WHEN Griggsby Doane moved, pain shot through his lame muscle. A vaguely heavy anxiety clouded his brain, engaged as it still was with the specters of confusedly ugly dreams.

The speckled area overhead was gradually coming clear; it appeared to be a plastered ceiling, very small; a little cell of a place... oh, yes, Elmer Boatwright's room!

Faintly through the open window at the foot of the bed came the sound of a distant, shot; another; a rattle of them. And other, nearer shots. Then a slow whistling shriek and a crash. Then the rattle of a machine gun, quite clear. Then a lull.

He sensed a presence; felt rather than heard low breathing; with an effort that was as much of the will as of the body he turned his head.

Betty was sitting there, close by the bed, gently smiling. Almost painfully his slow eyes took her in. She bent over and kissed him, then her little hand nestled in his big one. They talked a little; he in a natural enough manner, if very grave, spoke of his joy in finding her safe. But as he spoke his mind, not yet wholly awake, took on a morbid activity. Did she know what he had done in the night? Had they told her? Anxiously, as she answered him, he searched her delicately pretty face. How young she was! Dwelling amid tragedy, in a degree sobered by it, the buoyancy of youth glowed in her brown eyes, in the texture of her skin, in the waving masses of fine hair, in the soft vividness of her voice; the touch of tragedy would, after all, rest lightly on her slim shoulders. To her the world was young; of the bitter impasse of middle age she knew no hint. Men loved her, of course. Men had died for less than she.... He pondered, swiftly, gloormly, the problem her very existence presented. And he looked on her and spoke with a finer tenderness than any he had before felt toward any living creature, even toward the wife who had left her soul on earth in the breast of this girl.

He decided that they hadn't told her. After all, they wouldn't. They were, when all was said, adult folk. He couldn't himself tell her. But his predicament was pitiful. He knew now, from the honest love in her eyes, that not the least black of his sins had been the doubting her. Never again could he do that. But this realization brought him to the verge of an attitude toward Jonathan Braehey that it was impossible for him to entertain; the mere thought of that man roused emotions that he could not control. But emotions, all sorts, must be controlled, of course; on no other understanding can life be lived. If direct effort of will is insufficient, then counter-activity must be set up.

Betty protested when he told her he meant to get up at once. But it was afternoon. He assured her that his wound was not serious; Dr. Cassin had admitted that, and he had slept deeply. H is muscles were lame; but that was an added reason for exercise.

They had brought in some of the clothing of the large Australian. As he pieced out a costume, he shaped a policy He couldn't, at once, fit into the life of the compound. He couldn't face Brachey. Not yet. The only hope of getting through these days of his passion lay in keeping himself desperately active. He weighed a number of plans, finally discarding all but one. Then he rang for a servant; and sent, while he ate a solitary breakfast, a chit to M. Pourmont.

2

The engineer received him at three. Neither spoke of the incident that had brought them together in the night. To Doane, indeed, it was now, in broad daylight and during most of the time, but a nightmare, unreal and impossible. During the moments when it did come real, he could only set his strong face and wait out the turbulence and bewilderment it stirred in him.

M. Pourmont found him very nearly himself; which was good. He seemed, despite the bandaged shoulder and the thinner face, the Griggsby Doane of old. But his proposal—-he was grimly bent on it—was nothing less than to make the effort, that night, to get through to the telegraph station at Shau T'ing.

M. Fourmunt took the position that the thing couldn't be done. After losing two natives in the attempt, he had decided to conserve his meager manpower and fall back on the certain fact that the legations knew of the siege and were doubtless moving toward action of some sort. Besides, he added, Duane with his courage and his extensive knowledge of the local situation was the man above all others he could least well spare.

Doane, however, pressed his point. “Getting through the lines will be difficult, but not impossible,” he said. “Remember I did get through last night. I believe I can do it again to-night. Even if I should be captured they may hesitate to kill me. I would ask nothing better than to be taken before Kang. He would have to listen to me, I think. And if I do succeed in establishing communication with Peking I may be able to stir them to action. The Imperial Government can hardly admit that they are backing Kang. It may even be possible to force them, through diplomatic pressure alone, to repudiate him and use their own troops to overthrow him. But first Peking must have the facts.”

M. Pourmont smiled.

“If you vill step wiz me,” he said, and led the way down a corridor to his spacious dining-room. There on the table, stood a large basket heaped with apples and pears. “Vat you t'ink, Monsieur Doane! But yesterday comes un drapeau bianc to ze gate viz a let-tair from zis ol' Kang. He regret vair' much zat ve suffair ici ze derangement, an' he hope zat vair' soon ve are again confortable. In Heaven, perhaps he mean! Chose donnante! An' he sen' des fruits viz ze compliments of Son Excellence Kang Hsu to Monsieur Pourmont. Et je vous demande, qu'est-ce que cela fait?”

Doane considered this puzzle; finally shook his head over it. It was very Chinese. Kang doubtless believed that through it he was deluding the stupid foreigners and escaping responsibility for his savage course.

Finally Doane won M. Pourmont's approval for his forlorn sally. He was, in a wild way, glad.

