There was a silence; the girl looked up at her, flushed, intent, perplexed; the Princess Mistchenka, her hands on the girl's shoulders, looked back at her out of grave and beautiful dark eyes.

"That is the truth," said the Princess. "My intention was to develop you along the lines which I follow as a—profession; teach you to extract desirable information through your wit, intelligence, and beauty—using your youth as a mask. But I—I can't do it——" She shook her head slightly. "Because I've lost my heart to you.... And the business I follow is a—a rotten game."

Again silence fell among those three; Rue, kneeling at the elder woman's feet, looked up into her face in silence; Neeland, his elbows resting on his knees, leaned slightly forward from the sofa, watching them.

"I'll help you, if you wish," said Rue Carew.

"Thank you, dear. No."

"Let me. I owe you everything since I have been here——"

"No, dear. What I said to you—and to James—is true. It's a merciless, stealthy, treacherous business; it's dangerous to a woman, body and soul. It is one long lifetime of experience with treachery, with greed, with baser passions, with all that is ignoble in mankind.

"There is no reason for you to enter such a circle; no excuse for it; no duty urges you; no patriotism incites you to such self-sacrifice; no memory of wrong done to your nearest and dearest inspires you to dedicate your life to aiding—if only a little, in the downfall and destruction of the nation and the people who encompassed it!"

The Princess Mistchenka's dark eyes began to gleam, and her beautiful face lost its colour; and she took Rue's little hands in both of hers and held them tightly against her breast.

"Had I not lost my heart to you, perhaps I should not have hesitated to develop and make use of you.

"You are fitted for the role I might wish you to play. Men are fascinated by you; your intelligence charms; your youth and innocence, worn as a mask, might make you invaluable to the Chancellerie which is interested in the information I provide for it.

"But, Rue, I have come to understand that I cannot do this thing. No. Go back to your painting and your clever drawing and your music; any one of these is certain to give you a living in time. And in that direction alone your happiness lies."

She leaned forward and kissed the girl's hair where it was fine and blond, close to the snowy forehead.

"If war comes," she said, "you and James will have to go home, like two good children when the curfew rings."

She laughed, pushed Rue away, lighted another cigarette, and, casting a glance partly ironical, partly provocative, at the good-looking young man on the sofa, said:

"As for you, James, I don't worry about you. Impudence will always carry you through where diplomacy fails you. Now, tell me all about these three unpleasant sporting characters who occupied the train with you."

Neeland laughed.

"It seems that a well-known gambler in New York, called Captain Quint, is backing them; and somebody higher up is backing Quint——"

"Probably the Turkish Embassy at Washington," interposed the Princess, coolly. "I'm sorry, Jim; pray go on."

"The Turkish Embassy?" he repeated, surprised that she should guess.

"Yes; and the German Embassy is backing that. There you are, Jim. That is the sequence as far as your friend, Captain Quint. Now, who comes next in the scale?"

"This man—Brandes—and the little chalk-faced creature, Stull; and the other one, with the fox face—Doc Curfoot."

"I see. And then?"

"Then, as I gathered, there are several gentlemen wearing Teutonic names—who are to go into partnership with them—one named Kestner, one called Theodore Weishelm, and an exceedingly oily Eurasian gentleman with whom I became acquainted on the Volhynia—one Karl Breslau——"

"Breslau!" exclaimed the Princess. "Now I understand."

"Who is he, Princess?"

"He is the most notorious international spy in the world—a protean individual with aliases, professions, and experiences sufficient for an entire jail full of criminals. His father was a German Jew; his mother a Circassian girl; he was educated in Germany, France, Italy, and England. He has been a member of the socialist group in the Reichstag under one name, a member of the British Parliament under another; he did dirty work for Abdul Hamid; dirtier for Enver Bey.

"He is here, there, everywhere; he turns up in Brazil one day, and is next in evidence in Moscow. What he is so eternally about God only knows: what Chancellery he serves, which he betrays, is a question that occupies many uneasy minds this very hour, I fancy.

"But of this I, personally, am now satisfied; Karl Breslau is responsible for the robbery of your papers today, and the entire affair was accomplished under his direction!"

"And yet I know," said Neeland, "that after he and Kestner tried to blow up the captain's cabin and the bridge aboard the Volhynia yesterday morning at a little after two o'clock, he and Kestner must have jumped overboard in the Mersey River off Liverpool."

"Without doubt a boat was watching your ship."

"Yes; Weishelm had a fishing smack to pick them up. Ilse Dumont must have gone with them, too."

"All they had to do was to touch at some dock, go ashore, and telegraph to their men here," said the Princess.

"That, evidently, is what they did," admitted Neeland ruefully.

"Certainly. And by this time they may be here, too. They could do it. I haven't any doubt that Breslau, Kestner, and Ilse Dumont are here in Paris at this moment."

"Then I'll wager I know where they are!"

"Where?"

"In the Hotel des Bulgars, rue Vilna. That's where they are to operate a gaming house. That is where they expect to pluck and fleece the callow and the aged who may have anything of political importance about them worth stealing. That is their plan. Agents, officials, employees of all consulates, legations, and embassies are what they're really after. I heard them discussing it there in the train today."

The Princess had fallen very silent, musing, watching Neeland's animated face as he detailed his knowledge of what had occurred.

"Why not notify the police?" he added. "There might be a chance to recover the box and the papers."

The Princess shook her pretty head.

"We have to be very careful how we use the police, James. It seems simple, but it is not. I can't explain the reasons, but we usually pit spy against spy, and keep very clear of the police. Otherwise," she added, smiling, "there would be the deuce to pay among the embassies and legations." She added: "It's a most depressing situation; I don't exactly know what to do.... I have letters to write, anyway——"

She rose, turned to Rue and took both her hands:

"No; you must go back to New York and to your painting and music if there is to be war in Europe. But you have had a taste of what goes on in certain circles here; you have seen what a chain of consequences ensue from a chance remark of a young girl at a dinner table."

"Yes."

"It's amusing, isn't it? A careless and innocent word to that old busybody, Ahmed Mirka Pasha, at my table—that began it. Then another word to Izzet Bey. And I had scarcely time to realise what had happened—barely time to telegraph James in New York—before their entire underground machinery was set in motion to seize those wretched papers in Brookhollow!"

Neeland said:

"You don't know even yet, Princess, how amazingly fast that machinery worked."

"Tell me now, James. I have time enough to write my warning since it is already too late." And she seated herself on the sofa and drew Ruhannah down beside her.

"Listen, dear," she said with pretty mockery, "here is a most worthy young man who is simply dying to let us know how picturesque a man can be when he tries to."

Neeland laughed:

"The only trouble with me," he retorted, "is that I've a rather hopeless habit of telling the truth. Otherwise there'd be some chance for me as a hero in what I'm going to tell you."

And he began with his first encounter with Ilse Dumont in Rue Carew's house at Brookhollow. After he had been speaking for less than a minute, Rue Carew's hands tightened in the clasp of the Princess Naia, who glanced at the girl and noticed that she had lost her colour.

And Neeland continued his partly playful, partly serious narrative of "moving accidents by flood and field," aware of the girl's deep, breathless interest, moved by it, and, conscious of it, the more inclined to avoid the picturesque and heroic, and almost ashamed to talk of himself at all under the serious beauty of the girl's clear eyes.

But he could scarcely tell his tale and avoid mentioning himself; he was the centre of it all, the focus of the darts of Fate, and there was no getting away from what happened to himself.

So he made the melodrama a comedy, and the moments of deadly peril he treated lightly. And one thing he avoided altogether, and that was how he had kissed Ilse Dumont.

When he finished his account of his dreadful situation in the stateroom of Ilse Dumont, and how at the last second her unerring shots had shattered the bomb clock, cut the guy-rope, and smashed the water-jug which deluged the burning fuses, he added with a very genuine laugh:

"If only some photographer had taken a few hundred feet of film for me I could retire on an income in a year and never do another stroke of honest work!"

The Princess smiled, mechanically, but Rue Carew dropped her white face on the Princess Naia's shoulder as though suddenly fatigued.



CHAPTER XXVII

FROM FOUR TO FIVE

The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing which must ever remain a mystery to man.

The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward bathing and changing his attire.

No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows; the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the opposite wall; the rue Soleil d'Or was very silent in the July afternoon.

And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and real; and could not.

For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he personally had known all those people concerned in this wild, exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of today.

Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal, the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain benumbed and sceptical.

And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical, laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him—and went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made intellectually blase, found himself without sufficient capacity to comprehend it.

There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals from his cigarette mount straight to the ceiling, and that was the metamorphosis of Rue Carew.

Where was the thin girl he remembered—with her untidy chestnut hair and freckles, and a rather sweet mouth—dressed in garments the only mission of which was to cover a flat chest and frail body and limbs whose too rapid growth had outstripped maturity?

To search for her he went back to the beginning, where a little girl in a pink print dress, bare-legged and hatless, loitered along an ancient rail fence and looked up shyly at him as he warned her to keep out of range of the fusillade from the bushes across the pasture.

He thought of her again at the noisy party in Gayfield on that white night in winter; visualised the tall, shy, overgrown girl who danced with him and made no complaint when her slim foot was trodden on. And again he remembered the sleigh and the sleighbells clashing and tinkling under the moon; the light from her doorway, and how she stood looking back at him; and how, on the mischievous impulse of the moment, he had gone back and kissed her——

At the memory an odd sensation came over him, scaring him a little. How on earth had he ever had the temerity to do such a thing to her!

And, as he thought of this exquisite, slender, clear-eyed young girl who had greeted him at the Paris terminal—this charming embodiment of all that is fresh and sweet and fearless—in her perfect hat and gown of mondaine youth and fashion, the memory of his temerity appalled him.

