By Charles Laing Warr

It was April above Lucerne, in the year of grace nineteen hundred and fourteen, and everything was young. A witchery of sunlight and scent and blossom etherealised the earth and the heavens; and fields, green as the green diamond at the heart of the world, rioted wantonly to kiss the white dazzling peaks that glittered in the sapphire sky.

On a fallen tree, its bark all frosted with lichen, two young people sat at the edge of a pine copse. They were both in the springtide of life, and they sat in enchanted silence inhaling the perfume of the trees and listening to the birth song of an awakening universe. She was not much over twenty, perhaps, and she was enhaloed with the soul of France. It lurked in the dark glistening coils of her hair, in the gestures of her shoulders and white, nervous hands, her lips. Her eyes, half mystic, half tigerish, wells of lightly slumbering passion, told the eternal story of that indomitable race whose destiny it seems to have been to demonstrate to the world that the life of a nation's soul may be unquenchable, though drowned in every century with blood.

He was obviously from across the Channel; clean built, healthy and handsome. One versed in the characteristic physiognomy of the denizens of our islands would have told you after a moment's observation that he was a Celt. And indeed, the Honourable Gordon Niall, son and heir of the fifteenth Baron Niall of the Western Isles, could play the piob mor and speak the Gaelic as his mother tongue. Twelve years of public school and university life had left him still dreaming foolish dreams and seeing great visions. Which is a proof that he was born into this world a trifle late.

They were happy, these two, in their nest in the hills. They looked out on the world as the good God made it. Among the flower-smothered fields stretched at their feet a placid-minded peasantry lived and moved and had their being. Content with their tree-bowered, log-built chalets and their daily bread, they follow the slow-footed oxen and their wooden ploughs, just as their fathers did a thousand years ago. From day to day their stainless, uneventful life unfolds to them the secret of the untroubled heart, and they believe in the beauty of the world they see and the goodness of the Creator they one day hope to see. They are simple folk, of course.

Helene von Behr loved it as she looked. It made her remember so vividly an old-age worn chateau in the peace of southern France. She felt again in her inmost soul those scents of childhood which outlive all human forgetfulness. She sat and dreamed of it all, and as she dreamed her thoughts became words, and she told them to her companion, who listened with his blue eyes full of a boyish unconcealed adoration for the lovely girl beside him. Her eyes sometimes puzzled him; they puzzled him now. A sad, lambent light was in them; like sunset glints on the shadowing hills of vanished years.

She talked on: about the moat round the grey creeper-covered house, the moat into which she had fallen one day when only six years old. And the forest—so deep and dark and wonderful—with the great oak, into whose branches Napoleon III. had climbed to smoke his everlasting cigarette in peace when he had been the unwelcome guest of her great-uncle, a grand seigneur who had despised the new rÉgime. Old Jean BarbÉ, the coachman, was remembered too—old Jean, who was always cross but didn't mean to be; and what a funny scar it was over his left eye where her white cat had scratched him!

Then there was the village curÉ. She said, with simple innocence, that her nurse had told her as a secret that it was whispered he was her uncle, and would have reigned in the chateau had he only travelled into this life down the broad road which leadeth from the altar. But, what a dear he was! She remembered when she made her first confession to him, and how she had wondered if he was smiling, or angry, behind the grating when she told that she had stolen a cigarette from the big silver box on the writing-table of M. le Vicomte de Fontaigne, her father, and had smoked it surreptitiously in the stable beside her pet horse. He used to dine with them every Wednesday evening; and in the calm summer night the table was laid beneath the pear tree at the end of the terrace near the river, which glowed so red in the light of the westering sun. How shabby his soutane always was, and all brown with the stains of snuff!

So she rambled on and spoke of her father, that proud aristocrat, bearing a name to be found in the most abbreviated histories. She laughed when she said that he lived there in magnificent isolation, too proud to serve the Republic!

