NEITHER in Galantza nor in Bralatz did Sylvia and Queenie perceive any indication of a fortune. They performed for a week at the VariÉtÉs High Life in Bralatz; but the audience and the salary were equally low, the weather was hot and misty, and the two hotels they tried were full of bugs. In Galantza they performed for two days at the VariÉtÉs Tiptop; but here both the audience and the salary were lower still, the weather was hotter and more misty, and there were as many bugs in the one hotel as in the two hotels at Bralatz put together. Sylvia thought she should like to visit the British vice-consul who had angered Maud so much by his indifference to her future. He was a pleasant young man, not recognizable from her description of him except by the fact that he certainly did smoke incessantly. He invited them both to dine and grumbled loudly at the fate which had planted him down in this God-forsaken corner of Rumania in war-time. He was disappointed to hear that they could not stay in Galantza, but agreed with them about the audience and the salary.

"I can't think who advised you to come here," he exclaimed. "Though I'm glad you did come; it has cheered me up a bit."

"It wasn't Maud," Sylvia said, with a smile.

"Maud?" he repeated. "Who is she?"

"An English girl who took a great fancy to you. She wanted you to pay her fare to Bucharest."

"Oh, my hat! a most fearful creature," he laughed. "A great, pink, blowsy woman with a voice like two trains shunting. I had a terrible time with her. Upon my word, I had actually to push her out of the Consulate. Oh, an altogether outrageous phenomenon! What became of her finally? In Bucharest, is she? Well, she's not a good advertisement of our country in these times. What part of England do you come from?" he added, turning to Queenie.

"London," Sylvia said, quickly. She always answered this kind of question before Queenie could blush and stammer something unintelligible. "But she's been on the Continent since she was a little girl, and can't speak any language except with the accent of the one she spoke last." Then she changed the subject by asking him where he advised them to go next.

"I should advise you to go back to England. These are no times for two girls to be roaming about Europe."

"You'd hardly describe me as a girl," Sylvia laughed. "Even I can no longer describe myself as one. Passports have been fatal to some cherished secrets. No, we can't get back to England, chiefly because we haven't saved enough money for the fare, and secondly because the passport-office in Bucharest didn't consider me a good enough voucher for Queenie's right to a British passport."

"Wouldn't they recommend the consul to issue one?"

Sylvia shook her head.

"Too bad," said the vice-consul, in a cheerful voice. "But that's one of the minor horrors of war, this accumulation of a new set of officials begotten by the military upon the martial enthusiasm of non-combatants. It's rather ridiculous, isn't it, to assume that all consuls are incapable of their own job?... But I suppose I've no business to be displaying professional jealousy at such a moment," he broke off.

"Would you have given her a passport?" Sylvia asked.

The vice-consul looked at Queenie with a smile. "I could hardly have refused, eh?"

But Sylvia knew that, once inside his Consulate, he would probably be even more pedantic than Philip, and this affectation of gallantry over coffee rather annoyed her.

"But what are you going to do?" he went on.

"Oh, I don't know," said Sylvia, curtly. "Leave things to arrange themselves, I suppose."

"Yes, that's a very good attitude to take up when your desk is untidy, but, seriously, I shouldn't advise you to leave things to arrange themselves by touring round Rumania. These provincial towns are wretched holes."

"What's Avereshti like?"

"I don't know. I've never been there. It's not likely to be any better than Galantza or Bralatz, except for being a good deal nearer to Bucharest. Oh dear! everything's very gloomy. That Suvla business will keep out the Rumanians for some time. In fact, I don't think myself they'll ever come in now, unless they come in with the Germans. Why don't you take a week's holiday here?"

But the vice-consul, who had seemed agreeable at first, was getting on Sylvia's nerves with his admiration for Queenie, and she told him that they should leave next day.

"Too bad," he exclaimed. "But that's the way of the world. When a consul would like to be thoroughly bothered by somebody, nothing will induce that person to waste five minutes of his precious time. Your friend Maud, on the contrary, haunted me like a bluebottle."

Avereshti turned out to be a much smaller place than Sylvia had expected. She had heard it spoken of in Bucharest as a favorite summer resort, and had pictured it somehow with a casino, gardens, good hotels, and pretty scenery: the very name had appealed to her with a suggestion of quietude. She had deliberately not gone there at once with Queenie when they left Bucharest because, being not more than sixty kilometers from the capital, she had had an idea that Zozo might think it a likely place for them to visit and take it into his head to seek them out. Even in the train coming back from Galantza she had doubts of the wisdom of turning on their tracks so soon; but their taste of Galantza and Bralatz had been so displeasing that Avereshti with its prefigured charm of situation promised a haven with which the risk of being worried by their enemy could not interfere. They would take a week's holiday before engaging themselves to appear at the casino or whatever the home of amusement was called in Avereshti; then after a short engagement they might perhaps venture back to Bucharest and start saving up money again.

"For what good?" Queenie asked, sadly.

"Oh, something will turn up," Sylvia replied. "Perhaps the war will come to a sudden end, and you'll be able to go to England without a passport."

"You was always dreaming, Sylvia. Happy things cannot come to me so easily as you was thinking."

Since the night of the row at the Trianon Queenie had settled down to a steady despair about the whole of her future, and it was partly Sylvia's powerlessness to restore her to the childish gaiety that was so attractive in one whom she was conscious of protecting which had made her conceive such a distaste for the two towns they had just left. She was beginning, indeed, to doubt if her intervention between Queenie and the life she had been leading was really worth while. She upbraided herself with a poor spirit, with a facile discouragement, with selfishness and want of faith; yet all the way in the train she was on the verge of proposing that they should go back at once to Bucharest and there definitely part company. The dreary country through which they were traveling and the moist heat of the September afternoon created such a desire for England that the thought of remaining five minutes longer in Rumania was becoming intolerable. Sylvia began to make plans to telegraph home for money, and while she pondered these she began to think about Jack and Olive and the twins. Jack, of course, would be a soldier by now; but Olive would be in Warwickshire. Perhaps at this moment she was walking through a leafy path in Arden and wondering what her lost friend was doing. Sylvia tried to conjure familiar English scents—the smell of blue-bells and young leaves, the smell of earth in a London window-box after being watered, and, most wistfully of all, the smell of the seaside on a breathless day of late summer when the sun was raining diamonds into the pale-blue water—that so poignantly English seaside smell of salt sand and pears in paper bags, of muslin frocks and dusty shrubs and warm asphalt. It might be such a day in England now, such a day at Eastbourne or Hastings. The notion of enduring any longer these flat Rumanian fields, this restless and uncertain existence upon the fringe of reality, this pilgrimage in charge of a butterfly that must soon or late be caught, clouded her imagination.

"In seeking to direct Queenie's course I am doing something that is contrary to my dearest theory of behavior. When I met her again at Jassy I was in an abnormal and hysterical condition. The sense of having failed myself led me to seize desperately upon her salvation to justify this long withdrawal from the activity of my own world. This world of gipsies is no longer my world. Why, I believe that the real reason I feel annoyed with Philip is because, having roused in me a sense of my unsuitableness to my present conditions and actions, he does not trouble to understand the effect that talking to him had upon me. Here I am at thirty-two thinking like an exaltÉe school-girl. Thirty-two! Just when I ought to be making the most tremendous efforts to anchor myself to some stable society that will carry me through the years to come, the years that without intellectual and spiritual pleasures will be nothing but a purgatory for my youth, I find myself more hopelessly adrift than ever before. It will end in my becoming a contemplative nun in one last desperate struggle to avoid futility. It is a tragedy for the man or woman who realizes futility without being able to escape from it. That's where the Middle Ages were wiser than we. Futility was impossible then. That's where we suffer from that ponderous bog of Victorianism. When one pauses to meditate upon the crimes of the Victorian era! And it's impossible not to dread a revival of Victorianism after this war. It's obvious that unless we defeat the Teuton quickly—and there's no sign of it—we shall be Teutonized in order to do it. And then indeed, O grave where is thy victory? Will the Keltic blood in England be enough to save her in ten years' time from a base alliance with these infernal Germans in order that the two stupidest nations in the world may combine to overlay it? Will this war at last bring home to Europe the sin of handing herself over to lawyers? Better the Middle Ages priest-ridden than To-day lawyer-ridden. At least if we are going to pay these rascals who exploit their country, let us have it well exploited. Don't let us call in one political plumber after another whose only object is to muddle the state for his successor to muddle it still more that he may be called in again to muddle it again—and muddle—and muddle eternally! When one reads in the papers the speeches of politicians, of what can one be reminded but of children playing cat's-cradle over the tortured body of their mother? Yet what business have I to be abusing lawyer and politician when I lack the strength of mind to persevere in a task which I set myself with my eyes open? Unless I suffer in achieving it, it will not be worth the achievement. Surely the human soul that has suffered deeply can never again acknowledge futility? O England, perhaps it is a poor little pain to be away from you now, a mean little egotistical ache at the best, but away from you I see your faults so much more clearly and love you for them all the more."

