When the ordeal at the police station came to an end, every person there was extremely on edge—except, you'd say, Miss von Schwarzenberg. Her dignity under the ordeal would forever, Napier told himself, count in his mind to Miss Greta's credit. Going home, she soothed the ruffled spirits of Miss Nan; she was tender, reassuring; she smiled.

Before the party had left the dinner table that night, Julian Grant walked in. He had arrived late and put up at the Essex Arms.

"I shall complain to his mother about him when I see her," Lady McIntyre threatened. They all fell to congratulating Julian upon his parents' arrival in London. The fact of their belated and difficult return from Germany had been duly chronicled in the newspapers, together with hints of the unsuitable treatment to which Sir James and Lady Nicholson Grant had been subjected. But if, as was plainly the case, some of the Lamborough party waited eagerly to hear the horrid details, Julian seemed to have no mind to make the most of his opportunities.

"I suppose they told you all about it?" Sir William made no more effort than Madge to disguise his desire to know the worst.

"Oh, they told me one or two things. It's been no worse for them than for some of the foreigners over here," was the unfilial answer which Napier challenged on other grounds. Napier had the facts of the ill-treatment of English KurgÄst from the Foreign Office.

Julian lolled in his chair. People made a great deal of a little inconvenience, he said, especially the type of person who was a KurgÄst. It was a speech that did him no good in that company—being far too much like a reflection upon a highly esteemed pair of whom their son should speak with an even greater respect than the ordinary person.

Napier, who knew Julian's devotion to his parents, was morally certain that Lady McIntyre was thinking at that moment of those shining lights of filial duty, Mr. Carl and Mr. Ernst Pforzheim. They would never cast such a reflection upon their revered Papa as to suggest he was a little fussy about small comforts. No, it wasn't nice of Julian.

So little did Julian recognize this, he was asking if anybody seriously thought inconvenience was avoidable in the vast upheaval of war? He only wished that inconvenience was the worst that any of them might have to complain of. A second time he tripped up those "Foreign Office facts" of Gavan's. Julian knew about those "facts." "And I know certain others. They relate to ill-treatment too. Facts more easily examined. No trouble about subjecting those facts to every sort of test! Why? Because they were nearer home. Yet I doubt if the Foreign Office makes any note of them. I have—in haphazard way. But enough to sober any man." He produced two or three. Instances of harsh dismissal at a time when fresh employment was known to be impossible. Instances of boycott, of petty persecution, all because of a foreign name. It was the kind of attempt at sober balancing still possible even under the roof of a British official. A willingness as yet unshackled to see and to criticize these spots on the national sun, was accounted an attitude of mind peculiarly, proudly, British. If this particular circle was readier than most to admit these minor blames, it was largely because of sympathy with the particular German who was in their midst. A form of hospitality.

To Nan Ellis, Julian's espousal of the cause of the stranger within the gate was as music in the ear and as honey in the mouth. Good! good! She applauded him with hands and lips and eyes.

On leaving the dining-room, everybody began to put on hats and wraps.

"Oh, yes, hadn't you heard, Mr. Julian? Fearful excitement! A mine has been washed up on the coast. And you, Madge," urged her father, who needed no urging whatever, "you've got to come and look at it, too."

They all went down to the beach, and walked in the moonlight, by the incoming tide, a quarter of a mile north of the pier.

Miss Greta carried her coat on her arm at first. Would Mr. Napier be so kind? He stopped to help her into the voluminous white canvas ulster. "It isn't true, is it," she said in a low, earnest voice, "that you've joined an O. T. C. and go drilling in the park after working hours?"

"Plenty of men do that," he said, struggling to enable Miss Greta to find the armhole.

"Not men like you!" she whispered. "And when you aren't working with Sir William, you go route marching, or trench digging for a holiday!"

Napier had been one of the first of his world who refused to accept the fact of not being bred a soldier as an excuse for not becoming one. But that Miss Greta should be one of the few to know the fact did not please him. "Oh, the sleeve's wrong side out," he said; "that's why."

The ulster had to come off again. "Surely,"—she turned the sleeve with deliberation—"surely you know that before you are nearly ready for a commission, peace will be declared."

"You think peace will come soon, then?"

"Well, of course, when the Germans have taken Paris. There now—" she stopped short again, making of her compunction an excuse to widen the distance between themselves and the rest of the party. "I've gone in my bungling way and said something I oughtn't to. I, who would rather offend anybody on earth than you."

"I don't know why you should say that." He began to walk on.

"You don't know why?"

There was something unnerving in the appealing sorrow of the question. Why, in the name of all the gods, hadn't he kept up with the others?