Then she sighed, and did not tell that nevertheless he had married her against her will to that dull old German diplomatist sitting down there in the Schweizerhof immersed in the voluminous correspondence which was the breath of his life: that correspondence which she secretly blessed in her heart for the free, careless hours it had given her these last ten days with this fresh-faced boy, the only occupant of the scantily filled hotel with whom her lord and master would allow her to associate.

She sat silent, and gazed dreamily at the undulating countryside, radiant in bloom and light and colour, with old Pilatus in the distance, sentinel of ages. The shimmering sunshine quivered all over it, and the scattered chalets, and orchards pink and white with foam, seemed lulled to sleep in the security of God. Once a priest passed, trudging down the white dusty road beneath; once a peasant, the smoke of his long black cigar hanging in a blue filmy wreath about his round felt hat. Far down in the valley tinkled the music of cow bells. A little stream, crystal clear, trickled at her feet ... flies danced in clouds above the edging rushes. The warm smell of the earth was intoxicating like incense....

She was dimly conscious that her companion was whistling softly. He had a habit of doing this when deep in thought, and she recognised the odd little refrain. She had heard him whistle it a dozen times—queer, uncanny, elusive as the mountain mist, with the mystery of the hills in it, and sorrow, and the spirit of brave men. She glanced at him. She knew that this boy had begun to exercise a strange fascination over her, stronger and more dangerous than she dared to confess even to herself. It was not unnatural, for her life these last three years in that grim, dull old schloss in Hanover had been very lonely. The bud will not mate with the yellow leaf, but spring must call to spring; albeit the mongers of the matrimonial market prattle as they please.

"What is it you whistle, my Gordon?" she asked suddenly. "There are strange things in the air. Has it a story from your Scottish hills?"

He sat back and laughed his gay laugh.

"Yes, it has," he answered. "I'll tell it you, if it won't bore you."

"But no: tell me," she said, and prepared to listen, her chin in her hand.

It was a tune they played on the pipes, he said: and it was a wild, barbaric story of war and the fierce passion of men and the tottering fortunes of his race. Six hundred years ago Castle Niall had been besieged by a neighbouring clan, for the Niall of the day had carried off the daughter of its chief, and held her within his walls. The beleaguered garrison was on the verge of starvation, when to Niall came a dream which told him that deliverance would come from a black chanter which would drop from heaven upon the castle roof. Three times, and three times only, would it play a mysterious tune, which none but the head of the house would be able to awaken from the reed; and in the hour of peril or distress the playing of the chanter would bring salvation. When the morning dawned grey over the castle ramparts, they found, lying on the roof, a black chanter as had been foretold. The chief blew on it with trembling lips, and lo! it played of its own accord. Immediately Niall and his men sallied from the fortress and drove their enemies into the sea.

In the intervening centuries the chanter had again been used and brought deliverance. Its virtue would be efficacious only once more. The strange, haunting air had become the battle charge of his race. It was that which he had been whistling. The last time it had been played, in the sixteenth century, the family piper had caught the air and fixed it indelibly on the scroll of memory. He laughed nervously when he had finished. He was afraid she would treat it lightly. But he had told his tale with an old-world seriousness, and although she had felt inclined to smile when he had ended his recital of it, something in his face restrained her. Instead, she patted his brown curly head.

"Come," she said, "it is late. We must go home."

It was their last evening together, for Helene and her husband were leaving the following day. As they walked along under the chestnut trees on the Schweizerhof Quai, Niall was dull and silent. She had stirred the very depths of his young, impressionable heart, this girl. He didn't attempt to deceive himself: he knew he was passionately in love with her. He felt that he hated old von Behr. But—it was all so hopeless.

That night he dined with them. The dinner was not a great success. They were all pre-occupied—Helene and Gordon with crowding thoughts that were very much akin, the Count with a disquieting dispatch from the Wilhelmstrasse and a severe attack of indigestion. At ten o'clock he excused himself: he had writing to do. He pointedly suggested that his wife should go to bed; and he made his adieux to Niall, remarking that they were leaving early in the morning and would not likely see him. Furious with stifled anger, the boy said a conventional good-bye to the woman he loved. She moved away. Count von Behr lingered for a moment, and then betook himself with shambling gait to his accustomed corner of the writing-room, which, for some reason, he preferred to his own private apartment.