The train entered the station, and Sylvia perceived that there was nothing beautiful about Avereshti in the way she had fancied. Yet she was ashamed now of the temptation to desert Queenie; therefore, though the train was going on to Bucharest, she hurried her out on the platform, and when they reached the Hotel Moldavia she took a room for two weeks, paying for it in advance lest she should be tempted by her disappointment with Avereshti to hurry back to Bucharest again, the inevitable result of which in her present mood would be to abandon her friend.

Avereshti, instead of being situated amid the romantic scenery that one expected from a celebrated summer resort, was surrounded by oil-fields which disfigured still more the flat environment. It was too large for genuine rusticity, too small for its assumption of European civilization, and too commercial for gaiety. Possibly during the season the shareholders and owners of the oil-fields came here to gloat for a week upon the sources of their prosperity; if they did, they had all of them left by the middle of September; the VariÉtÉs Alcazar was closed and the playbills were already beginning to peel off the walls. Whatever life there was in Avereshti displayed itself in the Piatza Carol I, the pavement of which was planted with trees clipped out of any capacity to cast a pleasant shade. The Hotel Moldavia, flanked by cafÉs, occupied one side of it, a row of respectable shops another, a large municipal hall of the crudest Germanic architecture fronted the hotel, and along the remaining side ran a row of market booths, the insult of which to the progress of Avereshti was greatly resented by the inhabitants and always apologized for and explained in the first few minutes of conversation.

The appearance of Sylvia and Queenie in this square on the morning after their arrival created an interest that soon developed into a pertinacious and disconcerting curiosity. If they entered a shop to make some small purchases, a crowd gathered outside and followed them to the next shop, and finally became such a nuisance that they retired to the balcony outside their room—a long wooded balcony of a faded tint of green—and watched the populace gathering to stare at them from below. When the sun became too hot for this entertainment, they took refuge in the big bedroom which had the unusual merit of being free from bugs. Queenie dreamed away the morning with her lithographs; Sylvia read War and Peace. Late in the afternoon they went out again on the balcony and were amused to see that the frequenters of the cafÉs on either side of the hotel had moved their chairs hornwise far enough out into the square to obtain a view of their movements. Sylvia suggested to the waiter that they should give a musical performance from the balcony, but he replied, quite seriously, that it was not strong enough: otherwise, he left them to understand, there would have been no objection.

"Yet really, after all, it's not so bad here," Sylvia declared. "We'll stay a few days, and then I'll go into Bucharest and prospect. Perhaps Zozo will be gone by now."

Avereshti possessed, at any rate, the charm of making one feel lazy; to feel lazy and to be able to gratify one's laziness was, after nearly a year of ceaseless work, pleasant enough. On the third afternoon the waiter came up with six visiting-cards from local gentlemen who desired their acquaintance. Sylvia told him that they were not anxious to make any friends; he smiled and indicated two names as those that would best repay their choice.

"We wish to be left quite alone," Sylvia repeated, irritably.

"Then why do you walk about on the balcony?" the waiter asked.

"We walk about on the balcony because it's the only place where we can walk about without being annoyed by a crowd. You don't expect us to remain in our room day and night, do you?"

The waiter smiled and again called attention to the desirable qualifications of the two visiting-cards he had first thrust into prominence. He added that both the gentlemen, M. Stefan Florilor and M. Toma Enescu, were particularly anxious to make the acquaintance of the fair young lady; that M. Florilor was young, handsome, and the son of the richest man in Avereshti; and that, though M. Enescu was not young, he was very rich. Perhaps the ladies would invite them to take coffee? It would be easy to get rid of the other four visiting-cards.

Sylvia told the waiter to get rid of all six and never again to have the impudence to refer to the subject; but he continued to extol his clients, until at last Sylvia in a rage knocked the card-tray out of his hand with the volume of War and Peace that he was interrupting, upon which he retired, muttering abuse.

About ten minutes afterward the waiter came back and told Sylvia that all the gentlemen were gone away except M. Florilor, who insisted upon being received.

"Insists?" cried Sylvia. "But is he the crown prince of Avereshti?"

The waiter shrugged his shoulders.

"His father has a mortgage on the hotel," he explained. "And the proprietor would be very much upset to think that any discourtesy had been shown to the son."

"Have we paid for this room?" Sylvia demanded.

The waiter agreed with her that they had paid for it.

"Very well, when we ask for free board and lodging it will be time enough to talk about the proprietor's annoyance at our refusal to receive his creditors."

She indicated the direction of the door with a contemptuous inclination of the head, and the waiter retired.

"I don't know how you can be so strong to talk like that," Queenie marveled. "If I was being alone here I should be too frightened to speak so to the waiter. Suppose they was all to murder us to-night?"

When Queenie spoke like this, Sylvia's old sense of guardianship flowed again as fast as ever, and any impulse to abandon her was drowned in a flood of rage against the arrogance of money with its sale and purchase of human lives. There was something less distasteful about the domination of Zozo than about the attempted domination of this young Rumanian puppy yelping in his back yard of a town. If the juggler were to arrive in Avereshti to-night and in a frenzy of balked passion were to murder both herself and Queenie, there would be a kind of completeness about the action that made the presentiment of it a sane and feasible terror; but that Queenie should have been reduced to a condition of semi-idiocy merely by the fact that the accidents of her childhood had put her for sale on the market of life did seem to Sylvia inexpressibly revolting.

"And we credit ourselves with the abolition of slavery! I am not sure that the frank slavery of the past was not more moral than the unadmitted slavery of the present. At any rate, it carried with it its own penalty in the demoralization and decay of the owners; but I perceive no prospective penalty for this sort of thing. A young barbarian whose father has grown rich and fat upon petroleum sees a girl that takes his fancy and sends up his card; the proprietor of the hotel threatens us through that pimping waiter with the enmity of his father's debtor. This happens to be a crude case because we are living temporarily in a crude country; but less crudely the same thing goes on in England. It is true that we shrink there from the licensed brothel, and that we are still able to shrink from that is something to be grateful for; yet, though we refrain from inflicting an open shame upon womanhood, we pay very little attention to the rights of the individual woman and child, or, for the matter of that, to the rights of the individual man. We no longer allow the bodies of children to be slowly murdered in factories, but we offer not the least objection to their employment in nice healthy amusing occupations such as selling newspapers for great monopolies or dancing in the theaters. There can be no defense of employing child labor, and the man who defends it is the equal of the most brutalized and hardened souteneur. I still think that the greater part of humanity is so naturally inclined to be enslaved that the bestowal of freedom will in a short time land the world in the same state as before; but what I don't understand is the necessity for a reformer or the philanthropist to be anything except profoundly cynical. It always seems to be assumed that a desire to help other people implies a belief that other people will benefit from the help. I should like to meet an unadvertising philanthropist who was willing to admit that his philanthropy was a vice like secret drinking. One occasionally perceives signs of a sick conscience in some large anonymous contribution to charity; I always suspect the donor of expiating a monstrous crime. I can imagine being haunted by the fear of a peerage in return for the expenditure upon a Lord Mayor's fund of the superfluous savings of a wicked life."

"Of what are you thinking?" Queenie asked.

"I'm thinking, my dear, that visits from the jeunesse dorÉe of Avereshti tend to infect me with an odious feeling of self-righteousness. The result of reading Tolstoi and arguing with a waiter about the sale of your body to M. Florilor has reduced me to a state of morbid indignation with the human race. But the problem that's bothering me is my ultimate ineffectiveness. I'm like a chained-up dog, and I am realizing that noise, to be a real weapon of defense, requires listeners. I'm a little afraid, Queenie, that unless I can do more than bark, I shall lose you."

"When shall you lose me?"

"When the web of my theory in which I'm sitting like a spider gets swept away by something more powerful than you, my butterfly, whom even without interference I can scarcely retain. You'll escape me then and be caught finally in a net, and I shall scuttle off and hide myself in a dark corner until I die of inanition and chagrin."

"I was not understanding one word of what you were saying," said Queenie. "First you were being a dog. After you were being a spider. Who was ever to understand you?"

"Who indeed?" Sylvia murmured with half a sigh, as she went out on the balcony and looked down upon the frequenters of the cafÉs, whose heads, when she appeared, were simultaneously lifted to regard her with a curiosity that her elevated position made impersonal as the slow glances of cattle at pasture.

That evening after dinner the first sign of the proprietor's displeasure at the snub administered to the heir of his chief creditor was visible in a bill for their board of three days. The sum was not large, but by using up their small cash it involved breaking into the five-hundred-franc note that represented the last of the money they had saved since February. Sylvia had always kept this note in a pocket of her valise; now when she went up to their room to fetch it it was gone. The discovery of the loss was such a blow at this moment that she could not speak of it to Queenie when she came down-stairs again; she paid what was owing with the last halfpenny they had, and sat back revolving internally in her mind how, when, and where that five-hundred-franc note could possibly have been lost. Suddenly she had an idea that she might have moved it to another pocket and, leaving a half-smoked cigarette balanced against the saucer of her coffee-cup, she ran up-stairs again to verify the conjecture. Alas! it was the emptiest of conjectures, and in a fever of exasperation she searched wildly in all sorts of unlikely places for the missing money. When the bedroom was scattered with her clothes to no purpose, she went back to the dining-room, where she found that the waiter had taken the half-smoked cigarette in clearing away the coffee-cups.