"I think you do know," she said, a pace or two behind his hurrying figure.

Napier didn't look round, but he was sure that the tears in her voice had risen to her eyes.

"Do you mind if I go on? I promised Julian—"

"Ah, you've already gone on."

"Gone—" he paused an instant.

"Yes, gone back inside that British arctic circle that you came out of once—to save my life." She gained on him; she was panting at his elbow. "I shall never forget that, Mr. Gavan; never as long as I live."

"Oh, you make too much of—"

"Too much of saving such a life as mine! That may be true."

"You know!"—he swung back a step—"that wasn't in the least what I meant. I—you see—I say! Julian!"

When Napier had caught up with the two in front, Miss Greta wasn't far behind.

Nan turned an excited face. "Does Gavan know?" she asked Julian.

Just as though Greta weren't now at his elbow, Julian jerked out, "He can easily satisfy himself. Two hundred people on the Fourth of August simply vanished from our common life. No public charge, no trial that was a trial according to English ideas—"

"Would you leave known spies free to do their work?" Napier asked sharply.

"Do you know what happened to them?" Nan intervened.

"We can tell what happened to some of them. Set blindfolded against a wall and shot."

"How perfectly awful!" breathed Nan.

"Miss Greta isn't as horrified as you are. She knows what Germany would do with men—yes, and women—arrested on even slighter evidence."

"They'd never do that to women!" said Nan, aghast.

"Oh, wouldn't they!"

"Set a woman against a wall and shoot her!"

"It's logical," was Miss Greta's comment.

"Logical!" echoed Nan. "It's—it's devilish."

"Risky but well paid," observed Napier, with his eyes on the rippled sand.

"It should be well paid," pronounced the quiet voice of Greta von Schwarzenberg. They had come up with Lady McIntyre, abandoned by the advance-guard. Nan offered her arm. She and Greta adapted their pace to the older woman's.

As the two men walked on, Julian spoke of the beauty of ships seen in that transfiguring light. "Only two or three little fishing-smacks, and yet the grace, the mystery—"

Napier's eyes had gone farther seaward. What were those other, vaguer shapes? Was there a mystery more urgent there? The night was unseasonably warm, but a chill invaded him as he asked, "Are they English?"

Julian, with his hands clasped behind him, strolled on without troubling to reply.

It was Napier who again broke silence.

"It's all very well to scoff at amateur detectives. Have you thought why we are on the coast?"

"Good air."

"And we breathe it just where we could so easily, if we were as accomplished as some, make signals and receive them."

Julian uttered the audible sigh of much-tried patience.

"Well, think a moment. Little as there is of proscribed area as yet, why are we in it? Because the McIntyres chose this place?"

"Certainly. Lady McIntyre told me herself about coming down to inspect—"

"Exactly!—a house selected for her. We are in the proscribed area because the enemy alien in the McIntyre family chose this place for them."

"I tell you, Gavan, I'm not going to listen—"

"Yes, you are. I've listened to you often enough. You can listen to me for once." He told him about the leakage of the shipping secret. The loss it had been to us. The gain it had been to the enemy. "Old Colonel McManus is right. She has poked her nose everywhere."

"All this makes me anxious," said Julian, gravely.

His friend breathed a free half-minute.

"Very anxious about you, Gavan."

"See here—" Napier stopped short—"because I was wrong about Gull Island is no reason—"

"So you're satisfied you were wrong, are you?" Julian said lightly.

"Naturally, since you found nothing to report." Then it came out that Julian had had "more serious things" to think about. He hadn't been near the Island. It was the first serious quarrel of their lives.

Napier left his friend and caught up with Sir William. The pressure on his mind did not suffer him to wait till he got his chief alone. When he had asked and obtained Sir William's reluctant consent "to a few days off," Napier broke through the little hail of questions, and commented with, "Isn't that the mine?"

"It is! It is!"

Madge flew on ahead, deaf to Lady McIntyre's, "Wait for your father, darling,"—as though Sir William's presence might be trusted to exercise a mollifying effect upon the mine, a theory which, however, she wasn't long in publicly abandoning.

Fifty yards or so this side of a rock-strewn indentation in the low coast-line there it lay, that strange, new creature of the deep, with nothing in its aspect to account for the instantaneous aversion it inspired in Lady McIntyre. Gray-white, shaped like a great egg or a pear, according to your angle of vision, seen at closer quarters it might be taken for a well-stuffed laundry-bag, except for the something odd protruding from its mouth. Lady McIntyre made no secret of her intention to give it a wide berth. As the others went toward the Thing, Lady McIntyre, left alone some yards away, called out, "I wish you wouldn't, William!"