The moment he was out of sight Niall hurriedly left the lounge and hastened upstairs. On the first floor he saw her, obviously lingering, a little way down the corridor. She came back as she saw him approach. The boy blushed deeply as he took her hand, and stammered something about not being able to say good-bye in such a beastly cold fashion. His head seemed to be swimming. He had some confused impressions about the white of her evening gown and a great crimson rose at her breast.

"My Gordon," she said softly, with that fascinating inability to control her r's that thrilled him; "Whistle me your tune once again—quickly, for I must go. I shall remember you by it, boy. Perhaps, some day if we meet again, I may be able to whistle it to you!"

She smiled, but her eyes were moist. And Niall drew his parched lips together and managed to whistle the strange, mysterious air. He finished and stood awkwardly facing her, tall and distinguished in his evening clothes. No word of love had ever passed between them, but as they looked into each other's eyes, each read the secret that nothing could hide.

"Adieu, my Gordon," she whispered hastily. "You have been good to me. I won't forget you ... and you'll help me often ... but be sensible, boy—and forget me!"

A moment later she was running down the corridor and vanished at the end. The boy stood for a minute or two rigid where he was, staring blankly at a red rose in his hands, his head reeling with the delicious joy of the knowledge that for one never-to-be-forgotten moment her arms had been thrown round his neck, and on his mouth her warm lips had pressed a swift, burning kiss.

II

Captain Gordon Niall of the Uist Highlanders lay flat on his face beside a loophole in the wall. With a subaltern, two men, and a stray sergeant of the Yorkshire Rifles, he occupied the remains of a former farmstead, now a jumbled heap of bricks and mortar. The only portion of this mass of refuse that looked like a house was a right angle formed by the ends of two walls which rose like a skeleton from the shattered piles of rafters, rubbish, stones, lime, and dead bodies of mangled men.

It was one of the supreme moments resultant upon the German break through near ArmentiÈres, that grim, bloody month of April, 1918. The British line existed only in the imagination of an exhausted and bewildered Staff, their faculties half paralysed with fatigue and over work. No one knew with anything even approaching certainty what the situation was. Only one thing was certain because it was obvious, and that was that the very existence of our Armies was hanging in the balance. The British front was hopelessly, irretrievably broken; and a disorganised rabble of tattered regiments, half crazy with weariness and strain and hunger, were retreating in mixed, irregular bands back from the river Lys, through a withering hail of bullets and a raging tornado of shrapnel and high explosive; valiantly and uncomplainingly to take up new positions and renew the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds.

Gordon Niall had arrived at the stage when all emotion had been frozen to its depths. He looked phlegmatically out upon a dreary, muddy countryside literally alive with the grey advancing hordes of the enemy. The little group huddled in the shelter of the tottering walls manipulated a Lewis gun with the dull ceaseless energy of men in a dream. Dirty, ragged, verminous, with a week's growth on their smoke-grimed emaciated faces, they were unquestioningly carrying out to the last their final act in the mighty drama of that last awful month which clouded their minds like a nightmare from Hell.

They had been all through the sickening horror of the struggle on the Somme, and after three weeks hard fighting had arrived a week ago at ArmentiÈres for a rest, to find themselves swirled into the vortex of the new German offensive. Gordon Niall as he stoically waited for death, knew very little about the facts of it all. He had been told that the Portuguese who held the line on the left had broken; and that out of the welter of shattered, scurrying, disordered units, he had been ordered to take up an advanced position, to stem the rush with a handful of men he had managed to gather round him out of the retreating forces. And there he was, with four others—all that were left—with the German masses two hundred yards ahead, and behind him the river Lys, its muddy waters splashing under the bursting barrage, ironically emphasising the fact that for him there was no retreat.