"Didn't you keep that cigarette?" she demanded.

Queenie looked at her in surprise.

"Why to keep a cigarette?" she asked.

"Because I haven't another."

"Well, ring for the waiter. He shall bring one for you."

"No, no, it doesn't matter," Sylvia muttered; but the waste of that last precious cigarette brought home to her more than anything else that there was absolutely not even a halfpenny left in her purse after paying for the food they had had, and abruptly with the transmutation of that insignificant object to something of immense value arrived a corresponding change in Sylvia's attitude to the whole of life.

In the first case the larger share of the money she had lost so carelessly—with an effort she drove from her brain the revolving problem of how, when, and where—belonged to Queenie. Hence her responsibility toward Queenie was doubled, because if in certain moods of disillusionment she had been able to set aside her former responsibility as nothing but a whim, there was now a positive and material obligation that no change of sentiment could obliterate. Any harm that threatened Queenie now must be averted by herself, no matter at what cost to herself; somehow money must be obtained. It was plain that they could expect no consideration from the proprietor of the hotel; the way in which he had demanded payment for their day's board proved as much. Having accepted the money in advance for this room, he could not eject them into the street; but unless it suited him he was under no obligation to feed them. What a precipitate fool she had been to pay for a fortnight's lodging in advance! Seventy francs flung away! She might ask for them back, or at any rate for the fifty francs' worth of lodging of which they would not have availed themselves if they left to-morrow. With fifty francs they would reach Bucharest, where something might turn up. But suppose nothing did turn up? Suppose that damned juggler found Queenie and herself without a halfpenny? Even that was better than starving here or surrendering to M. Stefan Florilor.

Sylvia went out to ask the proprietor if he would give her back the money she had paid in advance for a room she and her friend found themselves unable any longer to occupy. The proprietor shrugged his shoulders, informed her in his vile French that he had never demanded the sum in advance, assured her that he had refused the room twice to important clients who had wanted it for next week, and altogether showed by his attitude that he had been too much embittered by the reception of M. Florilor to stand upon anything except his strict rights. It was clear that these rights would include refusal of any food that was not paid for at the time. Such behavior might be unjust and unreasonable, she thought, but, after all, it was not to be expected that an empty pocket was going to tempt the finer side of human nature. Sylvia went back to Queenie, who was looking in bewilderment at the clothes strewn about the bedroom. She explained what had happened, and Queenie ejaculated:

"There, fancy! We have no money now. Never mind, I can be friends with that gentleman who was asking to know me. He will give me the money, because if he wants me very much he will have to give much money. Yes, I think?"

Sylvia could have screamed aloud her rejection of such a course.

"What, after keeping you away from men for six months, to let you go back to them on account of my carelessness? Child, you must be mad to think of it."

"Yes, but I have been thinking, Sylvia. I have been thinking very much. When I was going to be English and you were saying to me that I should have a passport and be going to England and be English myself, it was good for me to care nothing at all for men; but now what does it matter? I am nothing. I am just being somebody lost, and if I am going with men or not going with men I am still nothing. Why to be worried for money? I shall show you how easy it is for me to have money. It is true what I am speaking. You could be having no idea how much money I can have. And if I am nothing, always nothing, why must I be worrying any more about money? You are so sweet to me, Sylvia, so kind. No one was ever being so kind to me before. So I must be kind to you now. Yes, I think? Are you crying about that money? I think you are stupid to cry for such a little thing as money."

"There are things, my rose, that must not, that shall not happen," Sylvia cried, clasping the child in her arms. "And that you should ever again sell yourself to a man is one of them."

"But I am nothing."

"Ah," thought Sylvia, "here is the moment when I should be able to say that every one to God is everything; but if I say it she will not understand. What hope is there for this child?" Then aloud she added, "Are you nothing to me?"

"No, to you I am something, and if my brother was here I would be something to him."

"Very well, then, you must not think of selling yourself. I lost the money. I shall find a way of getting more money. I have a friend in Bucharest. I will telegraph to him to-morrow and he will send us money." And to herself she thought: "This is indeed the ultimate irony, that I should ask a favor of Philip. Yet perhaps I am glad, for if I did him the least injury years ago, no priest could have imagined a more appropriate penance. Yes, perhaps I deserve this."

The next morning, when Sylvia ordered coffee, the waiter presented the bill for it at the same time, and when she tore it up he seemed inclined to take away the coffee; he retreated finally with a threat that in future nothing should be served to them that was not paid for in advance.

"They are being nasty with us," Queenie solemnly enunciated.

"Never mind. We shall have some money to-night, or at any rate to-morrow morning. We must put up with fasting to-day. It's Friday, appropriately enough. Good heavens!" Sylvia exclaimed. "I haven't even got the money to send a telegram. We must raise a few francs. Perhaps I could borrow some money with a trinket. Good gracious! I never realized until this moment that I haven't a single piece of jewelry! It takes the sudden affliction of extreme poverty to discover one's abnormality and to prove how essential it is not to be different from everybody else. Come, Queenie, you must lend me your two brooches."

Sylvia took the daisy of brilliants set round a topaz, and the swallow of sapphires—all that Queenie had kept after her disastrous expulsion from Russia—and visited the chief local jeweler, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to buy them.

"But at least you can lend me twenty francs upon them until to-morrow," Sylvia urged.

He shrugged his shoulders again and bent over to pick at the inside of a watch with that maddening indifference of the unwilling purchaser. Sylvia could not bring herself to believe in his refusal and suggested a loan of fifteen francs. Nothing answered her except the ticking of a dozen clocks and the scraping of a small file. There was a smell of drought in the shop that seemed to symbolize the personality of its owner.

"Ten francs?" Sylvia begged.

The jeweler looked up slowly from his work and regarded her with a fishy eye, the fishiness of which was many times magnified by the glass that occupied it. He raised his chin in a cold negative and bent over his work more intently. Every clock in the shop told a different time and ticked away more loudly than ever. Sylvia gathered up the trinkets and went away. She tried two other jewelers without success, and she even proposed the loan to a chemist who had a pleasant exterior; finally she had to go back to the hotel without obtaining the money. The day dragged itself along; not even War and Peace could outlast it, and Sylvia wondered why she had never grasped before how much of life radiated from lunch, the absence of which dislocated time itself. Toward six o'clock she came to a sudden resolution, and, going out into the square, she began to sing outside the cafÉ. Four lean dogs came and barked; a waiter told her that the singing was not required. Somebody threw a stone at one of the dogs and cut open its leg; whereupon the other three set upon it, until it broke away and fled howling across the square, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. The drinkers outside the cafÉ looked at Sylvia over the tops of their newspapers, until she went back to the hotel. Such a retirement would ordinarily have made her hot with shame; but she was already hardened by the first pangs of hunger and had only a savage contempt for the people who had thought to humiliate her; she had not been hungry long enough to feel the pathos of a broken spirit; after all, she had only missed her lunch.

Dinner consisted of two stale chocolate creams that were found in a pocket of one of Queenie's jackets; even the bits of silver paper adhering to them seemed to possess a nutritive value.

"But we cannot be going on like this," Queenie protested.

"There must be some way of raising money enough to get to Bucharest," Sylvia insisted. "There must be. There must be. If we really starve, the police will send us there to avoid a death in this cursed hole of a town."

"We must ask that gentleman to tea with us to-morrow," Queenie declared, as she put out the light.

Want of food prevented Sylvia from sleeping, and in her overwrought spirit those good-night words of Queenie seemed to presage the collapse of everything.

"It shall not be. It shall not be," she vowed to herself. "I will not be defeated by squalid circumstances in this dreary little Rumanian town. If thirteen years ago I could sell my body to save my soul, now I can sell my body to save the soul of another. Surely that sacrifice will defeat futility. I had a presentiment of this situation when I was arguing with Philip that afternoon. I warned him that nothing should stand in my way over this girl. And nothing shall! To-morrow I will invite this youth who is the son of the richest man in Avereshti. He will not refuse me twenty francs for my body. If I cannot do this I am worth no more than those trinkets that the jeweler refused to buy for ten francs. I will do this, and accept its accomplishment as the sign that I have fought long enough. Then I will go to Philip and tell him what his refusal has brought about. I will make him give me the passport. But suppose that he is no longer capable of being horrified? Suppose that my behavior of thirteen years ago has rendered him proof against such an emotion? Oh well, we shall see. Am I light-headed? No, no, no. On the contrary, hunger makes one clear-sighted. It must be. It shall be. The duty of the human soul lies in such a complete, such a reckless, such a relentless, such a victorious self-will as can only be assuaged by self-sacrifice. This is the great paradox of life. This is the divine egotism."

