruin; but the wild duck were coming in from the sea in twos and threes and sheering down into distant reaches of Isla Water.

Then, into the divine stillness of the universe came the unspeakable twang of a banjo; and a fat voice, slightly hoarse:

"Rocks on the mountain, Fishes in the sea, A red-headed girl Raised hell with me. She come from Chicago, R.F.D. An' she ain't done a thing to a guy like me!"

The business was so grotesquely outrageous, so utterly and disgustingly hopeless in its surprise and untimelines, that McKay's sharp laugh rang out under the sky.

There they were, the same trespassers of the morning, squatted on the heather at the base of Isla Craig—a vast heap of rocks—their machine drawn up in the tall green brakes beside the road.

The flashy, fat man, Macniff, had the banjo. The girl sat between him and the thin man, Skelton.

"Ah, there, old scout!" called out Macniff, flourishing one hand toward McKay. "Lovely evening, ain't it? Won't you and the wife join us?"

There was absolutely nothing to reply to such an invitation. Miss Erith continued to gaze out steadily across Isla Water; McKay, deeply sensitive to the ludicrous, smiled under the grotesque provocation, his eyes mischievously fixed on Miss Erith. After a long while: "They've spoiled it," she said lightly. "Shall we go on, Kay? I can't endure that banjo."

They walked on, McKay grinning. The picnickers were getting up from the crushed heather; Macniff with his banjo came toward them on his incredibly thick legs, blocking their path.

"Say, sport," he began, "won't you and the lady join us?" But McKay cut him short:

"Do you know you are impudent?" he said very quietly. "Step out of the way there."

"The hell you say!" and McKay's patience ended at the same instant. And something happened very quickly, for the man only staggered under the smashing blow and the other man's arm flew up and his pistol blazed in the gathering dusk, shattering the cairngorm on McKay's shoulder. The young woman fired from where she sat on the grass and the soft hat was jerked from Miss Erith's head. At the same moment McKay clutched her arm and jerked her violently behind a jutting elbow of Isla Rock. When she recovered her balance she saw he held two pistols.

"Boche?" she gasped incredulously.

"Yes. Keep your head down. Crouch among the ferns behind me!"

There was a ruddy streak of fire from the pistol in his right hand; shots answered, the bullets smacking the rock or whining above it.

"Yellow-hair?"

"Yes, Kay."

"You are not scared, are you?"

"Yes; but I'm all right."

He said with quiet bitterness: "It's too late to say what a fool I am. Their camouflage took me in; that's all—"

He fired again; a rattling volley came storming among the rocks.

"We're all right here," he said tersely. But in his heart he was terrified, for he had only the cartridges in his clips.

Presently he motioned her to bend over very low. Then, taking her hand, he guided her along an ascending gulley, knee-deep in fern and brake and brier, to a sort of little rocky pulpit.

The lake lay behind them, lapping the pulpit's base. There was a man in a boat out there. McKay fired at him and he plied both oars and fled out of range.

"Lie down," he whispered to Miss Erith. The girl mutely obeyed.

Now, crouched up there in the deepening dusk, his pistol extended, resting on the rock in front of him, his keen eyes searched restlessly; his ears were strained for the minutest stirring on the moor in front of him; and his embittered mind was at work alternately cursing his own stupidity and searching for some chance for this young girl whom his own incredible carelessness had probably done to death.

Presently, between him and Isla Water, a shadow moved. He fired; and around them the darkness spat flame from a dozen different angles.

"Damnation!" he whispered to himself, realising now what the sunlit moors had hidden—a dozen men all bent on murder.

Once a voice hailed him from the thick darkness promising immunity if he surrendered. He hesitated. Who but he should know the Boche? Still he answered back: "If you let this woman go you can do what you like to me!" And knew while he was saying it that it was useless—that there was no truth, no honour in the Boche, only infamy and murder. A hoarse voice promised what he asked; but Miss Erith caught McKay's arm.

"No!"

"If I dared believe them—"

"No, Kay!"

He shrugged: "I'd be very glad to pay the price—only they can't be trusted. They can't be trusted, Yellow-hair."