It was only a matter of minutes, and at last the end came. A confused babel of sounds; a smothering avalanche of men, stamping, yelling, pushing; the collapse of the whole universe about him; a deadly pain in his head; a strange, swift, kaleidoscopic vision of home ... his mother's face ... then darkness.

He didn't know how long afterwards it was that he felt himself jerked roughly to his feet. As his senses slowly returned he realised that a German officer was searching him. He watched the man stupidly as he went through the papers in his pocket-book: then something fell from a letter to the ground, something brown like a dead leaf, and Niall lurched forward with a snarl.

"Give it me!" he said hoarsely.

The officer looked up, surprised, and then down at his feet. He stooped and picked the little fragment from the ground, glanced at it casually, and handed it to Niall with a look of half amused wonder in his eyes. Then he went on reading. Niall thrust the recovered treasure into his tunic pocket—only a faded rose given to him four years ago by a girl at Lucerne, whose memory the passion of war had not succeeded in effacing.

The officer soon finished, and Niall was marched off with a small escort. It all seemed like a bad dream, that scurry over the fire-swept zone, the arrival at the battered hamlet where more prisoners were waiting. Then the long weary march, hour after hour, their numbers constantly swelling, on through the fading twilight and a dark drizzling night. Like drunken men the straggling column reeled along, half delirious with hunger and fatigue, past stores and camps and dumps and villages, while ever past them the reserve masses of horse, foot and artillery incessantly pressed on the heels of the advancing German forces. At last, long after midnight, they reached a smallish town; and, packed into an empty building, they fell on the cold concrete floor and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.

Early in the morning they were marched to the station, and Niall found himself in a third class compartment with eleven other officers. Some time before the train started a bowl of some sticky, soupy substance was handed in, with a loaf of bread; and on this they subsisted during the twenty-six hours which elapsed before they were detrained at their destination, a dreary, drab little town; and, cramped and weak as children, they marched two miles out into the country to the wire-encircled encampment which awaited their coming.

III

Those unfortunates who endured the lonely monotonous horror of prison life in Germany will tell you what "barbed-wire madness" was. They will tell you of men who got the disease; and of that furtive, piteous look that haunted the tragic sunken eyes of weary creatures who became frenzied with the longing for freedom. It is perhaps difficult to appreciate from the depths of an arm-chair the terrible gnawing pain of this consuming passion to which some natures were so very susceptible. But strong men who have lived, if only just lived, for three long ghastly months, without letters or parcels, on a diet of turnip-soup and small lumps of black bread, till the skin was stretched tight over their protruding cheek-bones like yellow parchment, their filthy, ragged clothes hanging like mildewed sacks on their emaciated bodies, and their hollow eyes gleaming like the eyes of famished beasts—they understand how easy it was to fall a prey to "barbed-wire madness."

Gordon Niall got it, and got it badly. It was inevitable. The restless Celtic spirit was the first to fall a victim to the mania for escape. Five times he eluded his watchful guard, and five times was recaptured, sullen and still determined, taking his punishment of solitary confinement as a matter of course, with a purpose dogged and unbroken. For solitary confinement in cells was no cure for the disease: it was like malaria, once in the system it was ineradicable. The weeks dragged on. Parcels and letters arrived from home and conditions gradually improved, but Niall remained obsessed with his yearning for liberty. Other men who had escaped and been recaptured began to realise the futility of it, and the news which filtered through the German newspapers of the turn of the tide and the progress of the Allied forces tended to encourage them to settle down to await developments. And one night the camp was electrified with the announcement of the defection of Bulgaria. It was the beginning of the end, and the star of hope shone clear in the firmament. Yet it had no effect on Gordon Niall, for the following night he made yet another attempt to escape.