Toward dawn Sylvia slept, and woke at sunrise from dreams that were strangely serene in contrast with the tormenting fevers of the night, to find that Queenie was still fast asleep. The beauty of her lying there in this lucid and golden morn was like the beauty of a flower that blooms at daybreak in a remote garden. It was a beauty that caught at Sylvia's heart, a beauty that could only be expressed with tears which were silent as the dew and which, like the dew, sparkled in the daybreak of the soul.

"It is through such tears that people have seen the fairies," she murmured.

Sylvia half raised herself in bed, and, leaning upon her elbow, she watched the sleeping girl so intently that it seemed as if some of herself was passing away to Queenie. This still and virginal hour was indeed time transmuted to the timelessness of dreams, in which absolute love like a note of music rose quivering upon its own shed sweetness to such an ecstasy of sustained emotion that the barest memory of it would secure the wakeful one forever against disillusionment.

"Call it hunger or the divine vision, the result is the same," she murmured. "I was lifted out of myself, and I take it that is the way martyrs died for their faith. From an outsider's point of view I may be only worthy of a foot-note in a manual of psychology; but I 'on honeydew have fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.' Another queer thought: the fasting saint and the drunken sinner both achieve ecstasy by subduing the body, the one with mortification, the other with indulgence. Those whom the gods love die young—they drink too deep and too often of honeydew and become intoxicated even unto death. Wine must serve the man who would live long. Perhaps I am one of those less rare spirits that depend too much on purely material beauty; yet even in defense of so little I can act. Some nightingales love roses: the rest of them love other nightingales. Which do I love? Ah, whether Queenie be rose or nightingale, what does it matter? Nobody that would not stoop to save a wood-louse in his path can claim to love. And I will stoop as low as hell to save this rosebud that has already been gathered and wired and worn in a buttonhole and dropped by the roadside, but surely not yet trodden underfoot."

Queenie woke with a bad headache, and Sylvia went down-stairs to see if she could persuade the waiter to let her have some coffee. He was going to refuse, but when she asked him if he would tell M. Florilor that a visit would be welcomed that afternoon, his manner changed, and presently he came back from an interview with the proprietor to say that he would serve coffee at once. At the same time he brought the bill of fare for lunch, and seemed anxious that they should choose some special delicacy to fortify themselves against the ill effects of the day before. There was no talk of paying for the meal, and the best wine was indicated with that assumption of subservient greed which is common to all good waiters.

After lunch Sylvia told Queenie that she was going out to send off the delayed telegram to Bucharest, and left her lying down with her pictures. Then she consulted the waiter about a room. The waiter agreed that it would be inconvenient to receive M. Florilor in their own, and informed her that the best room in the hotel was ready, adding that he had ordered plenty of cakes and put flowers in the vases.

"I'll go there now," Sylvia announced. "When he comes, bring him straight up."

The brightness of the early morning had been dimmed by a wet mist, and the room allotted for the reception of M. Florilor, which was on the other side of the hotel, looked out over houses covered with sodden creepers and down into gardens of disheveled sunflowers; it was a view that suited the mood Sylvia was in, and for a long time she stood gazing out of the window, trying to detect beyond the immediate surroundings of the hotel some definition of a landscape in the distance. In the light of the morning her resolution had not presented itself as morbidly as now; then it had appeared essentially poetic—a demonstration really of the creative power of the human will; now, like the dejected flowers in the gardens below, it hung limp and colorless. She turned away from the window and sat down in a tight new armchair, the back of which seemed to be inclosed in corsets. Everything in this room was new, and, like all hotel rooms, it depressed one with that indeterminate bleakness which is the property of never having been touched by the warmth of personality. It was bleak as an abandoned shell on the beach, and stirred by nothing save the end of the tide's ebb and flow. The waiter's attempt to give it the significance of human life by cramming bunches of dahlias into a pair of fluted vases only added to the desolate effect. For want of something to do Sylvia began to arrange the flowers with a little consideration for their native ugliness, as one tries to smarten an untidy woman with a bad figure; but when she poured some water into a china bowl and saw floating upon its surface the ends of burned-out matches and cigarettes, she gave up the task. These burned-out relics of transitory occupants seemed typical of the room's effect upon the pensive observer. A confused procession of personalities made up its history, and as these had cast away their burned-out cigarettes and matches, so had they cast behind them the room where they had lodged, preserving no memory of its existence and leaving behind not a single emotion to vitalize the bleak impersonal shell they had thankfully forsaken.

Yet Sylvia, waiting here for the beginning of the heartless drama that would be wrought of her heart's blood pulsing to reinforce her will, rejoiced in this sterility of the setting; it helped her to achieve a similar effect in her own attitude. Just as this room had succeeded in preserving itself from any impression of having ever been lived in by human beings, so she, when the drama was played through, should retain of it no trace. That in it which was real—the lust of man—should be left behind, an ignominious burned-out thing less than a cigarette stump at the bottom of a china bowl.

The waiter came in with a basket of cakes, the cold and sugary forms of which were no more capable than the dahlias of imparting life to the merciful deadness. And how dead it all was! Those red-plush curtains eternally tied back in symmetrical hideousness—they had never lived since the time when some starved and withered soul had sewn those pompons along their edges one after another, pompons as numerous and monotonous as the days of their maker. Indeed, there was not a single piece of furniture, not an ornament nor a drapery, that was not stamped with the hatred of its maker. There was no trace of the craftsman's joy in his handiwork either in thread or tile or knob. There was nothing except the insolence of profit and the dreary labor of slaves. Yet a world stifled by such ugliness talked with distasteful surprise of men who profited by war. With the exploitation of the herd and the sacrifice of the individual that was called civilization what else could be expected? Nowadays even man's lust had to be guaranteed pure and unadulterated like his beer. Better that the whole human race should rot on dunghills with the diseases they merited than that they should profit from an added shame imposed upon the meanest and most miserable tinker's drab. People were shocked at making a hundred per cent. upon a shell to blow a German to pieces; but they regarded with equanimity the same profit at the expense of a child's future. Wherever one looked, there was nothing but material comfort set as the highest aim of life at the cost of beauty, religion, love, childhood, womanhood, virtue—everything. Then two herds met in opposition, and there was war; the result had made everybody uncomfortable, and everybody had declared there must never again be war. But so long as the individual submitted to the herd, war would go on; and the most efficient herd with the greatest will for war would succeed because it would be able to offer greater comfort at the time and higher profits afterward. Yet the individual had nearly always much that was admirable; the most sordid profiteer possessed a marvelous energy and perception that might be turned to good, if he could but realize that virtue is the true egotism and that vice is only a distorted altruism.

"I've always hated ants and loathed bees," Sylvia cried. "And in certain aspects the human race makes one shudder with that sense of co-operative effort running over one which I believe is called formication."

The waiter came in to announce M. Florilor's arrival.

"Now we get the individual at his worst just when I've been backing him against the herd. This is formication spelled with an 'n.'"

Stefan Florilor resembled a figure in a picture by Guido Reni. A superficial glance would have established him as a singularly handsome, well-built, robust, and attractive young man; a closer regard showed that his good looks owed too much to soft and feminine contours, that the robustness of his frame was only the outward form of strength with all the curves but nothing of the hardness of muscle, and that his eyes flashed not as the mirrors of an inward fire, but with liquid gleams of sensuous impressions caught from outside. He really was extremely like one of Guido Reni's triumphant and ladylike archangels.

They talked in French, a language that Florilor spoke without distinction, but with a pothouse fluency—no doubt much as one of Guido Reni's archangels might have picked it up from one of Guido Reni's devils.

"What a fatally seductive language it is!" Sylvia exclaimed at last, when she had complimented him as he evidently expected to be complimented upon his ease. "Whenever I hear a tea-table conversation in French I suspect every one of being a poet or a philosopher: whenever I read a French poet I want to ask him if he likes his tea strong or weak."

"Your friend is English also?" Florilor inquired.

He took advantage of the ethnical turn in the conversation to express his own interest in a problem of nationality.

"Yes, she is English."

"And no doubt she will be coming down soon?"

"She's not coming down. She has a headache."

"But perhaps she will be well enough to dine this evening with me?"

"No, I don't think she will be well enough," said Sylvia.

The young man's face clouded with the disappointment; his features seemed to thicken, so much did their fineness owe to the vitality of sensual anticipation.

"Perhaps to-morrow, then?"

"No, I don't think she will ever be well enough," Sylvia continued. Then abruptly she put her will to the jump and cleared it breathlessly. "You'll have to make the best of me as a substitute."

Afterward when the reality that stood at the back of this scene had died away Sylvia used to laugh at the remembrance of the alarm in Florilor's expression when she made this announcement. She must have made it in a way so utterly different from any solicitation that he had ever known. At the moment she was absurdly positive that she had offered herself to him with as much freedom and as much allurement as his experience was able to conjecture in a woman. When, therefore, he showed by his temper that he had no wish to accept the offer, it never struck her that, even had he felt the least desire, her manner of encouragement would have frozen it. A secondary emotion was one of swift pride in the detachment of her position, which was brought home to her by the complete absence of any chagrin—such as almost every woman would have felt—at the obvious dismay caused by her proposal to substitute herself for her friend.