Imagine his taking an unencouraged liberty now!

Nor could he dare imagine encouragement from the Rue Carew so amazingly revealed to him.

Out of what, in heaven's name, had this lovely girl developed? Out of a shy, ragged, bare-legged child, haunting the wild blackberry tangles in Brookhollow?

Out of the frail, charmingly awkward, pathetic, freckled mill-hand in her home-made party clothes, the rather sweet expression of whose mouth once led him to impudent indiscretion?

Out of what had she been evolved—this young girl whom he had left just now standing beside her boudoir door with the Princess Naia's arm around her waist? Out of the frightened, white-lipped, shabby girl who had come dragging her trembling limbs and her suitcase up the dark stairway outside his studio? Out of the young thing with sagging hair, crouched in an armchair beside his desk, where her cheap hat lay with two cheap hatpins sticking in the crown? Out of the fragile figure buried in the bedclothes of a stateroom berth, holding out to him a thin, bare arm in voiceless adieu?

And Neeland lay there thinking, his head on his elbow, the other arm extended—from the fingers of which the burnt-out cigarette presently fell to the floor.

He thought to himself:

"She is absolutely beautiful; there's no denying that. It's not her clothes or the way she does her hair, or her voice, or the way she moves, or how she looks at a man; it's the whole business. And the whole bally business is a miracle, that's all. Good Lord! And to think I ever had the nerve—the nerve!"

He swung himself to a sitting posture, sat gazing into space for a few moments, then continued to undress by pulling off one shoe, lighting a cigarette, and regarding his other foot fixedly.

That is the manner in which the vast majority of young men do their deepest thinking.

However, before five o'clock he had scrubbed himself and arrayed his well constructed person in fresh linen and outer clothing; and now he sauntered out through the hallway and down the stairs to the rear drawing-room, where a tea-table had been brought in and tea paraphernalia arranged. Although the lamp under the kettle had been lighted, nobody was in the room except a West Highland terrier curled up on a lounge, who, without lifting his snow-white head, regarded Neeland out of the wisest and most penetrating eyes the young man had ever encountered.

Here was a personality! Here was a dog not to be approached lightly or with flippant familiarity. No! That small, long, short-legged body with its thatch of wiry white hair was fairly instinct with dignity, wisdom, and uncompromising self-respect.

"That dog," thought Neeland, venturing to seat himself on a chair opposite, "is a Presbyterian if ever there was one. And I, for one, haven't the courage to address him until he deigns to speak to me."

He looked respectfully at the dog, glanced at the kettle which had begun to sizzle a little, then looked out of the long windows into the little walled garden where a few slender fruit trees grew along the walls in the rear of well-kept flower beds, now gay with phlox, larkspur, poppies, and heliotrope, and edged with the biggest and bluest pansies he had ever beheld.

On the wall a Peacock butterfly spread its brown velvet and gorgeously eyed wings to the sun's warmth; a blackbird with brilliant yellow bill stood astride a peach twig and poured out a bubbling and incessant melody full of fluted grace notes. And on the grass oval a kitten frisked with the ghosts of last month's dandelions, racing after the drifting fluff and occasionally keeling over to attack its own tail, after the enchanting manner of all kittens.

A step behind him and Neeland turned. It was Marotte, the butler, who presented a thick, sealed envelope to him on his salver, bent to turn down the flame under the singing silver kettle, and withdrew without a sound.

Neeland glanced at the letter in perplexity, opened the envelope and the twice-folded sheets of letter paper inside, and read this odd communication:

* * * * *

Have I been fair to you? Did I keep my word? Surely you must now, in your heart, acquit me of treachery—of any premeditated violence toward you.

I never dreamed that those men would come to my stateroom. That plan had been discussed, but was abandoned because it appeared impossible to get hold of you.

And also—may I admit it without being misunderstood?—I absolutely refused to permit any attempt involving your death.

When the trap shut on you, there in my stateroom, it shut also on me. I was totally unprepared; I was averse to murder; and also I had given you my word of honour.

Judge, then, of my shame and desperation—my anger at being entrapped in a false position involving the loss in your eyes of my personal honour!

It was unbearable: and I did what I could to make it clear to you that I had not betrayed you. But my comrades do not yet know that I had any part in it; do not yet understand why the ship was not blown to splinters. They are satisfied that I made a mistake in the rendezvous. And, so far, no suspicion attaches to me; they believe the mechanism of the clock failed them. And perhaps it is well for me that they believe this.

It is, no doubt, a matter of indifference to you how the others and I reached safety. I have no delusions concerning any personal and kindly feeling on your part toward me. But one thing you can not—dare not—believe, and that is that I proved treacherous to you and false to my own ideas of honour.

And now let me say one more thing to you—let me say it out of a—friendship—for which you care nothing—could not care anything. And that is this: your task is accomplished. You could not possibly have succeeded. There is no chance for recovery of those papers. Your mission is definitely ended.

Now, I beg of you to return to America. Keep clear of entanglement in these events which are beginning to happen in such rapid succession in Europe. They do not concern you; you have nothing to do with them, no interest in them. Your entry into affairs which can not concern you would be insulting effrontery and foolish bravado.

I beg you to heed this warning. I know you to be personally courageous; I suppose that fear of consequences would not deter you from intrusion into any affair, however dangerous; but I dare hope that perhaps in your heart there may have been born a little spark of friendliness—a faint warmth of recognition for a woman who took some slight chance with death to prove to you that her word of honour is not lightly given or lightly broken.

So, if you please, our ways part here with this letter sent to you by hand.

I shall not forget the rash but generous boy I knew who called me

Scheherazade.



CHAPTER XXVIII

TOGETHER

He sat there, holding the letter and looking absently over it at the little dog who had gone to sleep again. There was no sound in the room save the faint whisper of the tea-kettle. The sunny garden outside was very still, too; the blackbird appeared to doze on his peach twig; the kitten had settled down with eyes half closed and tail tucked under flank.

The young man sat there with his letter in his hand and eyes lost in retrospection for a while.

In his hand lay evidence that the gang which had followed him, and through which he no longer doubted that he had been robbed, was now in Paris.

And yet he could not give this information to the Princess Naia. Here was a letter which he could not show. Something within him forbade it, some instinct which he did not trouble to analyse.

And this instinct sent the letter into his breast pocket as a light sound came to his ears; and the next instant Rue Carew entered the further drawing-room.

The little West Highland terrier looked up, wagged that section of him which did duty as a tail, and watched her as Neeland rose to seat her at the tea-table.

"Sandy," she said to the little dog, "if you care to say 'Down with the Sultan,' I shall bestow one lump of sugar upon you."

"Yap-yap!" said the little dog.

"Give it to him, please——" Rue handed the sugar to Neeland, who delivered it gravely.

"That's because I want Sandy to like you," she added.

Neeland regarded the little dog and addressed him politely:

"I shouldn't dare call you Sandy on such brief acquaintance," he said; "but may I salute you as Alexander? Thank you, Alexander."

He patted the dog, whose tail made a slight, sketchy motion of approval.

"Now," said Rue Carew, "you are friends, and we shall all be very happy together, I'm sure.... Princess Naia said we were not to wait. Tell me how to fix your tea."

He explained. About to begin on a buttered croissant, he desisted abruptly and rose to receive the Princess, who entered with the light, springy step characteristic of her, gowned in one of those Parisian afternoon creations which never are seen outside that capital, and never will be.

"Far too charming to be real," commented Neeland. "You are a pretty fairy story, Princess Naia, and your gown is a miracle tale which never was true."

He had not dared any such flippancy with Rue Carew, and the girl, who knew she was exquisitely gowned, felt an odd little pang in her heart as this young man's praise of the Princess Mistchenka fell so easily and gaily from his lips. He might have noticed her gown, as it had been chosen with many doubts, much hesitation, and anxious consideration, for him.

She flushed a little at the momentary trace of envy:

"You are too lovely for words," she said, rising. But the Princess gently forced her to resume her seat.

"If this young man has any discrimination," she said, "he won't hesitate with the golden apple, Ruhannah."

Rue laughed and flushed:

"He hasn't noticed my gown, and I wore it for him to notice," she said. "But he was too deeply interested in Sandy and in tea and croissants——"

"I did notice it!" said Neeland. And, to that young man's surprise and annoyance, his face grew hot with embarrassment. What on earth possessed him to blush like a plow-boy! He suddenly felt like one, too, and turned sharply to the little dog, perplexed, irritated with himself and his behaviour.

Behind him the Princess was saying:

"The car is here. I shan't stop for tea, dear. In case anything happens, I am at the Embassy."

"The Russian Embassy," repeated Rue.

"Yes. I may be a little late. We are to dine here en famille at eight. You will entertain James——

"James!" she repeated, addressing him. "Do you think Ruhannah sufficiently interesting to entertain you while I am absent?"

But all his aplomb, his lack of self-consciousness, seemed to be gone; and Neeland made some reply which seemed to him both obvious and dull. And hated himself because he found himself so unaccountably abashed, realising that he was afraid of the opinions that this young girl might entertain concerning him.

"I'm going," said the Princess. "Au revoir, dear; good-bye, James——"

She looked at him keenly when he turned to face her, smiled, still considering him as though she had unexpectedly discovered a new feature in his expressive face.

Whatever it was she discovered seemed to make her smile a trifle more mechanical; she turned slowly to Rue Carew, hesitated, then, nodding a gay adieu, turned and left the room with Neeland at her elbow.

"I'll tuck you in," he began; but she said:

"Thanks; Marotte will do that." And left him at the door.