During the few hours left to him he must work rapidly, think hard. That, too, was good. He decided to write a will. If he had little money to leave Betty, at least there were things of his and her mother's. Elmer Boatwright would help him. And he must tell Betty he was going. It was curiously hard to face her, hard to meet the eye of his own daughter. He winced at the thought.

She had returned to the residence before him. He asked for her now.

M. Pourmont, giving a moment more to considering this man, whom he had long regarded with a respect he did not feel toward all the missionaries, wondered, as he sent word to the young lady, what might underlie that strange quarrel of the early morning. The only explanation that occurred to him he promptly dismissed, for it involved the little Mademoiselle's name in a manner which he could not permit to be considered. M. Pourmont was a shrewd man; and he knew that the Mademoiselle was ashamed of nothing. Nothing was wrong there. Like his wife he had already learned to love the busy earnest girl. And then, leaving M. Doane in the reception-room waiting for her, he returned to his study and dismissed the whole matter from his mind. For the siege was cruel business. One by one, some one every day, men and women and children, were dying. The living had to subsist on diminishing rations, for he had never foreseen housing and feeding so large a number. There were problems—of discipline and morale, of tactics, of sanitation, of burying the dead—that must be met and solved from hour to hour.

On the whole, as he settled again into his endless, urgent task, M. Pourmont was not sorry that M. Doane had won his consent to this last desperate effort to reach those inhumanly deliberate white folk up at Peking; men whose minds dwelt with precedents and policies while their fellows, down here at Ping Yang, on a hillside, held off with diminishing strength the destruction that seemed, at moments, certain to fall.

3

Doane, watching Betty as she entered the room attired in a long white apron over her simple dress, knew that he must again beg the question that lay between them. He could no more listen to the burden of her heart than to the agony of his own. Sooner or later, if he lived, he would have to work it out, decide about his life. If he lived....

“My dear,” he said, quickly for him, holding her hand more tightly than he knew, “I have some news which I know you will take bravely.”

He could feel her steady eyes on him. He hurried on. “I am going out again to-night. There seems a good chance that I may get through to Shau T'ing, with messages. I'm going to try.”

His desire was to speak rapidly on, and then go. But he had to pause at this. He heard her exclaim softly—“Oh, Dad!” And then after a silence—“I'm not going to make it hard for you. Of course I understand. Any of us may come to the end, of course, any moment. We've just got to take it as it comes. But—I—it does seem as if—after all you've been through, Dad—as if—”

He felt himself shaking his head.

“No,” he said. “No. It's my job, dear.”

“Very well, Dad. Then you must do it. I know. But I do wish you could have a day or two more to rest. If you could”—this wistfully—“perhaps they'd let me off part of the time to take care of you. You know, I'm nursing. I'd be stern. You'd have to sleep a lot, and eat just \vhat I gave you.” She patted his arm as she spoke; then added this: “Of course it's not the time to think of personal things. But there's one thing I've got to tell you pretty soon, Dad. A strange experience has come to me. It's puzzling. I can't see the way very clearly. But it's very wonderful. I believe it's right—really right. It's a man.”

She rushed on with it. “I wanted you to meet him to-night. He's—out in the trenches, all day, up the hill. We're expecting word—a cablegram—when they get through to us. And when that comes, I'd have to tell you all about it. He'll come to you then. But I—well, I had to tell you this much. It's been a pretty big experience, and I don't like to think of going through it like this without your even knowing about it from me, and knowing, too, no matter what they may say”—her voice wavered—“that it's—it's—all right.” Her hands reached suddenly up toward his shoulders; she clung to him, like the child she still, in his heart, seemed.

He could trust himself only to speak the little words of comfort he would have used with a child. He felt that he was not helping her; merely standing there, helpless in the grip of a fate that seemed bent on racking his soul to the final Emit of his spiritual endurance.

“This won't do,” she said. “I have no right to give way. They need me in the hospital. I shall think of you every minute, Dad. I'm very proud of you.”

She kissed him and rushed away. He walked back to Elmer Boatwright's room fighting off a sense of unreality that had grown so strong as to be alarming. It was all a nightmare now—the manly dogged faces in the compound, the wailing sounds from the native quarter, the intermittent shots, the smells, the very sun that blazed down on the tiling. Nothing seemed really to matter. He knew well enough, in a corner of his mind, that this mood was the most dangerous of all. It lay but a step from apathy; and apathy, to such a nature as his, would mean the end.

So he busied himself desperately. The simple will he left for Boatwright with instructions that it was to be given to Betty in the event of his death. It seemed that the little man was one of a machine-gun crew and could not be reached until well on in the evening; he had turned fighter, like the others.

He sewed up his tattered knapsack and filled it with a sort of iron ration. He wrote letters, including a long one to Henry Withery, addressed in care of Dr. Hidderleigh's office at Shanghai. He framed with care the messages that were to go over the wires to Peking. He ate alone, and sparingly. And early, as soon as darkness settled over the scene of petty but bitter warfare, he clipped out of the compound and disappeared, carrying no weapon but his walking stick.