"I'm afraid I must go. I'm busy," he muttered.

"But you haven't had any cake," Sylvia protested.

"Vous vous fichez de moi," he growled. "Vous m'avez posÉ un sale lapin."

He looked like a greedy boy, a plump spoiled child that has been deprived of a promised treat.

"What did she come here for," he demanded, "if she's not prepared to behave like any other girl? You can tell her from me that finer girls—girls in Paris—have been glad enough to be friends with me."

"Caprice and mystery are the prerogatives of woman," Sylvia said.

"I'm glad she can afford to be capricious when she has not enough money to pay for her food."

"I'm not going to argue with you about your behavior, though I could say a good deal about it. At present I can't be as rude as I should like. You see, you've just paid me the compliment of declining to accept the offer of myself. The fact that either I am sufficiently inhuman or that you are too bestial for the notion of any intercourse between us leaves me with a real hope in my heart that there is a difference between you and me. You've no idea of the lowering effect, nay more, of the absolute despair it would cast over my view of life, had I to regard you as belonging to the same natural order as myself. It would involve belief in the universal depravity of man."

"Ah, vous m'emmerdez!" he shouted, as he ran from the room. Sylvia cried after him to remember the fate of the Gadarene shrine and to avoid going down-stairs too fast. Then to herself she added:

"Ecstasies and dreams of self-abnegation! What are they beside the pleasure of conflict face to face? The pleasure would have been keener, though, if I could have hurt him physically."

In the first elation of escaping from the fulfilment of her intention Sylvia overlooked all the consequences involved in Florilor's withdrawal. Soon in the stillness shed by this bleak room, in the sight of the frozen cakes upon the table, in the creeping obscurity of the afternoon, she was more sharply aware than before of the future, aware of it not as a vague and faintly disturbing horizon too far away still to affect anything except her moods of depression, but as the immediate future in the shape of a chasm at her feet, a future so impassable that she could scarcely think of it in other terms than those of space. It had positively lost the nebulous outlines of time and acquired in their stead the sharp materialism of hostile space. The future! Calculations of how to bridge or leap this gap went whirling through Sylvia's brain, calculations that even included projects of fantastic violence, but never one that envisaged the surrender of a single scruple about Queenie. The resolve she had made that morning, however its practical effect seemed to have been nullified by Florilor's rejection of her sacrifice, had woven each separate strand of her thought and emotion so tightly round the steel wire of her will that nothing could have snapped the result. There was not a bone in her body, not a nerve nor a corpuscle, that did not thrill to the command of her will and wait upon its fresh intention with a loyalty that must endow it with an invincible tenacity of purpose.

The sense of an omnipotent force existing in herself was so strong that when Sylvia saw a golden ten-franc piece lying in the very middle of the fiddle-backed armchair on which Florilor had been sitting, she had for a moment the illusion of having created the coin out of air by the alchemy of her own will.

"Many miracles have deserved the name less than this," she murmured, picking up the piece of gold. For the second time in her life she was able to enjoy the sensation of illimitable wealth; by a curious coincidence the sum had been the same on both occasions. She preened her nail along the figured edge, taking delight in the faint luxurious vibration.

"Misers may get very near to Paradise by fingering their gold," she thought. "But the fingering of gold preparatory to spending it is Paradise indeed."

She went back to Queenie, clasping the coin so tightly that even when she had put it in her purse it still seemed to be resting in her palm.

"Will you be leaving me here?" Queenie exclaimed, in dismay, when she heard of Sylvia's plan for going to Bucharest to-morrow morning and interviewing Philip.

"There's not enough money to take us both there, but I shall come back to-morrow evening; and then we'll flaunt our wealth in the faces of these brutes here."

"But I shall be so hungry to-morrow," Queenie complained.

"Fool that I am," Sylvia cried. "The cakes!"

She rushed away and reached the other room a moment before the waiter arrived with his tray.

"These cakes belong to me," she proclaimed, snatching up the china basket and hugging it to her breast.

The waiter protested that they had not been paid for; but she swept him and his remonstrances aside, and passed out triumphantly into the corridor, where the proprietor of the hotel, a short, greasy man, began to abuse her for the way she had treated Florilor.

"Va-t-en," she said, scornfully.

"Quoi? Quoi ditez? Moi bÂton? Non! Vous bÂton! Comprenez?"

He was in such a rage at the idea of Sylvia's threatening him with a stick, which was the way he understood her French, that he began to dribble; all his words were drowned in a foam of saliva, and the only way he could express his opinion of her behavior was by rapid expectoration. Again Sylvia tried to pass him in the narrow corridor, instinctively holding up the cakes beyond his reach. The proprietor evidently thought she was going to bring down the basket upon his head, and in an access of fear and fury he managed to knock it out of her hands.

"Those cakes are mine," Sylvia really screamed. She felt like a cat defending her kittens when she plunged down upon the floor to pick them up. The proprietor jumped right over her, stamping upon the cakes and the pieces of broken china and grinding them underfoot into the carpet until it looked like a pavement of broken mosaics. Sylvia completely lost her temper at the sight of the destruction of her dinner; and when the proprietor trod upon her hand in the course of his violence she picked up the broken handle of the basket and jabbed his instep, which made him yell so loudly that all the hidden population of the kitchens came out like disturbed animals, holding in their hands the implements of the tasks upon which they had been engaged.

"Vous payez! Vous payez tout! Oui, oui, vous payez!" the proprietor shouted.

The intensity of his anger made his veins swell and his nose bleed, and, not being able to find a handkerchief, he began to bellow for the attentions of his staff. This seemed an appropriate moment for the waiter to get himself back into his master's good graces, and with a towel in one hand and a chamber-pot in the other he came running out of the room where he had been hiding. At the sight of more china the proprietor uttered a stupendous Rumanian oath and kicked the pot out of the waiter's hand with such force that a piece of it flew up and cut his cheek. Sylvia left a momentarily increasing concourse of servants chattering round their master and the man, each of whom was stanching blood with his own end of the towel they held between them: they were all shoveling aside bits of china while they talked, so that they seemed like noisy hens scratching in a garden.

Queenie was standing with big, frightened eyes when Sylvia got back to their room.

"Whatever was happening?"

"An argument over our dinner," Sylvia laughed.

Then suddenly she began to cry, because at such a moment the loss of the cakes was truly a disaster and the thought of Queenie alone without food waiting here for her to return from Bucharest was too much after the strain of the afternoon. She caught the child to her heart and told the story of what had happened with Florilor.

"Now do you understand?" she asked, fiercely. "Now do you understand how much I want you never—but never, never again—even so much as to think of the possibility of selling yourself to a man? You must always remember, when the temptation comes, what I was ready to do for you to prevent such a horror. You must always believe that I am your friend and that if the war goes on for twenty years I will never leave you. You shall come back to England with me. With the money that I'm going to borrow in Bucharest we'll get as far as Greece, anyway. But whatever happens, I will never leave you, child, because I bear on my heart the stigmata of what I was ready to do for you."

"I was not understanding much of what you are talking," Queenie sighed.

"There is only one thing to understand—that I love you. You see this golden bag? The man who gave it to me left inside it a part of his soul; and if he has been killed, if he is lying at this moment a dreadful and disfigured corpse, what does it matter? He lives forever with me here. He walks beside me always, because he obeyed the instinct of pure love. For you I was ready to do an action to account for which, when I search deep down into myself, I can find no motive but love. You must remember that and let the memory of that walk beside you always. Let me go on talking to you. You need not understand anything except that I love you and that I must not lose you. I shall be thinking of you to-morrow when I'm in Bucharest, and I shall eat nothing all day, because I could not eat while you are waiting here hungry. It won't be for long. I shall be back to-morrow night with money. You don't mind my leaving you? And promise me, promise me that you won't unlock your door for a moment. Don't let that horrible youth have his way when I'm gone for the sake of a lunch. You won't, will you? Promise me, promise me."

"Of course I would never do anything with him," Queenie said.

Sylvia held up the ten-franc piece.

"Isn't it a wonderful little coin?" she laughed. "It will take us so far from here. Once when I was a very small girl I found just such another."

"You were being a small girl long ago," Queenie exclaimed. "Fancy! I was always forgetting that anybody else except me was ever being small."

"What a lonely world she lives in," Sylvia thought. "She is conscious of nothing but herself, which is what makes her desire to be English such a tragedy, because she is feeling all the time that she has no real existence. She is like a ghost haunting the earth with incommunicable desires."