When the car had driven away down the rue Soleil d'Or, Neeland returned to the little drawing-room where Rue was indulging Sandy with small bits of sugar.

He took up cup and buttered croissant, and for a little while nothing was said, except to Sandy who, upon invitation, repeated his opinion of the Sultan and snapped in the offered emolument with unsatiated satisfaction.

To Rue Carew as well as to Neeland there seemed to be a slight constraint between them—something not entirely new to her since they had met again after two years.

In the two years of her absence she had been very faithful to the memory of his kindness; constant in the friendship which she had given him unasked—given him first, she sometimes thought, when she was a little child in a ragged pink frock, and he was a wonderful young man who had taken the trouble to cross the pasture and warn her out of range of the guns.

He had always held his unique place in her memory and in her innocent affections; she had written to him again and again, in spite of his evident lack of interest in the girl to whom he had been kind. Rare, brief letters from him were read and reread, and laid away with her best-loved treasures. And when the prospect of actually seeing him again presented itself, she had been so frankly excited and happy that the Princess Mistchenka could find in the girl's unfeigned delight nothing except a young girl's touching and slightly amusing hero-worship.

But with her first exclamation when she caught sight of him at the terminal, something about her preconceived ideas of him, and her memory of him, was suddenly and subtly altered, even while his name fell from her excited lips.

Because she had suddenly realised that he was even more wonderful than she had expected or remembered, and that she did not know him at all—that she had no knowledge of this tall, handsome, well-built young fellow with his sunburnt features and his air of smiling aloofness and of graceful assurance, almost fascinating and a trifle disturbing.

Which had made the girl rather grave and timid, uncertain of the estimation in which he might hold her; no longer so sure of any encouragement from him in her perfectly obvious attitude of a friend of former days.

And so, shyly admiring, uncertain, inclined to warm response at any advance from this wonderful young man, the girl had been trying to adjust herself to this new incarnation of a certain James Neeland who had won her gratitude and who had awed her, too, from the time when, as a little girl, she had first beheld him.

She lifted her golden-grey eyes to him; a little unexpected sensation not wholly unpleasant checked her speech for a moment.

This was odd, even unaccountable. Such awkwardness, such disquieting and provincial timidity wouldn't do.

"Would you mind telling me a little about Brookhollow?" she ventured.

Certainly he would tell her. He laid aside his plate and tea cup and told her of his visits there when he had walked over from Neeland's Mills in the pleasant summer weather.

Nothing had changed, he assured her; mill-dam and pond and bridge, and the rushing creek below were exactly as she knew them; her house stood there at the crossroads, silent and closed in the sunshine, and under the high moon; pickerel and sunfish still haunted the shallow pond; partridges still frequented the alders and willows across her pasture; fireflies sailed through the summer night; and the crows congregated in the evening woods and talked over the events of the day.

"And my cat? You wrote that you would take care of Adoniram."

"Adoniram is an aged patriarch and occupies the place of honour in my father's house," he said.

"He is well?"

"Oh, yes. He prefers his food cut finely, that is all."

"I don't suppose he will live very long."

"He's pretty old," admitted Neeland.

She sighed and looked out of the window at the kitten in the garden. And, after an interval of silence:

"Our plot in the cemetery—is it—pretty?"

"It is beautiful," he said, "under the great trees. It is well cared for. I had them plant the shrubs and flowers you mentioned in the list you sent me."

"Thank you." She lifted her eyes again to him. "I wonder if you realise how—how splendid you have always been to me."

Surprised, he reddened, and said awkwardly that he had done nothing. Where was the easy, gay and debonaire assurance of this fluent young man? He was finding nothing to say to Rue Carew, or saying what he said as crudely and uncouthly as any haymaker in Gayfield.

He looked up, exasperated, and met her eyes squarely. And Rue Carew blushed.

They both looked elsewhere at once, but in the girl's breast a new pulse beat; a new instinct stirred, blindly importuning her for recognition; a new confusion threatened the ordered serenity of her mind, vaguely menacing it with unaccustomed questions.

Then the instinct of self-command returned; she found composure with an effort.

"You haven't asked me," she said, "about my work. Would you like to know?"

He said he would; and she told him—chary of self-praise, yet eager that he should know that her masters had spoken well of her.

"And you know," she said, "every week, now, I contribute a drawing to the illustrated paper I wrote to you about. I sent one off yesterday. But," and she laughed shyly, "my nostrils are no longer filled with pride, because I am not contented with myself any more. I wish to do—oh, so much better work!"

"Of course. Contentment in creative work means that we have nothing more to create."

She nodded and smiled:

"The youngest born is the most tenderly cherished—until a new one comes. It is that way with me; I am all love and devotion and tenderness and self-sacrifice while fussing over my youngest. Then a still younger comes, and I become like a heartless cat and drive away all progeny except the newly born."

She sighed and smiled and looked up at him:

"It can't be helped, I suppose—that is, if one's going to have more progeny."

"It's our penalty for producing. Only the newest counts. And those to come are to be miracles. But they never are."

She nodded seriously.

"When there is a better light I should like to show you some of my studies," she ventured. "No, not now. I am too vain to risk anything except the kindest of morning lights. Because I do hope for your approval——"

"I know they're good," he said. And, half laughingly: "I'm beginning to find out that you're a rather wonderful and formidable and overpowering girl, Ruhannah."

"You don't think so!" she exclaimed, enchanted. "Do you? Oh, dear! Then I feel that I ought to show you my pictures and set you right immediately——" She sprang to her feet. "I'll get them; I'll be only a moment——"

She was gone before he discovered anything to say, leaving him to walk up and down the deserted room and think about her as clearly as his somewhat dislocated thoughts permitted, until she returned with both arms full of portfolios, boards, and panels.

"Now," she said with a breathless smile, "you may mortify my pride and rebuke my vanity. I deserve it; I need it; but Oh!—don't be too severe——"

"Are you serious?" he asked, looking up in astonishment from the first astonishing drawing in colour which he held between his hands.

"Serious? Of course——" She met his eyes anxiously, then her own became incredulous and the swift colour dyed her face.

"Do you like my work?" she asked in a fainter voice.

"Like it!" He continued to stare at the bewildering grace and colour of the work, turned to another and lifted it to the light:

"What's this?" he demanded.

"A monotype."

"You did it?"

"Y-yes."

He seemed unable to take his eyes from it—from the exquisite figures there in the sun on the bank of the brimming river under an iris-tinted April sky.

"What do you call it, Rue?"

"Baroque."

He continued to scrutinise it in silence, then drew another carton prepared for oil from the sheaf on the sofa.

Over autumn woods, in a windy sky, high-flying crows were buffeted and blown about. From the stark trees a few phantom leaves clung, fluttering; and the whole scene was possessed by sinuous, whirling forms—mere glimpses of supple, exquisite shapes tossing, curling, flowing through the naked woodland. A delicate finger caught at a dead leaf here; there frail arms clutched at a bending, wind-tossed bough; grey sky and ghostly forest were obsessed, bewitched by the winnowing, driving torrent of airy, half seen spirits.

"The Winds," he said mechanically.

He looked at another—a sketch of the Princess Naia. And somehow it made him think of vast skies and endless plains and the tumult of surging men and rattling lances.

"A Cossack," he said, half to himself. "I never before realised it." And he laid it aside and turned to the next.

"I haven't brought any life studies or school drawings," she said. "I thought I'd just show you the—the results of them and of—of whatever is in me."

"I'm just beginning to understand what is in you," he said.

"Tell me—what is it?" she asked, almost timidly.

"Tell you?" He rose, stood by the window looking out, then turned to her:

"What can I tell you?" he added with a short laugh. "What have I to say to a girl who can do—these—after two years abroad?"

Sheer happiness kept her silent. She had not dared hope for such approval. Even now she dared not permit herself to accept it.

"I have so much to say," she ventured, "and such an appalling amount of work before I can learn to say it——"

"Your work is—stunning!" he said bluntly.

"You don't think so!" she exclaimed incredulously.

"Indeed I do! Look at what you have done in two years. Yes, grant all your aptitude and talents, just look what you've accomplished and where you are! Look at you yourself, too—what a stunning, bewildering sort of girl you've developed into!"

"Jim Neeland!"

"Certainly, Jim Neeland, of Neeland's Mills, who has had years more study than you have, more years of advantage, and who now is an illustrator without anything in particular to distinguish him from the several thousand other American illustrators——"

"Jim! Your work is charming!"

"How do you know?"

"Because I have everything you ever did! I sent for the magazines and cut them out; and they are in my scrapbook——"

She hesitated, breathless, smiling back at him out of her beautiful golden-grey eyes as though challenging him to doubt her loyalty or her belief in him.

It was rather curious, too, for the girl was unusually intelligent and discriminating; and Neeland's work was very, very commonplace.

His face had become rather sober, but the smile still lurked on his lips.

"Rue," he said, "you are wonderfully kind. But I'm afraid I know about my work. I can draw pretty well, according to school standards; and I approach pretty nearly the same standards in painting. Probably that is why I became an instructor at the Art League. But, so far, I haven't done anything better than what is called 'acceptable.'"

"I don't agree with you," she said warmly.

"It's very kind of you not to." He laughed and walked to the window again, and stood there looking out across the sunny garden. "Of course," he added over his shoulder, "I expect to get along all right. Mediocrity has the best of chances, you know."

"You are not mediocre!"

"No, I don't think I am. But my work is. And, do you know," he continued thoughtfully, "that is very often the case with a man who is better equipped to act than to tell with pen or pencil how others act. I'm beginning to be afraid that I'm that sort, because I'm afraid that I get more enjoyment out of doing things than in explaining with pencil and paint how they are done."