He had thought it out carefully; and at midnight, three friends, strenuously protesting at his foolishness, hoisted him up to the little window of their hut which overlooked the prison yard. It was not more than twelve yards from the wire enclosure, and within four feet of it rose a telegraph pole. The window had been very carefully prepared, and it did not take Niall many minutes to remove the glass, drop the panes into the keeping of his friends below, and wriggle on to the narrow ledge. He listened carefully, and looked up and down the yard, white in the searching glare of the great electric lamps which turned night into day. A high wind and a driving sleet favoured him, for the sentry who passed shortly afterwards on his beat by the barbed wire was walking quickly with his chin sunk in the collar of his coat. Niall waited till he had gone, then, crouching for a moment on the window ledge, he sprang forward, clutched at the telegraph pole, clung to it for a few seconds, then laboriously hauled himself up to the cross-bars. Here he rested for a while and allowed the sentry once more to pass. Then, judging that he would just have time to reach the further pole, which was a few feet on the far side of the wire, before the man returned, he commenced his perilous journey. Painfully and cautiously he straddled across the wires and began to work himself along. The swirling blasts of the strong wind more than once almost swept him from his precarious hold, and the icy rain numbed his cut and bleeding hands. Beneath his weight the wires swayed and sagged ... yet he struggled on his desperate way. It was more difficult than he had supposed, and sick, with nervous strain and physical exhaustion, he determined to risk discovery and hang where he was, halfway across, until the sentry passed again. The minutes dragged, and then round the corner of the next hut the man appeared, his shoulders hunched in the driving rain, his eyes on the ground. Above him, clinging frantically to the wire, Niall waited, his heart in his mouth. The man walked almost beneath him, seeing nothing; and in a few seconds the prisoner again began to toil along the wires. At length, almost fainting with fatigue and strain, he clutched his goal and drew himself across the cross-bars, and waited, panting, his heart throbbing as if it would burst, until the sentry should repass him. He soon approached. Nearer and nearer he came. He tramped beneath the crouching figure on the top of the telegraph pole. Niall muttered a prayer of thankfulness for the fierce wind and the torrential rain.

The blood suddenly roared in his ears with excitement ... the man had stopped ... was he going to look up?... he stamped his feet for a minute or two, then resumed his monotonous beat.

Niall quickly clutched the pole with his arms and knees and slithered to the ground. Bending low he ran swiftly across the area illumined by the glare from the prison yard, and found himself in the enveloping darkness of the night.

The fugitive had a roughly accurate knowledge of the immediate countryside, gained by constant observation during the occasional walks which had been permitted the prisoners, under escort. He purposed making for a thick wood which lay about two miles to the westward, and there concealing himself during the following day when the hue and cry would be in full swing. When night again came round he would push ahead; if possible, keeping a general course to the north-west, which, he anticipated, would in time bring him to some point on the Dutch frontier. He had saved up a quantity of food, which, with strict economy, he hoped might last him at a pinch for a fortnight. If, by that time, he had not reached the frontier, things might become awkward; but this was an eventuality too distant to be considered at the moment.

He found himself at the outskirts of the forest an hour later, and forged ahead through the crowding trees and thick undergrowth until dawn broke, when he searched about for a secure hiding-place. He resolved not to climb a tree as he felt that sleep was a necessity. Fortune favoured him by the discovery of a large fox-hole in a dense thicket; and down this he forced his way feet first, carefully wound up his wrist watch, and in five minutes was fast asleep.

It was one o'clock in the afternoon when he awoke. Scarcely a sound broke the tense silence of the wood. The rain had passed and the sun shone clear above the trees. He ate some biscuits and a meagre slice of tinned meat, washed his face and hands in a neighbouring stream, made some rough calculations on a sheet of paper as to direction, and settled down to wait for nightfall. With the advent of dusk he again set off through the forest.

For twelve long weary days and nights he successfully eluded capture and kept up the same monotonous round—hiding by day and pushing ahead by night. He had been forced on many occasions to retrace his steps or make circuitous rounds owing to coming suddenly on villages or towns, and he had not made the progress he had resolved to make. His food, too, he had miscalculated; and at the close of the twelfth day he found himself with his rations at an end, and hopelessly befogged as to his whereabouts. For another day and night he held out bravely, and then narrowly avoided detection in a fruitless attempt to steal a chicken from a farmyard. At the expiry of a fortnight he was starving and in the throes of a fever.