Sylvia passed away the supperless evening for Queenie by telling her stories about her own childhood, trying to instil into her some apprehension of the continuity of existence, trying to populate the great voids stretching between her thoughts that so terrified her with the idea of being lost. Queenie really had no conception of her own actuality, so that at times she became positively a doll, dependent upon the imagination of another for her very life. In the present stage of her development she might be the plaything of men without suffering; but Sylvia was afraid that if she again exposed her to the liability by deserting her at this point, Queenie might one day suddenly wake up to a sense of identity and find herself at the moment in a brothel. People always urged in defense of caging birds that if they were caged from the nest they did not suffer. Yet it was hard to imagine anything more lamentable than the celestial dreams of a lark that never had flown. Sylvia knew that at least she had been able to frame clearly the fear she had for Queenie; it lent new strength to her purpose. The horror of the brothel had become an obsession ever since earlier in the year she had passed by a vast and gloomy building which seemed a prison, but which she had been told was the recognized pleasure-house of soldiers. In this building behind high walls were two hundred women, most of whom in a Catholic country would have been cherished as penitents by nuns. Instead of that they were doomed to expiate their first fault by serving the state and slaking the lust of soldiers at the rate of a franc or a franc and a half. These women were fed by the state; they were examined daily by state doctors; everybody agreed that such forethought by the state was laudable. People who protested against such a debasement of womanhood were regarded as sentimentalists: so were people who believed in hell.

"This Promethean morality that enchains the world and sets its bureaucratic eagle to gnaw the vitals of humanity," Sylvia cried. "Prometheus himself was surely only another personification of Satan, and this is his infernal revenge for what he suffered in the Caucasus. The future of the race! Or is my point of view distorted and am I wrong in mocking at the future of the majority? No, no, it cannot be right to secure the many by debasing the few. Am I being Promethean myself in trying to keep hold of you, Queenie? You came back into my life at such a moment that I feel as if you were a part of myself. Yet I can't help divining that there's a weakness in my logic somewhere."

The next morning Sylvia went to Bucharest. She did not remember until she was in the train that it was Sunday; but the passport-office was open and Mr. Mathers was at work as usual. She asked if Mr. Iredale was too busy to see her.

"Mr. Iredale?" the clerk repeated. "I'm sorry to say that Mr. Iredale's dead."

Sylvia stared at him; for a moment the words had no more meaning than a conventional excuse to unwelcome visitors.

"But how can he be dead?" she exclaimed.

"I'm sorry to say that he died very suddenly. In fact, he was taken ill almost immediately after you were here last. It was a stroke. He never recovered consciousness. Mr. Abernethy is in charge temporarily. If you're anxious about your visa, I'm sure Mr. Abernethy will do everything in his power—subject, of course, to the regulations. Oh, certainly, yes, everything in his power."

Mr. Mathers tried by the tone of his voice to convey that, though his late chief was dead, he could not forget the length of the interview he had granted to Sylvia and that the present rulers of the office would pay a tribute to the dead by treating her with equal condescension.

"No, I wanted to see Mr. Iredale privately."

The clerk sighed his sympathy with her position in face of the unattainable.

"Perhaps I shall be wanting a visa presently," she added.

The clerk brightened. Sylvia fancied that in the remote and happy days before the war he must have had experience of the counter. He had offered her the prospect of obtaining a visa instead of seeing Philip again much as a shop assistant might offer one shade of ribbon in the place of another no longer in stock.

Sylvia left the passport-office and, without paying any heed in what direction she walked, she came to the Cimisgiu Gardens and sat down upon a seat beside the ornamental lake. It was a hot morning, and there was enough mist in the atmosphere to blur the outlines of material objects and to set upon the buildings of the city a charm of distance that was as near as Bucharest ever approximated to the mellowing of time. The shock of the news that she had just heard, coming on top of the fatigue caused by her journey without even a cup of coffee to sustain her body, blurred the outlines of her mental attitude and made her glad of the fainting landscape that accorded with her mood and did not jar upon her with the turmoil of a world insistently, almost wantonly alive.

So Philip was dead. Sylvia tried to imagine how the news of his death would have affected her, if he had not lately re-entered her life. Poor Philip! Death out here seemed to crown the pathos of his position, and she wished that she had not parted from him so abruptly, that she had not tried so hard to make him aware of his incongruity in Bucharest, and now, most of all, that she had let him talk, as he had wanted to talk, about their life together. If she had only known that he was near to death she should have told him of her gratitude for much that he had done for her; had he lived to hear the request that she had been going to make him this morning, she was sure that he would have taken pleasure in his ability to be of use once more. She had been wrong to blame him for his attitude toward Queenie. After all, his experiment with herself had not encouraged him to make other experiments in the direction of obeying impulses that took him off the lines he had laid down for his progress through life. She was really the last person who should have asked him to forgo another convention in favor of a girl like Queenie. How had he been paid for marrying a child whom he had met casually in a London cemetery? Very ill, he might consider. Poor Philip! Early next month it would be the fifteenth anniversary of their marriage. He had never known how to manage her; yet how preposterous it should have been to expect anything else. The more Sylvia meditated upon their marriage the more she felt inclined to blame herself for its collapse; and in her present state of weakness the thought that it was now forever too late to tell Philip how sorry she was fretted her with the poignancy of missed opportunity. Beneath that weight of pedagogic ashes there had always been the glow of humanity; if only she could have fanned it to a flame before she left Bucharest by giving him the chance of feeling that he was helping her! Yet she had regarded the favor she was about to ask as such a humiliation that almost she had been inclined to put it on the same level of self-sacrifice as the offer of herself to that Rumanian youth. Now that she had failed with both her self-imposed resolves, how easy it was to see the difference in their degree! Her appeal to Philip would have been the just payment she owed him for that letter she wrote when she ran away; it would have washed out that callow piece of cruelty. But Philip was dead, and the relation between them must remain eternally unadjusted.

In meditating upon her married life and in conjuring scenes that had long been tossed aside into the lumber-room of imagination, Sylvia's spirit wandered again in the green English country and forgot its exile. The warmth and mystery of the autumnal air drowsed all urgency with dreams of the past; for a minute or two she actually slept. She was soon disturbed by the voices of passing children, and she woke up with a shiver to the imperative and tormenting facts of the present—to the complete lack of money, to the thought of Queenie waiting hungry in Avereshti, and to Rumania clouding with the fog of war.

"What on earth am I going to do?" she murmured. "I must sell my bag."

The decision seemed to be made from without; it was like the voice of a wraith that had long been waiting incapable of speech, and involuntarily she turned round as if she could catch the spirit in the act of interfering with her affairs.

"Were I a natural liar, I should vow it was a ghost and frame the episode of Philip's death with a supernatural decoration. How many people who have penetrated to the ultimate confines of themselves have preferred to perceive the supernatural and in doing so destroyed the whole value of their discovery! Yet lying is the first qualification of every explorer."

But setting aside considerations of the subconscious self, Sylvia was for a while horrified at the damnable clarity with which her course of action presented itself. There was no possible argument against selling the bag, and yet to sell it would demand a greater sacrifice than borrowing money from Philip or selling herself to Florilor. The fact that during all this time of strain the idea had never suggested itself before showed to what depths of her being it had been necessary to pierce before she could contemplate the action. Her feeling for the bag far transcended anything in the nature of sentiment; without blasphemy she could affirm that she would as soon have attributed her sense of God in the sacrifice of the Mass to sentiment. But without incurring an imputation of idolatry by such a comparison she could at least award the bag as much value as devout women awarded a wedding-ring; for this golden bag positively was the outward sign that she had affirmed her belief in human love. In whatever tirades she might indulge against the natural depravity of man when confronted by the evidence of it so repeatedly as lately she had been, this bag was a continual reminder of his potential nobility. Certainly a critic of her extravagant reverence might urge that the value of the bag was created by the man who gave it, and that any transference of such an emotion to a natural object was nothing but a surrender to sentiment which involved her in the common fault of seeking to express the eternal in terms of the temporal. But certain acts of worship lay outside the destructive logic of an unmoved critic; the circumstances in which the gift had been made were exceptional and her attitude toward it must remain equally exceptional. And now it must go; its talismanic and sacramental power must rest unappreciated in the hands of another. Yet in selling the bag was she not giving final and practical expression to the impulse of the donor? He had told her, when she had protested against his generosity, that before he was lost in the war his money would be better spent in giving some one something that was desired than in gambling it all away. Equally now would he not say to her that the money were better spent in helping a Queenie than in serving as a symbol rather than as an instrument of love? Or was the intrusion of Queenie into this intimacy of personal communion a kind of sacrilege? The soldier had never intended the bag to acquire any redemptive signification; he had merely chosen Sylvia by chance as the vehicle of one of those acts of sacred egotism which illuminate the divine purpose. It was not to be supposed that the woman with the cruse of ointment was actuated by anything except self-expression, which was precisely what gave her impulse value as an act of worship. The commonplace and utilitarian point of view on that occasion was perfectly expressed by Judas.