But Rue Carew, seated on the arm of her chair, slowly shook her head:

"I don't think that those are the only alternatives; do you?"

"What other is there?"

She said, a little shyly:

"I think it is all right to do things if you like; make exact pictures of how things are done if you choose; but it seems to me that if one really has anything to say, one should show in one's pictures how things might be or ought to be. Don't you?"

He seemed surprised and interested in her logic, and she took courage to speak again in her pretty, deprecating way:

"If the function of painting and literature is to reflect reality, a mirror would do as well, wouldn't it? But to reflect what might be or what ought to be requires something more, doesn't it?"

"Imagination. Yes."

"A mind, anyway.... That is what I have thought; but I'm not at all sure I am right."

"I don't know. The mind ought to be a mirror reflecting only the essentials of reality."

"And that requires imagination, doesn't it?" she asked. "You see you have put it much better than I have."

"Have I?" he returned, smiling. "After a while you'll persuade me that I possess your imagination, Rue. But I don't."

"You do, Jim——"

"I'm sorry; I don't. You construct, I copy; you create, I ring changes on what already is; you dissect, I skate over the surface of things—Oh, Lord! I don't know what's lacking in me!" he added with gay pretence of despair which possibly was less feigned than real. "But I know this, Rue Carew! I'd rather experience something interesting than make a picture of it. And I suppose that confession is fatal."

"Why, Jim?"

"Because with me the pleasures of reality are substituted for the pleasures of imagination. Not that I don't like to draw and paint. But my ambition in painting is and always has been bounded by the visible. And, although that does not prevent me from appreciation—from understanding and admiring your work, for example—it sets an impregnable limit to any such aspiration on my part——"

His mobile and youthful features had become very grave; he stood a moment with lowered head as though what he was thinking of depressed him; then the quick smile came into his face and cleared it, and he said gaily:

"I'm an artistic Dobbin; a reliable, respectable sort of Fido on whom editors can depend; that's all. Don't feel sorry for me," he added, laughing; "my work will be very much in demand."



CHAPTER XXIX

EN FAMILLE

The Princess Mistchenka came leisurely and gracefully downstairs a little before eight that evening, much pleased with her hair, complexion, and gown.

She found Neeland alone in the music-room, standing in the attitude of the conventional Englishman with his back to the fireless grate and his hands clasped loosely behind him, waiting to be led out and fed.

The direct glance of undisguised admiration with which he greeted the Princess Naia confirmed the impression she herself had received from her mirror, and brought an additional dash of colour into her delicate brunette face.

"Is there any doubt that you are quite the prettiest objet d'art in Paris?" he enquired anxiously, taking her hand; and her dark eyes were very friendly as he saluted her finger-tips with the reverent and slightly exaggerated appreciation of a connoisseur in sculpture.

"You hopeless Irishman," she laughed. "It's fortunate for women that you're never serious, even with yourself."

"Princess Naia," he remonstrated, "can nothing short of kissing you convince you of my sincerity and——"

"Impudence?" she interrupted smilingly. "Oh, yes, I'm convinced, James, that, lacking other material, you'd make love to a hitching post."

His hurt expression and protesting gesture appealed to the universe against misinterpretation, but the Princess Mistchenka laughed again unfeelingly, and seated herself at the piano.

"Some day," she said, striking a lively chord or two, "I hope you'll catch it, young man. You're altogether too free and easy with your feminine friends.... What do you think of Rue Carew?"

"An astounding and enchanting transformation. I haven't yet recovered my breath."

"When you do, you'll talk nonsense to the child, I suppose."

"Princess! Have I ever——"

"You talk little else, dear friend, when God sends a pretty fool to listen!" She looked up at him from the keyboard over which her hands were nervously wandering. "I ought to know," she said; "I also have listened." She laughed carelessly, but her glance lingered for an instant on his face, and her mirth did not sound quite spontaneous to either of them.

Two years ago there had been an April evening after the opera, when, in taking leave of her in her little salon, her hand had perhaps retained his a fraction of a second longer than she quite intended; and he had, inadvertently, kissed her.

He had thought of it as a charming and agreeable incident; what the Princess Naia Mistchenka thought of it she never volunteered. But she so managed that he never again was presented with a similar opportunity.

Perhaps they both were thinking of this rather ancient episode now, for his face was touched with a mischievously reminiscent smile, and she had lowered her head a trifle over the keyboard where her slim, ivory-tinted hands still idly searched after elusive harmonies in the subdued light of the single lamp.

"There's a man dining with us," she remarked, "who has the same irresponsible and casual views on life and manners which you entertain. No doubt you'll get along very well together."

"Who is he?"

"A Captain Sengoun, one of our attaches. It's likely you'll find a congenial soul in this same Cossack whom we all call Alak." She added maliciously: "His only logic is the impulse of the moment, and he is known as Prince Erlik among his familiars. Erlik was the Devil, you know——"

He was announced at that moment, and came marching in—a dark, handsome, wiry young man with winning black eyes and a little black moustache just shadowing his short upper lip—and a head shaped to contain the devil himself—the most reckless looking head, Neeland thought, that he ever had beheld in all his life.

But the young fellow's frank smile was utterly irresistible, and his straight manner of facing one, and of looking directly into the eyes of the person he addressed in his almost too perfect English, won any listener immediately.

He bowed formally over Princess Naia's hand, turned squarely on Neeland when he was named to the American, and exchanged a firm clasp with him. Then, to the Princess:

"I am late? No? Fancy, Princess—that great booby, Izzet Bey, must stop me at the club, and I exceedingly pressed to dress and entirely out of humour with all Turks. 'Eh bien, mon vieux!' said he in his mincing manner of a nervous pelican, 'they're warming up the Balkan boilers with Austrian pine. But I hear they're full of snow.' And I said to him: 'Snow boils very nicely if the fire is sufficiently persistent!' And I think Izzet Bey will find it so!"—with a quick laugh of explanation to Neeland: "He meant Russian snow, you see; and that boils beautifully if they keep on stoking the boiler with Austrian fuel."

The Princess shrugged:

"What schoolboy repartee! Why did you answer him at all, Alak?"

"Well," explained the attache, "as I was due here at eight I hadn't time to take him by the nose, had I?"

Rue Carew entered and went to the Princess to make amends:

"I'm so sorry to be late!"—turned to smile at Neeland, then offered her hand to the Russian. "How do you do, Prince Erlik?" she said with the careless and gay cordiality of old acquaintance. "I heard you say something about Colonel Izzet Bey's nose as I came in."

Captain Sengoun bowed over her slender white hand:

"The Mohammedan nose of Izzet Bey is an admirable bit of Oriental architecture, Miss Carew. Why should it surprise you to hear me extol its bizarre beauty?"

"Anyway," said the girl, "I'm contented that you left devilry for revelry." And, Marotte announcing dinner, she took the arm of Captain Sengoun as the Princess took Neeland's.

* * * * *

Like all Russians and some Cossacks, Prince Alak ate and drank as though it were the most delightful experience in life; and he did it with a whole-souled heartiness and satisfaction that was flattering to any hostess and almost fascinating to anybody observing him.

His teeth were even and very white; his appetite splendid: when he did his goblet the honour of noticing it at all, it was to drain it; when he resumed knife and fork he used them as gaily, as gracefully, and as thoroughly as he used his sabre on various occasions.

He had taken an instant liking to Neeland, who seemed entirely inclined to return it; and he talked a great deal to the American but with a nice division of attention for the two ladies on either side.

"You know, Alak," said the Princess, "you need not torture yourself by trying to converse with discretion; because Mr. Neeland knows about many matters which concern us all."

"Ah! That is delightful! And indeed I was already quite assured of Mr. Neeland's intelligent sympathy in the present state of European affairs."

"He's done a little more than express sympathy," remarked the Princess; and she gave a humorous outline of Neeland's part in the affair of the olive-wood box.

"Fancy!" exclaimed Captain Sengoun. "That impudent canaille! Yes; I heard at the Embassy what happened to that accursed box this morning. Of course it is a misfortune, but as for me, personally, I don't care——"

"It doesn't happen to concern you personally, Prince Erlik," said Princess Naia dryly.

"No," he admitted, unabashed by the snub, "it does not touch me. Cavalry cannot operate on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Therefore, God be thanked, I shall be elsewhere when the snow boils."

Rue tuned to Neeland:

"His one idea of diplomacy and war is a thousand Kuban Cossacks at full speed."

"And that is an excellent idea, is it not, Kazatchka?" he said, smiling impudently at the Princess, who only laughed at the familiarity.

"I hope," added Captain Sengoun, "that I may live to gallop through a few miles of diplomacy at full speed before they consign me to the Opolchina." Turning to Neeland, "The reserve—the old man's home, you know. God forbid!" And he drained his goblet and looked defiantly at Rue Carew.

"A Cossack is a Cossack," said the Princess, "be he Terek or Kuban, Don or Astrachan, and they all know as much about diplomacy as Prince Erlik—or Izzet Bey's nose.... James, you are unusually silent, dear friend. Are you regretting those papers?"

"It's a pity," he said. But he had not been thinking of the lost papers; Rue Carew's beauty preoccupied him. The girl was in black, which made her skin dazzling, and reddened the chestnut colour of her hair.

Her superb young figure revealed an unsuspected loveliness where the snowy symmetry of neck and shoulders and arms was delicately accented by the filmy black of her gown.

He had never seen such a beautiful girl; she seemed more wonderful, more strange, more aloof than ever. And this was what preoccupied and entirely engaged his mind, and troubled it, so that his smile had a tendency to become indefinite and his conversation mechanical at times.