He came to a final decision. He would start again at dusk and press on. If by daylight there was no sign of the frontier he would give himself up. There was nothing else for it. He was in desperate straits: his clothes were torn to rags and he was almost overcome by the fierce grip of the fever that was rapidly consuming his little remaining strength. He had given up all hope of winning to the haven of neutral territory; it might not be far away, perhaps, but his power of endurance was at an end. However, he would forge ahead that night, whatever happened.

As soon as darkness rendered it safe he emerged from his concealment and struck westward along the edge of a rough country road. For hours he toiled along meeting with nobody, but making poor progress. He was becoming light-headed, and he lurched heavily as he walked. At intervals he burned and shivered and sweated fiercely. Time and again he fell on his face, but on each occasion he staggered to his feet and struggled ahead.

The night wore on, and through the clouds on the eastern skyline a palish light began to filter. The skies grew dull grey and then softer like the wing of a dove. Over the fields and hedgerows the luminous glow grew clearer as the wheels of the Dawn rolled on, touching the bare branches of the trees and silvering the green stagnant water in the ditch, by whose edge reeled and pitched an exhausted atom of humanity.

Niall raised his bloodshot eyes to the heavens.

"Well, this is the end of it," he muttered, "and probably the end of me too. I don't mind ... it's been a good effort, and I'm so tired ... my God, how tired I am!"

A hundred yards ahead a high wall began, evidently the bound of some large country residence, and not much further on was a small iron gate. Inside, a footpath led winding among the trees of a wide parkland. With shaking hands Niall unlatched the gate and followed the path. He could not see now where he was going: a red mist hung like a veil before his eyes. Once he ran against a tree, striking his head violently against the trunk. Dazedly he raised his hand to his forehead and felt it wet.... Shortly afterwards he reached the end of the parkland. Things grew clearer again, and he saw before him, not three hundred yards away, the grey battlemented towers of a stately castle. For a few moments he stared at it in a fuddled manner, then he collapsed into a ditch full of rotting leaves.

When he regained consciousness it was night. He must have lain there all day. Slowly past events came back to him, and he raised himself with difficulty on his elbow and looked at the winking lights in the castle windows. The fever did not trouble him now: all he was conscious of was a fierce, overpowering craving for food and warmth and rest. The twinkle of the lights called to him. It was a German house, certainly, but he would get something to eat there, and they would let him rest—how he wanted rest! His thoughts flew back to his home in the distant western isles. Would they be thinking of him? he wondered. Thank God, they couldn't see him now. His mother, and Eileen his sister ... they would be in the old library where they always sat at night, that vast stone-walled room above the cliff where the moaning of the sea rose eternally. And his father would be asleep in the red leather chair by the gun-room fire. He smiled as the vision rose before him. Would he ever see it again? Great God, why did men want to kill one another?...

His rambling thoughts switched off in another direction ... if they could see him now, perhaps his old father would go to the glass case on the library wall, take from its resting place the black chanter, and blow on it for the last time! He laughed hoarsely—a good joke that! Delirious and cracked, his voice suddenly croaked forth the weird notes of the black chanter's tune. Horrible and broken it rose on the still night air.

In a few moments the delirium passed, and with a mighty effort he got on his hands and knees. Painfully and slowly he began to crawl across the damp grass of the park towards the shadowy mass of the silent castle.

"They'll give me food," he gasped ... "and let me rest."

IV

The Countess von Behr sat in a deep chair by the open fireplace of her boudoir in the Schloss Bersenburg. On the white marble mantelshelf a painted china clock pointed to a quarter past eleven. The luxuriously furnished room was in deep shadow, the only light coming from two massive silver candelabra upon the grand piano in a recess by the window. The flickering glow from the red embers lit up fitfully the face of the woman who gazed abstractedly into the fire.