"And my own point of view about Queenie is not in the least altruistic. I want to give her something of which I have more than my fair share. I am burdened with an overflowing sense of existence. I have attached Queenie to myself and assumed a responsibility for her in exactly the same way as if I had brought a child into the world. There is no false redemptionism about the mother's relation to her child: there is merely a passion to bequeath to the child the sum of her own experience. My feeling about Queenie partakes of the passionate guardianship with which a loose woman so often shields her child. Certainly I must sell the bag. Who knows what chain of good may not weave itself from that soldier's action? To me he gave an imperishable store of love at the very moment when without the assurance of love my faith must have withered. I, in turn, give all that I can give to balance Queenie's life in the way I think it should be balanced. The next purchaser of the bag may, I should like to think without superstition, inherit with it a sacramental of love that will carry on the influence. And the one who first gave it to me? That almond-eyed soldier swept like a grain of chaff before the winnowing-fan of war? At this very moment perhaps the bullet has struck him. He has fallen. His company presses forward or is pressed back. He will lie rotting for days between earth and sky, and when at last they come to bury him they will laugh at the poor scarecrow that was a man. They will speculate neither whence he came nor who may weep for him; but his reward will be in his handiwork, for he will have shown love to a woman and he will have died for his country; such men, like stars, may light a very little of the world's darkness, but they proclaim the mysteries of God."

With all her conviction that she was right in selling the bag, it was with a heavy heart that Sylvia left the Cimisgiu Gardens to seek a jeweler's shop; when she found that all the shops were shut except those open for the incidental amusements of the Sunday holiday, she nearly abandoned in relief the idea of selling the bag in order to go back to Avereshti and trust to fate for a way out of her difficulties. On reflection, however, she admitted the levity of such behavior, if she wished to regard her struggle as worth anything at all, and she sharply brought herself back to the gravity of the position by reminding herself that it was she who had lost the five hundred francs, a piece of carelessness that was the occasion, if not the cause, of what had happened afterward. If anything was to be left to hazard, it must be Queenie to-night alone in that hotel; besides, if further argument were necessary, there was not enough change from the ten francs to get back. Sylvia had promised Queenie that she would not eat until she saw her again, but she had not counted upon the effect of this long day, to be followed by another long day to-morrow. How much money had she? Three francs twenty-five. Oh, she must eat; and she must also send a telegram to Queenie! Otherwise the child might do anything. But she must eat; and suddenly she found herself sitting at a table outside a cafÉ, with a waiter standing by on tiptoe for her commands. The coffee tasted incredibly delicious, but the moment she had finished it she was overcome by a sensation of nausea and pierced by remorse for her weakness in giving way. She left the cafÉ and went to the post-office, where she spent all that was left of her money in a long telegram of exhortation and encouragement to Queenie.

The problem of how to pass the rest of the day weighed upon her. She did not want to meet any of the girls at the Trianon; she did not want to meet anybody she knew until she could meet him with money in her pocket. To-night she would stay at their old hotel in Bucharest; she would say that she had missed the train back to Avereshti, if they wondered at the absence of luggage. Oh, but what did it matter if they did wonder? It was her sensitiveness to such trifles as these that brought home to Sylvia how much the strain of the last week had told upon her. Walking aimlessly along, she found herself near the little mission church and turned aside to enter it. At such an early hour of the afternoon the church was empty, and the incense of the morning Mass was still pungent. There was the same sort of atmosphere that exists in a theater between a matinÉe and an evening performance; the emotion of the departed worshipers was mingled with the expectation of more worshipers to come. Sylvia sat contemplating the images and wondering about the appeal they could make. She tried to put herself in the position of the humble and faithful soul that could derive consolation and help from praying before that tawdry image of the Sacred Heart. She wished that she could be given the mentality of a poor Italian girl whose sense of awe was so easily satisfied and who could behold those flames of cheap gold paint around the Heart burning like the eyes of Seraphim.

"Yet, after all," she thought, "are we superior people, who suppose that such representations hurt the majesty of God, any nearer to Him with our equally pretentious theories of His manifestation? What in the ultimate sum of this world's history, when the world itself hangs in the sky like a poor burned-out moon, will mark the difference between the great philosopher with his words and the most degraded savage with his idols? And am I with my perception of God's love in a golden bag less hopelessly material than the poor Italian girl who bows before that painted heart?"

The influence of the church began to penetrate Sylvia's mind with a tranquilizing assurance of continuity, or rather with the assurance of silent and universal forces undisturbed by war. The sense of the individual's extinction in the strife of herd with herd had been bound to affect her very deeply, coming, as it did, at a time when she had once again challenged life as an individual by refusing any co-operation with the past.

"The worst of feeling regenerated," she thought, "is that such an emotion or condition of mind implies the destruction of all former experience. Of course, former experience must still produce its effect unconsciously; but one is too sensible of trying to bring the past into positively the same purified state as the present. When I was thinking about Philip this morning and reliving bygone moments, I was all the time applying to them standards which I have only possessed for about a year. Certainly I perceive that what I call my regeneration must be the fruit of past experience—otherwise the description would be meaningless—but it is the fruit of individual experience ripening at the very moment when individual experience counts for less than it has ever counted since the beginning of the world. Had I always been a social and political animal the idea of the war would not have preyed on my mind as it does; I should have been educated up to the point of expecting it. I remember when I was first told in the Petrograd hospital that a war had broken out, what a trifling impression the news made compared with my own discovery of the change in myself. Gradually during this past year I have found at every turn my new progress barred by the war. My individual efforts perpetually shrink into insignificance before the war, and I am beginning to perceive, unless I can in some way fall into step with the rest of mankind, that what I considered progress is really the retreat of my personality along a disused bypath where I am expending my energy in cutting away briers that were better left alone, at any rate, at such a moment in history. Certainly one of the effects of an ordered religion is to restore the individual to the broad paths along which mankind is marching. An ordered religion is equally opposed either to short cuts or to cul-de-sacs, or to what by their impenetrability to the individual are equivalent to cul-de-sacs. My first instinct about Queenie was certainly right when I was anxious to intrust her to religion rather than to rely upon my personal influence. I think I must have lacked conviction in the way I approached the subject. I must have been timid and self-conscious; and the skeptical side of me that has just been wondering about the appeal of that image of the Sacred Heart may have defeated my purpose without my noticing its intrusion. I was all the time like a grown-up person who plays with children in order to get pleasure from their enjoyment rather than from his own.

"Yes, sitting here in this tawdry little church, I am beginning to make a few discoveries. I must positively lose the slightest consciousness of being superior to Queenie in any way whatsoever. Equally, I must get over the slightest consciousness of being superior to any of the worshipers in this church. I must get over the habit of being injured by the monstrousness of this war until I have been personally injured by it in the course of sharing its woes with the rest of mankind. I have got to find an individualism that while it abates nothing of its unwillingness to be injured by the state is simultaneously always careful in its turn never to injure or impede the state, which from the individual's point of view must be regarded not as a state, but as another individual. Presumably the chief function of an ordered religion is by acting through the individual to apply the sum of mankind's faith, hope, and love under the guidance of the Holy Ghost to the fulfilment of the divine purpose. In such a way the self-perfection of the individual will create the self-perfection of the state, and, oh, what a long time it will take! God is a great conservative; yet when He was incarnate He was a great radical. I wonder if I had ever had a real logical training, or indeed any formal education at all, whether I should be tossed about, as I am, from one paradox to another. The Church was, significantly enough, built upon Peter, not upon John nor upon Thomas; it was founded upon the most human of the apostles. If one might admit in God what in men would be called an afterthought, it might be permissible to look upon Paul as an afterthought to leaven some of the ponderousness of Peter's humanity. Anyway, the point is that the paradoxes began in the very beginning, and it's quite obvious that I'm not going to help myself or anybody else by exposing myself to them rather than to the mighty moral, intellectual, and spiritual fabric into which they have all been absorbed or by which they have all been rejected."

During Sylvia's meditation the church had gradually filled with worshipers to receive the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Generally, that strangely wistful concession to the pathetic side of human nature had not made a deep appeal to Sylvia's instinct for worship; but this afternoon the bravery of self had fallen from her. For the first time she felt in all its force—not merely apprehending it as a vague discomfort—the utter desolation of the soul without God. In such a state of mind faith shrank to infatuate speculation, hope swelled to arrogance, and even love shivered in a chill and viewless futility, until the mystical sympathy of other souls, the humblest of whom was a secret only known to God, led her to identify herself with them and to cry with them:

They were very poor people, these Albanians and Italians who knelt round her in this church; and Sylvia bowed before the thought that all over the world in all the warring nations somewhere about this hour poor people were crying out to God the same words in the same grave Latin. The helplessness of humanity raged through her like a strong wind, and her self-reliance became as the dust that was scattered before it. When the priest held the monstrance aloft, and gave the Benediction it seemed that the wind died away; upon her soul the company of God was shed like a gentle rain, which left behind it faith blossoming like a flower, and hope singing like a bird, and above them both love shining like a sun.

Sylvia went out of the church that afternoon with a sense of having been personally comforted; she was intensely aware of having made more spiritual progress in the last hour than in all the years that had gone by since the first revelation of God.

"Without Him I am nothing, I am nothing, I am nothing," she murmured.