Captain Sengoun drained one more of numerous goblets; gazed sentimentally at the Princess, then with equal sentiment at Rue Carew.

"As for me," he said, with a carelessly happy gesture toward the infinite, "plans are plans, and if they're stolen, tant pis! But there are always Tartars in Tartary and Turks in Turkey. And, while there are, there's hope for a poor devil of a Cossack who wants to say a prayer in St. Sophia before he's gathered to his ancestors."

"Have any measures been taken at your Embassy to trace the plans?" asked Neeland of the Princess.

"Of course," she said simply.

"Plans," remarked Sengoun, "are not worth the tcherkeske of an honest Caucasian! A Khirgize pony knows more than any diplomat; and my magaika is better than both!"

"All the same," said Rue Carew, "with those stolen plans in your Embassy, Prince Erlik, you might even gallop a sotnia of your Cossacks to the top of Achi-Baba."

"By heaven! I'd like to try!" he exclaimed, his black eyes ablaze.

"There are dongas," observed the Princess dryly.

"I know it. There are dongas every twenty yards; and Turkish gorse that would stop a charging bull! My answer is, mount! trot! gallop! and hurrah for Achi-Baba!"

"Very picturesque, Alak. But wouldn't it be nicer to be able to come back again and tell us all about it?"

"As for that," he said with his full-throated, engaging laugh, "no need to worry, Princess, for the newspapers would tell the story. What is this Gallipoli country, anyway, that makes our Chancellery wag its respected head and frown and whisper in corners and take little notes on its newly laundered cuffs?

"I know the European and Asiatic shores with their forts—Kilid Bahr, Chimilik, Kum Kale, Dardanos. I know what those Germans have been about with their barbed wire and mobile mortar batteries. What do we want of their plans, then——"

"Nothing, Prince Erlik!" said Rue, laughing. "It suffices that you be appointed adviser in general to his majesty the Czar."

Sengoun laughed with all his might.

"And an excellent thing that would be, Miss Carew. What we need in Russia," he added with a bow to the Princess, "are, first of all, more Kazatchkee, then myself to execute any commands with which my incomparable Princess might deign to honour me."

"Then I command you to go and smoke cigarettes in the music-room and play some of your Cossack songs on the piano for Mr. Neeland until Miss Carew and I rejoin you," said the Princess, rising.

At the door there was a moment of ceremony; then Sengoun, passing his arm through Neeland's with boyish confidence that his quickly given friendship was welcome, sauntered off to the music-room where presently he was playing the piano and singing some of the entrancing songs of his own people in a voice that, cultivated, might have made a fortune for him:

"We are but horsemen, And God is great. We hunt on hill and fen The fierce Kerait, Naiman and Eighur, Tartar and Khiounnou, Leopard and Tiger Flee at our view-halloo; We are but horsemen Cleansing the hill and fen Where wild men hide— Wild beasts abide, Mongol and Baiaghod, Turkoman, Taidjigod, Each in his den. The skies are blue, The plains are wide, Over the fens the horsemen ride!"

Still echoing the wild air, and playing with both hands in spite of the lighted cigarette between his fingers, he glanced over his shoulder at Neeland:

"A very old, old song," he explained, "made in the days of the great invasion when all the world was fighting anybody who would fight back. I made it into English. It's quite nice, I think."

His naive pleasure in his own translation amused Neeland immensely, and he said that he considered it a fine piece of verse.

"Yes," said Sengoun, "but you ought to hear a love song I made out of odd fragments I picked up here and there. I call it 'Samarcand'; or rather 'Samarcand Mahfouzeh,' which means, 'Samarcand the Well Guarded':

"'Outside my guarded door Whose voice repeats my name?' 'The voice thou hast heard before Under the white moon's flame! And thy name is my song; and my song is ever the same!'

"'How many warriors, dead, Have sung the song you sing? Some by an arrow were sped; Some by a dagger's sting.' 'Like a bird in the night is my song—a bird on the wing!'

"'Ahmed and Yucouf bled! A dead king blocks my door!' 'If thy halls and walls be red, Shall Samarcand ask more? Or my song shall cleanse thy house or my heart's blood foul thy floor!'

"'Now hast thou conquered me! Humbly thy captive, I. My soul escapes to thee; My body here must lie; Ride!—with thy song, and my soul in thy arms; and let me die.'"

Sengoun, still playing, flung over his shoulder:

"A Tartar song from the Turcoman. I borrowed it and put new clothes on it. Nice, isn't it?"

"Enchanting!" replied Neeland, laughing in spite of himself.

Rue Carew, with her snowy shoulders and red-gold hair, came drifting in, consigning them to their seats with a gesture, and giving them to understand that she had come to hear the singing.

So Sengoun continued his sketchy, haphazard recital, waving his cigarette now and then for emphasis, and conversing frequently over his shoulder while Rue Carew leaned on the piano and gravely watched his nimble fingers alternately punish and caress the keyboard.

After a little while the Princess Mistchenka came in saying that she had letters to write. They conversed, however, for nearly an hour before she rose, and Captain Sengoun gracefully accepted his conge.

"I'll walk with you, if you like," suggested Neeland.

"With pleasure, my dear fellow! The night is beautiful, and I am just beginning to wake up."

"Ask Marotte to give you a key, then," suggested the Princess, going. At the foot of the stairs, however, she paused to exchange a few words with Captain Sengoun in a low voice; and Neeland, returning with his latchkey, went over to where Rue stood by the lamplit table absently looking over an evening paper.

As he came up beside her, the girl lifted her beautiful, golden-grey eyes.

"Are you going out?"

"Yes, I thought I'd walk a bit with Captain Sengoun."

"It's rather a long distance to the Russian Embassy. Besides——" She hesitated, and he waited. She glanced absently over the paper for a moment, then, not raising her eyes: "I'm—I—the theft of that box today—perhaps my nerves have suffered a little—but do you think it quite prudent for you to go out alone at night?"

"Why, I am going out with Captain Sengoun!" he said, surprised at her troubled face.

"But you will have to return alone."

He laughed, but they both had flushed a little.

Had it been any other woman in the world, he had not hesitated gaily to challenge the shy and charming solicitude expressed in his behalf—make of it his capital, his argument to force that pretty duel to which one day, all youth is destined.

He found himself now without a word to say, nor daring to entertain any assumption concerning the words she had uttered.

Dumb, awkward, afraid, he became conscious that something in this young girl had silenced within him any inclination to gay effrontery, any talent for casual gallantry. Her lifted eyes, with their clear, half shy regard, had killed all fluency of tongue in him—slain utterly that light good-humour with which he had encountered women heretofore.

He said:

"I hadn't thought myself in any danger whatever. Is there any reason for me to expect further trouble?"

Rue raised her troubled eyes:

"Has it occurred to you that they might think you capable of redrawing parts of the stolen plans from memory?"

"It had never occurred to me," he admitted, surprised. "But I believe I could remember a little about one or two of the more general maps."

"The Princess means to ask you, tomorrow, to draw for her what you can remember. And that made me think about you now—whether the others might not suspect you capable of remembering enough to do them harm.... And so—do you think it prudent to go out tonight?"

"Yes," he replied, quite sincerely, "it is all right. You see I know Paris very well."

She did not look convinced, but Sengoun came up and she bade them both good night and went away with the Princess Mistchenka.

As, arm in arm, the two young men sauntered around the corner of the rue Soleil d'Or, two men who had been sitting on a marble bench beside the sun-dial fountain rose and strolled after them.



CHAPTER XXX

JARDIN RUSSE

At midnight the two young men had not yet parted. For, as Sengoun explained, the hour for parting was already past, and it was too late to consider it now. And Neeland thought so, too, what with the laughter and the music, and the soft night breezes to counsel folly, and the city's haunting brilliancy stretching away in bewitching perspectives still unexplored.

From every fairy lamp the lustrous capital signalled to youth her invitation, her challenge, and her menace. Like some jewelled sorceress—some dreaming Circe by the river bank, pondering new spells—so Paris lay in all her mystery and beauty under the July stars.

Sengoun, his arm through Neeland's, had become affectionately confidential. He explained that he really was a nocturnal creature; that now he had completely waked up; that his habits were due to a passion for astronomy, and that the stars he had discovered at odd hours of the early morning were more amazing than any celestial bodies ever before identified.

But Neeland, whose head and heart were already occupied, declined to study any constellations; and they drifted through the bluish lustre of white arc-lights and the clustered yellow glare of incandescent lamps toward a splash of iridescent glory among the chestnut trees, where music sounded and tables stood amid flowers and grass and little slender fountains which balanced silver globes upon their jets.

The waiters were in Russian peasant dress; the orchestra was Russian gipsy; the bill of fare was Russian; and there was only champagne to be had.

Balalaika orchestra and spectators were singing some evidently familiar song—one of those rushing, clattering, clashing choruses of the Steppes; and Sengoun sang too, with all his might, when he and Neeland were seated, which was thirsty work.

Two fascinating Russian gipsy girls were dancing—slim, tawny, supple creatures in their scarlet and their jingling bangles. After a deafening storm of applause, their flashing smiles swept the audience, and, linking arms, they sauntered off between the tables under the trees.

"I wish to dance," remarked Sengoun. "My legs will kick over something if I don't."

They were playing an American dance—a sort of skating step; people rose; couple after couple took the floor; and Sengoun looked around for a partner. He discovered no eligible partner likely to favour him without a quarrel with her escort; and he was debating with Neeland whether a row would be worth while, when the gipsy girls sauntered by.

"Oh," he said gaily, "a pretty Tzigane can save my life if she will!"

And the girls laughed and Sengoun led one of them out at a reckless pace.