"Wouldn't what?" he said good-humoredly over his shoulder. "I thought we had come for the express purpose of examining it."

"Yes, but I—I didn't know it would be like that."

"You can hardly have expected it to look more harmless," Sir William said as he went closer.

"That's just it." Her wail said she wouldn't have minded it half so much had it been more frankly infernal. "Anyway, Madge mustn't—" Then, with a rising terror in her voice, Lady McIntyre betrayed the degree to which she had lost her bearings at sight of that mysterious messenger of death. "William," she cried, "make Madge come away."

"It's all right, my dear, as long as they aren't touched. This is the part, you see—"

As he appeared to be in the act of doing the very thing he himself had said was likely to have dire results, Lady McIntyre raised her voice still higher. "Greta, do, do bring Madge here!"

Greta, enveloped in a canvas coat and gray-white motor-veil, was squatting by the enemy. She seemed to hear nothing, as she crouched there on the sand. The others listened to Sir William, and they, too, looked at the Thing, all except Napier. He looked at the huddled figure staring with that curious expression at the mine. It was canvas-covered like herself. Like herself, of rounded contour and of incalculable capacity for harm. It struck Napier rather horribly that there was kinship between the two, that she hung over the infernal thing like a mother might over her child.

"Mr. Napier,"—Lady McIntyre's voice shrilled sharply behind him—"will you get Madge to come away?"

It was Nan who achieved the impossible. "Brr! I'm cold," she announced. "If you weren't too grand, Mr. Napier, Madge and I would race you to those rocks."

Mr. Napier wasn't too grand, and Miss Madge was elated by her victory. "I'll race you back again," she cried, again off like the wind.

They sat down on the rocks where Madge left them. For several moments there was no sound but the swish and rattle of pebbles as they swept up shore in the advance, and then, deserted by the force behind, fell back a little, clinging for a moment to the skirts of the retreating wave.

Nan, with her white veil cloud-like round her face, looked at the track of light across the water. The moon wore a cloud round her face, too, but she looked in and out. The girl was very still.

"Oh, my dear! my dear!" Napier's heart cried so loud that in a kind of terror he fell upon audible speech. "It is the most wonderful night I ever—" and he stopped. His voice sounded strange. As she turned from the moon-path on the water to meet Napier's look fastened on her, he saw that her eyes had brought away some of the restlessness as well as some of the glitter of the sea. The adorable gentleness in them had given place to a critical, sharp, little glance that affected Napier like a breath from a glacier.

"Sir William seems immensely devoted to you—" To his over-sensitive ear she seemed to imply that being devoted to Gavan Napier implied a singular stretch of charity. Nor would she accept his silence. As though he must himself share this view of his scant deserts. "Don't you think it very nice of Sir William to let you go off on a holiday at such a time as this?"

"Very nice indeed."

She sat with her chin in her hand, her face upturned again. But the soft rapture was gone, gone utterly. "Julian is looking very tired, don't you think?" she said.

"I thought he did look tired."

"He is going to help Mr. Wilkins.

"Who is Mr. Wilkins?"

"Oh, Mr. Wilkins is a splendid person who is organizing stop-the-war meetings."

"Well," said Napier, shortly, "that's a good way to give Mr. Wilkins a taste of it."

"You mean a taste of war?" She dropped her hand. "Oh, I wish you wouldn't say things like that!"

"How I am making her hate me!" he said to himself. "Well, since she won't love me, what does it matter?"

But it did matter. It mattered to the very core of him. It mattered to the waking and the sleeping. It mattered for all of life—he knew that now. It would add a bitterness to the bitterness of death. To die never having had this—

She sat with hands lying slack in her lap. "I think I'd like to go home," she said. "I don't like England as much as I did."

"Why is that?"

She looked at him oddly and then away. After another little silence, "Well, for one thing, I think it's abominable the way they are talking and writing about the men who didn't approve of the war and were brave enough to say so, and say it publicly." She turned her eyes from the curling, crisping foam as if to plead for some little sympathy for these views. There was no sign on Napier's face. She thrust her iron-pointed stick into the sand. "What they've given up, some of those men, for the sake of—oh, it's the most splendid thing I ever came near to! I love those men."

"All of them?" Napier asked drily.

She sprang up. "I won't have you mocking at me. Or at Julian!"

"I don't mock at Julian."

"Oh, only at me?" She laughed a little uncertainly and then became grave again, but not, Napier felt, unfriendly. "You know, his father has gone home to Scotland. His mother, too. And Julian is here." They were silent a moment. "And I just wish they'd stayed in Germany," she burst out. "They are horrid to Julian. They've as good as told him they're ashamed of him. But they don't deserve to have a son like Julian. If he was my son...."