Four years of mental strain and suffering had left their mark on Helene von Behr, for there were lines about her eyes and her mouth had grown harder. These years had fallen with tragic weight upon the shoulders of the exiled girl, doomed by the exigencies of the times to live alone in this vast gloomy house, her heart in bleeding France, her body in a country which by hereditary instinct she had always disliked, but now hated with all the intensity of her passionate southern heart. So she had dragged out her solitary days in the seclusion of the Schloss, one of that vast multitude, young in years but old in suffering, whose souls have been ruthlessly crushed beneath the iron wheels of the chariots of war.

The Count had been keenly alive to the delicacy of his domestic situation, and from the outbreak of hostilities, though he had been almost constantly resident in Berlin owing to his important connection with the Foreign Office, he had deemed it the prudent course to leave his French wife in the solitariness of his country home; a policy which saved both himself and her from inevitable embarrassments which might at once prove detrimental to the interests of the one, and intolerable to the other.

The unutterable agony of the weary months in a position which was both false and horrible to her, conscious as she could not fail to be of the veiled contempt and cleverly concealed hostility of her servants, and the less disguised dislike of her few neighbours, had told heavily upon the lonely woman. Two months ago things had become almost insufferable when the news came that the Vicomte de Fontaigne had been laid in a soldier's grave. To fight for the Republic was one thing, but to fight for France was quite another: and so, at the hour of crisis, like the rest of his order, the haughty nobleman had put his politics in his pocket and offered his services to the Govermnent. The grief of her father's death, borne alone, friendless and exiled, had almost crushed Helene. Yet it seemed as if her perplexities were never to end: for that very afternoon a telegram had come intimating in crude staring words, that the Count von Behr had been shot dead in the Wilhelmstrasse while endeavouring from a window to appease a revolutionary mob.

She had tried to analyse her feelings when the news was conveyed to her. She had never loved him, but in his own blunt way he had been kind and considerate to her; and the sudden tears which she shed were from the heart, for she sincerely regretted his death. Yet despite this fact she could not stifle the insistent thought that she was free—free to go back to France and to the Chateau Fontaigne, that pearl of her soul, when this holocaust of death was past and over; a thought rendered doubly moving by the knowledge that the dawn was already breaking! She had often wondered what it would be like in the future for a child of France to be wedded for ever to a German.

As she sat before the fire she felt restless and ill at ease. Her jumbled thoughts refused to be focussed on any one aspect of her affairs. She felt something strange in the atmosphere, something that oppressed her. It seemed in the air, it was all around, real yet indefinable. Time and again she looked round half nervously as if expecting to find someone in the room with her....

She settled deeper into her chair and listlessly watched a morsel that fell red from the fire ... it grew pink and then grey. It still smoked a little, then died. As the lonely woman stared into the embers there suddenly rose before her a boyish face, so clear and vivid that she was startled by it. There was pain in the eyes that looked at her, pain and dull weariness, and the dumb suffering of a yearning spirit. Helene shivered.... How often during these last years had that face risen before her, and the sunlight and happiness of ten brief days in a deserted Lucerne had fallen on her tired heart like the dew of heaven. She had never forgotten him—how could she? She had wondered so often where he was. She knew he was not dead: for he was first in that list of names which she had given to a friend in Berne, desiring him to keep her acquainted with their fortunes. She often thought, had she done wrong that night when she kissed his young mouth? But it didn't really matter, after all: she had done him no harm, and long ago he would have forgotten her. Men forgot so quickly. For his own sake she hoped he had: yet—in spite of herself she prayed that he hadn't. And as she looked ahead, to-night, to her coming liberty, she wondered.... But the face in the fire made her uneasy. A queer tune throbbed in her head—his tune! She had heard it in her thoughts all night; wild, unrhythmical, it seemed to have vibrated in the stillness of the shadowy room—mysterious, passionate, compelling. Once it had been so realistic that she had been convinced that she actually heard it—out in the night; and she had pulled aside the curtains and peered out into the darkness.

She stretched her arms above her head. She felt stifled: surely the room was very hot. Rising, she moved restlessly to the window and looked out. It was a clear, starry night; with a silver moon peeping from behind some scudding clouds. She lingered, gazing up at the beauty of the heavens. Then, just as she was about to let the thick curtain drop, suddenly, muffled yet distinct, she heard a man's voice rise on the night air. It cried one English word—"Help!"