The other smiled and looked at Neeland, and, seating herself, leaned on the table watching the whirl on the floor.

"Don't you dance?" she asked, with a sidelong glance out of her splendid black eyes.

"Yes; but I'm likely to do most of my dancing on your pretty feet."

"Merci! In that case I prefer a cigarette."

She selected one from his case, lighted it, folded her arms on the table, and continued to gaze at the dancers.

"I'm tired tonight," she remarked.

"You dance beautifully."

"Thank you."

Sengoun, flushed and satisfied, came back with his gipsy partner when the music ceased.

"Now I hope we may have some more singing!" he exclaimed, as they seated themselves and a waiter filled their great, bubble-shaped glasses.

And he did sing at the top of his delightful voice when the balalaikas swept out into a ringing and familiar song, and the two gipsy girls sang, too—laughed and sang, holding the frosty goblets high in the sparkling light.

It was evident to Neeland that the song was a favourite one with Russians. Sengoun was quite overcome; they all touched goblets.

"Brava, my little Tziganes!" he said with happy emotion. "My little compatriots! My little tawny panthers of the Caucasus! What do you call yourselves in this bandbox of a country where two steps backward take you across any frontier?"

His dancing partner laughed till her sequins jingled from throat to ankle:

"They call us Fifi and Nini," she replied. "Ask yourself why!"

"For example," added the other girl, "we rise from this table and thank you. There is nothing further. C'est fini—c'est Fifi—Nini—comprenez-vous, Prince Erlik?"

"Hi! What?" exclaimed Sengoun. "I'm known, it appears, even to that devilish name of mine!"

Everybody laughed.

"After all," he said, more soberly, "it's a gipsy's trade to know everybody and everything. Tiens!" He slapped a goldpiece on the table. "A kiss apiece against a louis that you don't know my comrade's name and nation!"

The girl called Nini laughed:

"We're quite willing to kiss you, Prince Erlik, but a louis d'or is not a copper penny. And your comrade is American and his name is Tchames."

"James!" exclaimed Sengoun.

"I said so—Tchames."

"What else?"

"Nilan."

"Neeland?"

"I said so."

Sengoun placed the goldpiece in Nini's hand and looked at Neeland with an uncomfortable laugh.

"I ought to know a gipsy, but they always astonish me, these Tziganes. Tell us some more, Nini——" He beckoned a waiter and pointed indignantly at the empty goblets.

The girls, resting their elbows on the tables, framed their faces with slim and dusky hands, and gazed at Sengoun out of humorous, half-veiled eyes.

"What do you wish to know, Prince Erlik?" they asked mockingly.

"Well, for example, is my country really mobilising?"

"Since the twenty-fifth."

"Tiens! And old Papa Kaiser and the Clown Prince Footit—what do they say to that?"

"It must be stopped."

"What! Sang dieu! We must stop mobilising against the Austrians? But we are not going to stop, you know, while Francis Joseph continues to pull faces at poor old Servian Peter!"

Neeland said:

"The evening paper has it that Austria is more reasonable and that the Servian affair can be arranged. There will be no war," he added confidently.

"There will be war," remarked Nini with a shrug of her bare, brown shoulders over which her hair and her gilded sequins fell in a bright mass.

"Why?" asked Neeland, smiling.

"Why? Because, for one thing, you have brought war into Europe!"

"Come, now! No mystery!" said Sengoun gaily. "Explain how my comrade has brought war into Europe, you little fraud!"

Nini looked at Neeland:

"What else except papers was in the box you lost?" she asked coolly.

Neeland, very red and uncomfortable, gazed back at the girl without replying; and she laughed at him, showing her white teeth.

"You brought the Yellow Devil into Europe, M'sieu Nilan! Erlik, the Yellow Demon. When he travels there is unrest. Where he rests there is war!"

"You're very clever," retorted Neeland, quite out of countenance.

"Yes, we are," said Fifi, with her quick smile. "And who but M'sieu Nilan should admit it?"

"Very clever," repeated Neeland, still amazed and profoundly uneasy. "But this Yellow Devil you say I brought into Europe must have been resting in America, then. And, if so, why is there no war there?"

"There would have been—with Mexico. You brought the Yellow Demon here, but just in time!"

"All right. Grant that, then. But—perhaps he was a long time resting in America. What about that, pretty gipsy?"

The girl shrugged again:

"Is your memory so poor, M'sieu Nilan? What has your country done but fight since Erlik rested among your people? You fought in Samoa; in Hawaii; your warships went to Chile, to Brazil, to San Domingo; the blood of your soldiers and sailors was shed in Hayti, in Cuba, in the Philippines, in China——"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Neeland. "That girl is dead right!"

Sengoun threw back his handsome head and laughed without restraint; and the gipsies laughed, too, their beautiful eyes and teeth flashing under their black cascades of unbound hair.

"Show me your palms," said Nini, and drew Sengoun's and Neeland's hands across the table, holding them in both of hers.

"See," she added, nudging Fifi with her shoulder, "both of them born under the Dark Star! It is war they shall live to see—war!"

"Under the Dark Star, Erlik," repeated the other girl, looking closely into the two palms, "and there is war there!"

"And death?" inquired Sengoun gaily. "I don't care, if I can lead a sotnia up Achi-Baba and twist the gullet of the Padisha before I say Fifi—Nini!"

The gipsies searched his palm with intent and brilliant gaze.

"Zut!" said Fifi. "Je ne vois rien que d'l'amour et la guerre aux dames!"

"T'en fais pas!" laughed Sengoun. "I ask no further favour of Fortune; I'll manage my regiment myself. And, listen to me, Fifi," he added with a frightful frown, "if the war you predict doesn't arrive, I'll come back and beat you as though you were married to a Turk!"

While they still explored his palm, whispering together at intervals, Sengoun caught the chorus of the air which the orchestra was playing, and sang it lustily and with intense pleasure to himself.

Neeland, unquiet to discover how much these casual strangers knew about his own and intimate affairs, had become silent and almost glum.

But the slight gloom which invaded him came from resentment toward those people who had followed him from Brookhollow to Paris, and who, in the very moment of victory, had snatched that satisfaction from him.

He thought of Kestner and of Breslau—of Scheherazade, and the terrible episode in her stateroom.

Except that he had seized the box in the Brookhollow house, there was nothing in his subsequent conduct on which he could plume himself. He could not congratulate himself on his wisdom; sheer luck had carried him through as far as the rue Soleil d'Or—mere chance, and that capricious fortune which sometimes convoys the stupid, fatuous, and astigmatic.

Then he thought of Rue Carew. And, in his bosom, an intense desire to distinguish himself began to burn.

If there were any way on earth to trace that accursed box——

He turned abruptly and looked at the two gipsies, who had relinquished Sangoun's hand and who were still conversing together in low tones while Sangoun beat time on the jingling table top and sang joyously at the top of his baritone voice:

"Eh, zoum—zoum—zoum! Boum—boum—boum! Here's to the Artillery Gaily riding by! Fetch me a distillery, Let me drink it dry— Fill me full of sillery! Here's to the artillery! Zoum—zoum—zoum! Boum—boum—boum!"

"Fifi!"

"M'sieu?"

"You're so clever! Where is that Yellow Devil now?"

"Pouf!" giggled Fifi. "On its way to Berlin, pardie!"

"That's easy to say. Tell me something else more expensive."

Nini said, surprised:

"What we know is free to Prince Erlik's friend. Did you think we sell to Russians?"

"I don't know anything about you or where you get your information," said Neeland. "I suppose you're in the Secret Service of the Russian Government."

"Mon ami, Nilan," said Fifi, smiling, "we should feel lonely outside the Secret Service. Few in Europe are outside—few in the world, fewer in the half-world. As for us Tziganes, who belong to neither, the business of everybody becomes our secret to sell for a silver piece—but not to Russians in the moment of peril!... Nor to their comrades.... What do you desire to know, comrade?"

"Anything," he said simply, "that might help me to regain what I have lost."

"And what do you suppose!" exclaimed Fifi, opening her magnificent black eyes very wide. "Did you imagine that nobody was paying any attention to what happened in the rue Soleil d'Or this noon?"

Nini laughed.

"The word flew as fast as the robber's taxicab. How many thousand secret friends to the Triple Entente do you suppose knew of it half an hour after it happened? From the Trocadero to Montparnasse, from the Point du Jour to Charenton, from the Bois to the Bievre, the word flew. Every taxicab, omnibus, sapin, every bateau-mouche, every train that left any terminal was watched.

"Five embassies and legations were instantly under redoubled surveillance; hundreds of cafes, bars, restaurants, hotels; all the theatres, gardens, cabarets, brasseries.

"Your pigs of Apaches are not neglected, va! But, to my idea, they got out of Paris before we watchers knew of the affair at all—in an automobile, perhaps—perhaps by rail. God knows," said the girl, looking absently at the dancing which had begun again. "But if we ever lay our eyes on Minna Minti, we wear toys in our garters which will certainly persuade her to take a little stroll with us."

After a silence, Neeland said:

"Is Minna Minti then so well known?"

"Not at the Opera Comique," replied Fifi with a shrug, "but since then."

"An artiste, that woman!" added Nini. "Why deny it? It appears that she has twisted more than one red button out of a broadcloth coat."

"She'll get the Seraglio medal for this day's work," said Fifi.

"Or the croix-de-fer," added Nini. "Ah, zut! She annoys me."

"Did you ever hear of a place called the Cafe des Bulgars?" asked Neeland, carelessly.

"Yes."

"What sort of place is it?"

"Like any other."

"Quite respectable?"

"Perfectly," said Nini, smiling. "One drinks good beer there."

"Munich beer," added Fifi.