That evening—an evening that she had dreaded indescribably—she sat by the window of her bedroom, happier than she could remember that she had ever been; when the chambermaid, on her way to bed, came to ask her if she wanted anything, Sylvia nearly kissed her in order that perhaps so she might express a little of her love toward all those who in this world serve.

"For such a girl, with the eyes of a nymph, to be serving you, and for you to have presumed to consider yourself above all service that did not gratify your egotism," she exclaimed aloud to her reflection in the glass.

The next morning Sylvia sold her golden bag for fifteen hundred francs. On the way to the station she felt very faint, and finding, when she arrived, that she would have to wait an hour for the train to Avereshti, she drank some coffee. She told herself that it was only the weakness caused by fasting which made her regard so seriously this second breach of her promise to Queenie; nevertheless, nothing could put out of her head the superstitious dread that the surrender caused her. The drinking of coffee while her friend was still hungry took on a significance quite out of proportion to what it actually possessed; she felt like the heroine of a fairy story who disobeys the warnings of her fairy godmother. While she was waiting in the salle d'attente and reproaching herself for what she had done, she heard a familiar voice behind her, and, looking round, saw Philidor in uniform. He was traveling to Bralatz on military duty, and she was glad of his company as far as Avereshti, for all sorts of fears about what might have happened to Queenie during her absence were assailing her fancy. Philidor was surprised to find her still in Rumania and spoke seriously to her about the necessity of leaving at once if she did not want to travel home by Russia.

"You must get away. No one knows what may happen in the Balkans presently. You must get within sight of the sea. You English are lost away from the sea. I assure you that Bulgaria will come in soon. There is no doubt of it. I cannot understand the madness of your English politicians in making speeches to deceive everybody that the mobilization is in self-defense. It is in self-defense, but not on the side of the Entente. You have been poisoned in England by the criminal stupidity of the Englishmen who come out here and see reflected in the eyes of the Bulgarian peasant their own liberal ideals. It is a tradition inherited from your Gladstone. To us out here such density of vision is incomprehensible. The Bulgarian is the Prussian of the Balkans; he is a product of uncompromising materialism. One of your chief Bulgarian propagandists was shot in the jaw the other day; it was a good place to wound him, but it's a pity he wasn't hit there before he did so much harm with its activities. We in Rumania were blamed by idealistic politicians for the way we stabbed Bulgaria in the back in 1913; you might as well blame a man for shooting at a slightly injured wild beast. You have always been too sporting in England, as you say; and not even war with Germany seems to have cured you of it. The Austrians are preparing to invade Serbia, and this time there will be no mistake. Get out of Rumania and get through Bulgaria before the carnage begins."

The conviction with which he spoke gave Sylvia a thrill; for the first time the active side of the war seemed to be approaching her.

"And what is Rumania going to do?" she asked.

The young officer made a gesture of bewilderment.

"Who knows? Who knows? It will be a struggle between sentiment and expediency. I wish that the cry of the rights of small nations was not being so loudly shouted by the big nations. Battle-cries are apt to die down when the battle is over. An idea that presents itself chiefly as a weapon of offense has little vitality; ideas, which are abstractions of liberty, do not like to be the slaves of other ideas. There is one idea in the world at this moment which overshadows all the rest—the idea of victory: the idea of the rights of small nations does not stand much chance against that. God fights on the side of the big battalions. Perhaps I'm too pessimistic. We shall see what happens in Serbia. But to put aside ideas for the moment, don't waste time in following my advice. You must leave Rumania now, if you want to leave at all. And I do not recommend you to stay. A woman like you following your profession should be in her own country in times of war. You are too much exposed to the malice of any private person, and in war justice, like everything else, is only regarded as a contribution to military efficiency."

"You mean I might be denounced as a spy?"

"Anybody without protection may be denounced as a spy. Probably nothing would follow from it except expulsion, but expulsion would be unpleasant."

"I wonder what is the fundamental reason for spy-mania," said Sylvia. "Is it due to cheap romanticism or a universal sense of guilt? Or is it the opportunity for the first time to give effect to vulgar gossip? I think it's the last, probably. It must be very unpleasant to glorify the meanest vice with the inspiration of a patriotic impulse."

"I said that justice was subordinated to military efficiency."

"Yes, and even slander has a temporary commission and is dressed up in a romantic uniform and armed with anonymous letters. Bullets are not the only things with long noses."

"I suppose you can get away? You have money?" Philidor asked.

"Oh, I'm rich," she declared.

"And your little friend, how is she?"

"She's waiting for me at Avereshti."

Sylvia gave an account of her adventures, and Philidor shook his head.

"But it has all ended satisfactorily," he said.

"I hope so."

"It only shows how right I was to warn you of the spy danger—the double danger of being made the victim of a genuine agent and the risk of a frivolous accusation. You may be sure that now, when you go back to the hotel with money, you will be accused everywhere of being a spy. If you have any trouble telegraph to me at Bralatz. Here's my address."

"And here's Avereshti," Sylvia said. "Good-by and good luck. Et vive la Roumanie!"

She waved her hand to him and walked quickly from the station to the hotel. It was good to see the waiter on the threshold and to be conscious of being able to rule him with the prospect of a tip. How second-rate the hotel looked, with money in one's pocket! How obsequiously it seemed to beg one's patronage! There was not a single window that did not have the air of cringing to the new arrival.

"Lunch for two at once," Sylvia cried, flinging him a twenty-franc note.

"For two?" the waiter repeated.

"For myself and Mademoiselle Walters—my friend up-stairs," she added, when the waiter stared first at her and then at the money. "What's the matter? Is she ill? CrÉtin, if she's ill you and your master shall pay."

"The lady who was staying here with madame left this morning with a gentleman."

"Crapule, tu mens!"

"Madame may look for herself. The room is empty."

Sylvia caught the waiter by the throat and shook him.

"You lie! You lie! Confess that you are lying. She was starved by you. She has died, and you are pretending that she has gone away."

She threw the waiter from her and ran up-stairs. Her own luggage was still in the room; of Queenie's nothing remained except a few pieces of pink tissue-paper trembling faintly in the draught. Sylvia rang the bell, but before any one could answer her summons she had fainted.

When she came to herself her first action—an action that seemed, when afterward she thought about it, to mark well the depths of her disillusionment—was to feel for her money lest she might have been robbed during her unconsciousness. The wad of notes had not shrunk; the waiter was looking at her with all the sympathy that could be bought for twenty francs; a blowsy chambermaid, dragged for the operation from a coal-cellar, to judge by her appearance, was sprinkling water over her.

"What was the man like?" she murmured.

The waiter bustled forward.

"A tall gentleman. He left no name. He said he brought a message. He paid a few little items on the bill that were not paid by madame. They took the train for Bucharest. Mademoiselle was looking ill."

Sylvia mustered all that will of hers, which lately had been tried hardly enough, to obliterate Queenie and everything that concerned Queenie from her consciousness. She fought down each superstitious reproach for not having kept her word by drinking the coffee in Bucharest: she drove forth from her mind every speculation about Queenie's future: she dried up every regret for any carelessness in the past.

"Clear away all this paper, please," she told the chambermaid; then she asked the waiter for the menu.

He dusted the grimy card and handed it to her.

"J'ai tellement faim," said Sylvia, "que je saurais manger mÊme toi sans beurre."

The waiter inclined his head respectfully, as if he would intimate his willingness to be eaten; but he tempered his assent with a smile to show that he was sensible that the sacrifice would not be exacted.

"And the wine?" he asked.

She chose half a bottle of the best native wine; and the waiter hurried away like a lame rook.

After lunch Sylvia carefully packed her things and put all her professional dresses away at the bottom of her large trunk. In the course of packing, the golden shawl that contained the records of her ancestry was left out of the trunk by accident, and she put it in the valise, which so far on her journeys she had always managed to keep with her. Philidor's solemn warning about the political situation in the Balkans had made an impression, and, thinking it was possible that she might have to abandon her trunk at any moment, she was glad of the oversight that had led her to making this change; though if she had been asked to give a reason for paying any heed to the shawl now she would have found it difficult. When she had finished her packing she sat down and wrote a letter to Olive.

HOTEL MOLDAVIA, AVERESHTI,
September 27, 1915.

MY DARLING OLIVE,—This is not a communication from the other world, as you might very well think. It's Sylvia herself writing to you from Rumania with a good deal of penitence, but still very much the same Sylvia. I'm not going to ask you for your news, because by the time you get this you may quite easily have got me with it. At any rate, you can expect me almost on top. I shall telegraph when I reach France, if telegrams haven't been made a capital offense by that time. I've wondered dreadfully about you and Jack. I've a feeling the dear old boy is in Flanders or likely soon to go there. Dearest thing, I need not tell you that, though I've not written, I've thought terribly about you both during all this ghastly time. And the dear babies! I'm longing to see them. If I started to tell you my adventures I shouldn't know where to stop, so I won't begin. But I'm very well. Give my love to anybody you see who remembers your long-lost Sylvia.