For a minute she stood startled and irresolute, then she flung open the window. Below, on the white of the wide gravel sweep, she could dimly see a dark form lying stretched before the massive steps of the doorway. She leaned over the edge and called. No answer came. She drew back into the room and touched the electric bell. A few seconds later, an old sleepy-eyed footman appeared, their last remaining manservant.

"Quick," she cried, "there is a man lying outside on the gravel. I think he is dead. Get some help and bring him into the hall. I'll come down myself immediately."

The man bowed solemnly and withdrew; and when five minutes later she descended the broad oak staircase, Helene saw an excited knot of servants depositing a human burden on the great fur rug before the cavernous hall fireplace. She approached and looked down upon the form of a man, little more than a skeleton, his clothes ragged and smeared with filth, his thin sunken face bearded and dirty. The cluster of servants stared at him open-mouthed.

The sick man moved an arm. He drowsily muttered a few words; feebly, but Helene and the domestics heard them:

"Must be near the frontier now.... Thank God!"

"English," said the old footman resentfully, but a quick look from his mistress silenced any further remark. She despatched the man for the local doctor and sent the women for blankets, hot water, brandy, pillows; and she herself knelt by the miserable creature and gently loosened his ragged collar. The emaciated face recalled nothing to her as she looked—but, a few seconds later, Gordon Niall opened his eyes, and, trembling like an aspen leaf, and white to the lips, Helene von Behr recognised him.

"Mother of God!" she gasped.

The floodgates of memory opened and the great waters poured over her soul. She felt the walls and the floor of the vast gloomy hall reeling about her; but, with an almost superhuman effort of will, she regained her composure, and met the eyes that looked into her ashen face with a look of wonder and amazement. The fever seemed to have left him, and for the moment Niall was perfectly conscious. She bent down and pillowed his head on her arm.

"Helene," he whispered, "is it you?... where am I?"

"It's all right, dear," she said soothingly. "You're quite safe. Don't speak—you must rest."

The servants returned and Niall was made as comfortable as possible. Helene thought rapidly. At all costs she must be alone with him for a time. She dismissed the whispering women upon various errands. Yes, she said to their enquiries, she would stay with him till they returned.

When they were alone Niall looked up.

"I escaped, you know," he said weakly. "I've had an awful time—but I'm safe now, Helene, am I not?... across the frontier, eh?"

"Yes, yes, my Gordon," she answered, smoothing back his matted hair, "you're across the frontier, and you'll soon be well." She almost choked as she remembered that the frontier was only five miles away.

He sighed contentedly and closed his eyes. For a while he lay very still; then he spoke, with difficulty.

"My left tunic pocket," he gasped, "feel in it, Helene ... that's right ... now, open that flap."

From the tattered leather pocket-book she pulled out a dried withered flower. His eyes gleamed as he saw it. He turned his face to her.

"Your rose," he whispered—"at Lucerne, you know."

A severe fit of shivering seized him. His eyes closed. From the corners of his mouth two thin rivulets of blood began to trickle ... he opened his eyes.

"Helene," he muttered spasmodically, "Helene—the frontier ... I must get across the frontier ... before the morning."

The end was near and she knew it. With her left hand she extracted from her bosom a little gold crucifix and held it before the dying eyes. In a voice, choked with emotion, she said in his ear,

"Say after me, my Gordon ... 'Jesu, have mercy!'"

"Jesu—have—mercy!"

"Now, and in the hour of death"—

"Now, and—in—the hour of—death"—

"Have mercy on me, a sinner!"

"Have mercy—on—me—a sinner!"—

He shivered as in a blast of icy wind, then smiled like a tired child and nestled his head against her breast. And very quietly he crossed the silent frontier of that shadowy country, whence no traveller returns.

The servants were clustered about her, and the stout village doctor was bending over the thin body stretched on the fur rug; but Helene, her head bowed, neither looked up nor spoke....