"Then it is watched?" asked Neeland.

"All German cafes are watched. Otherwise, it is not suspected."

Sengoun, who had been listening, shook his head. "There's nothing to interest us at the Cafe des Bulgars," he said. Then he summoned a waiter and pointed tragically at the empty goblets.



CHAPTER XXXI

THE CAFE DES BULGARS

Their adieux to Fifi and Nini were elaborate and complicated by bursts of laughter. The Tziganes recommended Captain Sengoun to go home and seek further adventures on his pillow; and had it not been for the gay babble of the fountain and the persistent perfume of flowers, he might have followed their advice.

It was after the two young men had left the Jardin Russe that Captain Sengoun positively but affectionately refused to relinquish possession of Neeland's arm.

"Dear friend," he explained, "I am just waking up and I do not wish to go to bed for days and days."

"But I do," returned Neeland, laughing. "Where do you want to go now, Prince Erlik?"

The champagne was singing loudly in the Cossack's handsome head; the distant brilliancy beyond the Place de la Concorde riveted his roving eyes.

"Over there," he said joyously. "Listen, old fellow, I'll teach you the skating step as we cross the Place! Then, in the first Bal, you shall try it on the fairest form since Helen fell and Troy burned—or Troy fell and Helen burned—it's all the same, old fellow—what you call fifty-fifty, eh?"

Neeland tried to free his arm—to excuse himself; two policemen laughed; but Sengoun, linking his arm more firmly in Neeland's, crossed the Place in a series of Dutch rolls and outer edges, in which Neeland was compelled to join. The Russian was as light and graceful on his feet as one of the dancers of his own country; Neeland's knowledge of skating aided his own less agile steps. There was sympathetic applause from passing taxis and fiacres; and they might, apparently, have had any number of fair partners for the asking, along the way, except for Sengoun's headlong dive toward the brightest of the boulevard lights beyond.

In the rue Royal, however, Sengoun desisted with sudden access of dignity, remarking that such gambols were not worthy of the best traditions of his Embassy; and he attempted to bribe the drivers of a couple of hansom cabs to permit him and his comrade to take the reins and race to the Arc de Triomphe.

Failing in this, he became profusely autobiographical, informing Neeland of his birth, education, aims, aspirations.

"When I was twelve," he said, "I had known already the happiness of the battle-shock against Kurd, Mongol, and Tartar. At eighteen my ambition was to slap the faces of three human monsters. I told everybody that I was making arrangements to do this, and I started for Brusa after my first monster—Fehim Effendi—but the Vali telegraphed to the Grand Vizier, and the Grand Vizier ran to Abdul the Damned, and Abdul yelled for Sir Nicholas O'Connor; and they caught me in the Pera Palace and handed me over to my Embassy."

Neeland shouted with laughter:

"Who were the other monsters?" he asked.

"The other two whose countenances I desired to slap? Oh, one was Abdul Houda, the Sultan's star-reader, who chattered about my Dark Star horoscope in the Yildiz. And the other was the Sultan."

"Who?"

"Abdul Hamid."

"What? You wished to slap his face?"

"Certainly. But Kutchuk Said and Kiamil Pasha requested me not to—accompanied by gendarmes."

"You'd have lost your life," remarked Neeland.

"Yes. But then war would surely have come, and today my Emperor would have held the Dardanelles where the Turkish flag is now flying over German guns and German gunners."

He shook his head:

"Great mistake on my part," he muttered. "Should have pulled Abdul's lop ears. Now, everything in Turkey is 'Yasak' except what Germans do and say; and God knows we are farther than ever from St. Sophia.... I'm very thirsty with thinking so much, old fellow. Did you ever drink German champagne?"

"I believe not——"

"Come on, then. You shall drink several gallons and never feel it. It's the only thing German I could ever swallow."

"Prince Erlik, you have had considerable refreshment already."

"Copain, t'en fais pas!"

The spectacle of two young fellows in evening dress, in a friendly tug-of-war under the lamp-posts of the Boulevard, amused the passing populace; and Sengoun, noticing this, was inclined to mount a boulevard bench and address the wayfarers, but Neeland pulled him down and persuaded him into a quieter street, the rue Vilna.

"There's a German place, now!" exclaimed Sengoun, delighted.

And Neeland, turning to look, perceived the illuminated sign of the Cafe des Bulgars.

German champagne had now become Sengoun's fixed idea; nothing could dissuade him from it, nothing persuade him into a homeward bound taxi. So Neeland, with a rather hazy idea that he ought not to do it, entered the cafe with Senguon; and they seated themselves on a leather wall-lounge before one of the numerous marble-topped tables.

"Listen," he said in a low voice to his companion, "this is a German cafe, and we must be careful what we say. I'm not any too prudent and I may forget this; but don't you!"

"Quite right, old fellow!" replied Sengoun, giving him an owlish look. "I must never forget I'm a diplomat among these sales Boches——"

"Be careful, Sengoun! That expression is not diplomatic."

"Careful is the word, mon vieux," returned the other loudly and cheerfully. "I'll bet you a dollar, three kopeks, and two sous that I go over there and kiss the cashier——"

"No! Be a real diplomat, Sengoun!"

"I'm sorry you feel that way, Neeland, because she's unusually pretty. And we might establish a triple entente until you find some Argive Helen to quadruple it. Aha! Here is our German champagne! Positively the only thing German a Russian can——"

"Listen! This won't do. People are looking at us——"

"Right, old fellow—always right! You know, Neeland, this friendship of ours is the most precious, most delightful, and most inspiring experience of my life. Here's a full goblet to our friendship! Hurrah! As for Enver Pasha, may Erlik seize him!"

After they had honoured the toast, Sengoun looked about him pleasantly, receptive, ready for any eventuality. And observing no symptoms of any eventuality whatever, he suggested creating one.

"Dear comrade," he said, "I think I shall arise and make an incendiary address——"

"No!"

"Very well, if you feel that way about it. But there is another way to render the evening agreeable. You see that sideboard?" he continued, pointing to a huge carved buffet piled to the ceiling with porcelain and crystal. "What will you wager that I can not push it over with one hand?"

But Neeland declined the wager with an impatient gesture, and kept his eyes riveted on a man who had just entered the cafe. He could see only the stranger's well-groomed back, but when, a moment later, the man turned to seat himself, Neeland was not surprised to find himself looking at Doc Curfoot.

"Sengoun," he said under his breath, "that type who just came in is an American gambler named Doc Curfoot; and he is here with other gamblers for the purpose of obtaining political information for some government other than my own."

Sengoun regarded the new arrival with amiable curiosity:

"That worm? Oh, well, every city in Europe swarms with such maggots, you know. It would be quite funny if he tries any blandishments on us, wouldn't it?"

"He may. He's a capper. He's looking at us now. I believe he remembers having seen me in the train."

"As for an hour or two at chemin-de-fer, baccarat, or roulette," remarked Sengoun, "I am not averse to a——"

"Watch him! The waiter who is taking his order may know who you are—may be telling that gambler.... I believe he did! Now, let us see what happens...."

Sengoun, delighted at the prospect of an eventuality, blandly emptied his goblet and smiled generally upon everybody.

"I hope he will make our acquaintance and ask us to play," he said. "I'm very lucky at chemin-de-fer. And if I lose I shall conclude that there is trickery. Which would make it very lively for everybody," he added with a boyish smile. But his dark eyes began to glitter and he showed his beautiful, even teeth when he laughed.

"Ha!" he said. "A little what you call a mix-up might not come amiss! That gives one an appetite; that permits one to perspire; that does good to everybody and makes one sleep soundly! Shall we, as you say in America, start something?"

Neeland, thinking of Ali-Baba and Golden Beard and of their undoubted instigation by telegraph of the morning's robbery, wondered whether the rendezvous of the robbers might not possibly be here in the Cafe des Bulgars.

The gang of Americans in the train had named Kestner, Breslau, and Weishelm—the one man of the gang whom he had never seen—as prospective partners in this enterprise.

Here, somewhere in this building, were their gambling headquarters. Was there any possible chance that the stolen box and its contents might have been brought here for temporary safety?

Might it not now be hidden somewhere in this very building by men too cunning to risk leaving the city when every train and every road would be watched within an hour of the time that the robbery was committed?

Leaning back carelessly on the lounge and keeping his eyes on the people in the cafe, Neeland imparted these ideas to Sengoun in a low voice—told him everything he knew in regard to the affair, and asked his opinion.

"My opinion," said Sengoun, who was enchanted at any prospect of trouble, "is that this house is 'suspect' and is worth searching. Of course the Prefect could be notified, arrangements made, and a search by the secret police managed. But, Neeland, my friend, think of what pleasure we should be deprived!"

"How do you mean?"

"Why not search the place ourselves?"

"How?"

"Well, of course, we could be picturesque, go to my Embassy, and fill our pockets with automatic pistols, and come back here and—well, make them stand around and see how high they could reach with both hands."

Neeland laughed.

"That would be a funny jest, wouldn't it?" said Sengoun.

"Very funny. But——" He nudged Sengoun and directed his attention toward the terrace outside, where waiters were already removing the little iron tables and the chairs, and the few lingering guests were coming inside the cafe.

"I see," muttered Sengoun; "it is already Sunday morning, and they're closing. It's too late to go to the Embassy. They'd not let us in here when we returned."

Neeland summoned a waiter with a nod:

"When do you close up inside here?"

"Tomorrow being Sunday, the terrace closes now, monsieur; but the cafe remains open all night," explained the waiter with a noticeable German accent.

"Thank you." And, to Sengoun: "I'd certainly like to go upstairs. I'd like to see what it looks like up there—take a glance around."