Napier smiled. "Well, if he were your son?"

"I'd know how to treat him. I'd know rather better than I do now," she wound up, with her astonishing candor.

Hardly two yards away the inrushing surf foamed as white as boiling milk among the boulders.

"How long," she asked, with something breathless in her manner, "before the tide reaches as far as where we are?"

"Not long." Even as he spoke, one of those waves that will sometimes outrace its fellows rushed up the beach and flung itself in thunder against the outward barrier. In spume and froth it ran whitely in and out nearly to the upper rocks, filling all the place with motion and a dazzle of moonlit foam.

"It seems to set the rocks moving. And the noise! Doesn't it make you dizzy?" she said. "It does me."

"Then come higher up."

She shook her head. He showed a place at his side. "Sit here if you feel—"

"Oh, but I like to feel dizzy. That's the great difference between you and me." Her laugh was gone in a second. With her eye on the receding wave she asked hurriedly, "Where are you going for your holiday?"

His plans were dependent on other people, he said.

"You make me wonder what 'other people' you've got. How little I know about you." She tumbled the sentences out.

"Well, come to that, how little I know about you."

"There isn't anything I'm not willing to tell you—if—if you cared to know." She spoke more gently, even with a touch of wistfulness. "You British are so reticent!" He didn't deny the charge. He felt her eyes on his face, as she said, "I have an idea you wouldn't be—if you once got started."

He laughed out again at that shot. "The only safe way then," he said, "is not to get started."

"Oh, do get started!" She said it with a touch of roguery lightening her new seriousness. "I should so like to see you indiscreet for once."

Deliberately Napier didn't look at her again, till the danger-point was safely rounded by her saying, "Greta thinks you're going to Scotland."

"Oh, does she?" He looked at her straight enough now. "And does she tell you why?"

"No; but you'll tell me that."

"Maybe I will," he answered a trifle grimly, "when I come back."

She studied him. "You are very serious." She leaned a trifle nearer. "You are more serious, I think, than I ever saw you."

Napier smiled. In his heart he was thinking: "Before she is up in the morning, I shall be gone. On the errand that will end even her surface kindness to Greta's enemy. This is the last time. She will never again stand so near and look at me with those eyes of faith."

"Aren't you rather serious, too?" he asked.

She spoke through his question, impulsively, lifting her voice a little above the nearing thunder. "Lady McIntyre thinks you are going to see a lady."

He made his small effort at jocularity. "I must speak to Lady McIntyre."

"Are you such a fickle person?"

"Is that what they say?"

"They think you are fickle about women."

"Well," he said, achieving an effect of jauntiness, "and what's your opinion, Miss Nan?"

"They don't understand you," she said gravely.

"And do you understand me?" he laughed.

"Yes. Because I'm like that myself. They call me fickle, too. But it's only that we haven't—hadn't"—she amended with that sudden summer lightning in her eyes—"hadn't met The One." If she came closer still, it seemed not to be by her own volition, but in the same way as she had spoken—at the bidding of some influence outside them both. Napier half turned from the too-disturbing nearness and instinctively put out a hand to the boulder, shoulder-high, just in front of him. But his hand moved short of its goal, unguided by a mind that was awhirl in a maelstrom where duties, inclinations, friendships, loves, all churned in an eddy of such surpassing swiftness that the brain reeled and the heart forgot its rhythm.

"Always thinking—but why does your hand shake so?"—the girl's voice was so low, that he hardly heard it above the surf, as she hurried on. "Maybe it's this one. No? Then perhaps it's that. And always wrong—till one day—in the hall—" a very passion of triumph thrilled through her question, "Wasn't it in the hall at Kirklamont?"

"Nan!" he cried out.

And she, on a note that the surf took up and carried out to sea, cried, "Gavan!" On whose initiative neither knew, they were clinging together. They cared as little for sea water as did the rocks. The two stood there like one—as if through all the moons to come they would bide as steadfast in their rapture as the rocks in foam.

When she drew her face away from his, and they looked at each other, it was with the knowledge that the wash of a greater sea than this they stood beside had flung them, companion castaways, on the shore of a new world.

She had thrown back her head. The scarf fell down over her shoulder to her feet, a tiny cascade to join the whiteness of sea water. All veils had been stripped off for that moment of uttermost joy, before the man cried sharply, "Julian!" and his arms fell down to his sides.

"Julian!" the girl echoed, aghast. She stumbled back a step. He didn't try to save her. She fell against the rock. Her hand, that tried to break the fall, was wrenched at the wrist. She hardly knew it at the time.

"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.

"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found the others waiting for them by the pier.