"Very well, let us go up——"

"We ought to have some excuse——"

"We'll think of several on the way," rising with alacrity, but Neeland pulled him back.

"Wait a moment! It would only mean a fight——"

"All fights," explained Sengoun seriously, "are agreeable—some more so. So if you are ready, dear comrade——"

"But a row will do us no good——"

"Pardon, dear friend, I have been in serious need of one for an hour or two——"

"I don't mean that sort of 'good,'" explained Neeland, laughing. "I mean that I wish to look about up there—explore——"

"Quite right, old fellow—always right! But—here's an idea! I could stand at the head of the stairs and throw them down as they mounted, while you had leisure to look around for your stolen box——"

"My dear Prince Erlik, we've nothing to shoot with, and it's likely they have. There's only one way to get upstairs with any chance of learning anything useful. And that is to start a row between ourselves." And, raising his voice as though irritated, he called for the reckoning, adding in a tone perfectly audible to anybody in the vicinity that he knew where roulette was played, and that he was going whether or not his friend accompanied him.

Sengoun, delighted, recognised his cue and protested in loud, nasal tones that the house to which his comrade referred was suspected of unfair play; and a noisy dispute began, listened to attentively by the pretty but brightly painted cashier, the waiters, the gerant, and every guest in the neighbourhood.

"As for me," cried Sengoun, feigning to lose his temper, "I have no intention of being tricked. I was not born yesterday—not I! If there is to be found an honest wheel in Paris that would suit me. Otherwise, I go home to bed!"

"It is an honest wheel, I tell you——"

"It is not! I know that place!"

"Be reasonable——"

"Reasonable!" repeated Sengoun appealingly to the people around them. "Permit me to ask these unusually intelligent gentlemen whether it is reasonable to play roulette in a place where the wheel is notoriously controlled and the management a dishonest one! Could a gentleman be expected to frequent or even to countenance places of evil repute? Messieurs, I await your verdict!" And he folded his arms dramatically.

Somebody said, from a neighbouring table:

"Vous avez parfaitement raison, monsieur!"

"I thank you," cried Sengoun, with an admirably dramatic bow. "Therefore, I shall now go home to bed!"

Neeland, maintaining his gravity with difficulty, followed Sengoun toward the door, still pretending to plead with him; and the gerant, a tall, blond, rosy and unmistakable German, stepped forward to unlock the door.

As he laid his hand on the bolt he said in a whisper:

"If the gentlemen desire the privilege of an exclusive club where everything is unquestionably conducted——"

"Where?" demanded Neeland, abruptly.

"On the third floor, monsieur."

"Here?"

"Certainly, sir. If the gentlemen will honour me with their names, and will be seated for one little moment, I shall see what can be accomplished."

"Very well," said Sengoun, with a short, incredulous laugh. "I'm Prince Erlik, of the Mongol Embassy, and my comrade is Mr. Neeland, Consul General of the United States of America in the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein!"

The gerant smiled. After he had gone away toward the further room in the cafe, Neeland remarked to Sengoun that doubtless their real names were perfectly well known, and Sengoun disdainfully shrugged his indifference:

"What can one expect in this dirty rat-nest of Europe? Abdul the Damned employed one hundred thousand spies in Constantinople alone! And William the Sudden admired him. Why, Neeland, mon ami, I never take a step in the streets without being absolutely certain that I am watched and followed. What do I care! Except that towns make me sick. But the only cure is a Khirgiz horse and a thousand lances. God send them. I'm sick of cities."

A few moments later the gerant returned and, in a low voice, requested them to accompany him.

They passed leisurely through the cafe, between tables where lowered eyes seemed to deny any curiosity; but guests and waiters looked after them after they had passed, and here and there people whispered together—particularly two men who had followed them from the sun-dial fountain in the rue Soleil d'Or to the Jardin Russe, across the Place de la Concorde, and into the Cafe des Bulgars in the rue Vilna.

On the stairs Neeland heard Sengoun still muttering to himself:

"Certainly I am sick of cities and narrow strips of sky. What I need is a thousand lances at a gallop, and a little Kirghiz horse between my knees."



CHAPTER XXXII

THE CERCLE EXTRANATIONALE

The suite of rooms into which they were ushered appeared to be furnished in irreproachable taste. Except for the salon at the further end of the suite, where play was in progress, the charming apartment might have been a private one; and the homelike simplicity of the room, where books, flowers, and even a big, grey cat confirmed the first agreeable impression, accented the lurking smile on Sengoun's lips.

Doc Curfoot, in evening dress, came forward to receive them, in company with another man, young, nice-looking, very straight, and with the high, square shoulders of a Prussian.

"Bong soire, mussoors," said Curfoot genially. "J'ai l'honnoor de vous faire connaitre mong ami, Mussoor Weishelm."

They exchanged very serious bows with "Mussoor" Weishelm, and Curfoot retired.

In excellent French Weishelm inquired whether they desired supper; and learning that they did not, bowed smilingly and bade them welcome:

"You are at home, gentlemen; the house is yours. If it pleases you to sup, we offer you our hospitality; if you care to play, the salon is at your disposal, or, if you prefer, a private room. Yonder is the buffet; there are electric bells at your elbow. You are at home," he repeated, clicked his heels together, bowed, and took his leave.

Sengoun dropped into a comfortable chair and sent a waiter for caviar, toast, and German champagne.

Neeland lighted a cigarette, seated himself, and looked about him curiously.

Over in a corner on a sofa a rather pretty woman, a cigarette between her jewelled fingers, was reading an evening newspaper. Two others in the adjoining room, young and attractive, their feet on the fireplace fender, conversed together over a sandwich, a glass of the widely advertised Dubonnet, and another of the equally advertised Bon Lait Maggi—as serenely and as comfortably as though they were by their own firesides.

"Perhaps they are," remarked Sengoun, plastering an oblong of hot toast with caviar. "Birds of this kind nest easily anywhere."

Neeland continued to gaze toward the salon where play was in progress. There did not seem to be many people there. At a small table he recognised Brandes and Stull playing what appeared to be bridge whist with two men whom he had never before seen. There were no women playing.

As he watched the round, expressionless face of Brandes, who was puffing a long cigar screwed tightly into the corner of his thin-lipped mouth, it occurred to him somewhat tardily what Rue Carew had said concerning personal danger to himself if any of these people believed him capable of reconstructing from memory any of the stolen plans.

He had not thought about that specific contingency; instinct alone had troubled him a little when he first entered the Cafe des Bulgars.

However, his unquiet eyes could discover nothing of either Kestner or Breslau; and, somehow, he did not even think of encountering Ilse Dumont in such a place. As for Brandes and Stull, they did not recognise him at all.

So, entirely reassured once more by the absence of Ali-Baba and Golden Beard, and of Scheherazade whom he had no fear of meeting, Neeland ate his caviar with a relish and examined his surroundings.

Of course it was perfectly possible that the stolen papers had been brought here. There were three other floors in the building, too, and he wondered what they were used for.

Sengoun's appetite for conflict waned as he ate and drank; and a violent desire to gamble replaced it.

"You poke about a bit," he said to Neeland. "Talk to that girl over there and see what you can learn. As for me, I mean to start a little flirtation with Mademoiselle Fortuna. Does that suit you?"

If Sengoun wished to play it was none of Neeland's business.

"Do you think it an honest game?" he asked, doubtfully.

"With negligible stakes all first-class gamblers are honest."

"If I were you, Sengoun, I wouldn't drink anything more."

"Excellent advice, old fellow!" emptying his goblet with satisfaction. And, rising to his firm and graceful height, he strolled away toward the salon where play progressed amid the most decorous and edifying of atmospheres.

Neeland watched him disappear, then he glanced curiously at the girl on the sofa who was still preoccupied with her newspaper.

So he rose, sauntered about the room examining the few pictures and bronzes, modern but excellent. The carpet under foot was thick and soft, but, as he strolled past the girl who seemed to be so intently reading, she looked up over her paper and returned his civil recognition of her presence with a slight smile.

As he appeared inclined to linger, she said with pleasant self-possession:

"These newspaper rumours, monsieur, are becoming too persistent to amuse us much longer. War talk is becoming vieux jeu."

"Why read them?" inquired Neeland with a smile.

"Why?" She made a slight gesture. "One reads what is printed, I suppose."

"Written and printed by people who know no more about the matter in question than you and I, mademoiselle," he remarked, still smiling.

"That is perfectly true. Why is it worth while for anyone to search for truth in these days when everyone is paid to conceal it?"

"Oh," he said, "not everyone."

"No; some lie naturally and without pay," she admitted indifferently.

"But there are still others. For example, mademoiselle, yourself."

"I?" She laughed, not troubling to refute the suggestion of her possible truthfulness.

He said:

"This—club—is furnished in excellent taste."

"Yes; it is quite new."

"Has it a name?"

"I believe it is called the Cercle Extranationale. Would monsieur also like to know the name of the club cat?"

They both laughed easily, but he could make nothing of her.

"Thank you," he said; "and I fear I have interrupted your reading——"

"I have read enough lies; I am quite ready to tell you a few. Shall I?"

"You are most amiable. I have been wondering what the other floors in this building are used for."

"Private apartments," she replied smiling, looking him straight in the eyes. "Now you don't know whether I've told you the truth or not; do you?"

"Of course I know."

"Which, then?"

"The truth."

She laughed and indicated a chair; and he seated himself.

"Who is the dark, nice-looking gentleman accompanying you?" she enquired.

"How could you see him at all through your newspaper?"

"I poked a hole, of course."

"To look at him or at me?"

"Your mirror ought to reassure you. However, as an afterthought, who is he?"