Late that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed."

Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new lodging, with the avowed intention of taking him home and seeing that he was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene.

In the midst of it, in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian in a few faint sentences put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the morning.

"Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me."

In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back into his mother's favor.

"Do they meet, those two?" Arthur asked.

"My mother and Nan? Rather. They get along like a house afire."

If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged circles of British shell shortage at the Front. The Germans had shells to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby; five hundred casualties, the papers said.

In spite of all the evil news, Julian was better. You could read that in his mother's face.

"I believe he'll be able to go over to America early in the new year," she said.

"To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed.

"It would be everything to have him out of England till the war is over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the law and the prophets, but so a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't you agree?"

"Then—they're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out.

"Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything? The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we shouldn't like it, so I took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said the lady reflectively. "She must have been confused, for what do you think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can I help caring about anybody with such a perfectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Wasn't that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James see it as I did, and that it would all come right."

Julian's way of helping it all to "come right" was to employ his convalescence in carrying on the propaganda from his sick bed with unabated ardor; or, rather, an ardor increased by the excitement of its transmission largely through Nan Ellis.

That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given her recurred to him again and again. Messenger, indeed! carrying contraband, not to say high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street!

The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That was the heart-breaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news. Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the more private hour.

Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to allow them any more to discuss these things. And here was some one wholly forgetting, if she had ever heard, that constraint-breeding, melancholy fact; some one who pronounced the words abhorred in an even, every-day voice, smiled the while, and sat at her ease. Too newly Julian had skirted death for his mother not to make shift to endure that which first brought back the hues and lights of life to the corpse-white face.

Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn bed-table.

During one of Napier's visits, he had seen her rise and leave the room. When she came back, she found Julian laughing as he hadn't for many a day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick.

Sometimes the messenger didn't spare the mixed audience in Berkeley Street a graver, more passionate mood.

"Mr. Lazenby was wonderful, talking about the awful casualty lists, and the way sheer hate is shriveling up men's minds. I do wish you'd heard, Julian, what he said about America and what President Wilson might do for peace."

"By minding his own affairs and not interfering with our blockade? Yes." For once Lady Grant and her enemies were in accord.

"I told them," Nan went on, smiling at Julian, "that you said the President had the greatest opportunity in all history. 'Eggs-actly!'" she lifted and brought down her slim arm in accurate reproduction of Lazenby's sledgehammer gesture: "'The President of the United States is the man to go for!' They had cheered that. '—The man with a more absolute power and a greater range of action that any ruler on the earth to-day!'"

"Just so!" Lady Grant's deep voice came down more quietly but hardly less heavy than Lazenby's hammer, "—Raging socialists building all their hopes on the irresponsible Despot."

"Oh.... Despots!" Miss Nan appeared to pass these gentlemen in mental review. "Do you know, they've done something more outrageous than ever?"

Now we'll have it, Gavan thought to himself. He had been conscious on this particular evening of an undercurrent of emotion in the smooth stream of the girl's talk—a peculiar shining in her eyes, that perplexed him. It certainly wasn't happiness. She was for once keeping back something.

"I told you," she said suddenly to Julian, with that new intimacy which seemed to clear the room of other occupants, "I told you Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book was practically finished. Yes. Well, the authorities aren't going to let it be published."

"What!" Julian very nearly leaped out of bed. "Suppress the greatest contribution to sane thinking since 'Progress and Poverty'? To dare to ban the 'Philosophy of Force' and pretend we are fighting for liberty!"

"You ought not to have told him," Lady Grant reproached the girl.

Julian caught his mother up. "Not tell me? Of course she had to tell me. She knows if she didn't bring me the news here, I'd have to go where I could depend on getting it."

His mother exchanged looks with Gavan.

"I told them what I'd do." Nan said it with that little catch of excitement in her voice. "I'd get Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book over to America. They wouldn't be afraid to publish it over there."

"Why should they? The Americans aren't standing in the breach," said Lady Grant, with heightened color.

Nan looked away. Her mouth quivered a little. It was clear that she was reminding herself, Julian's mother!

"America! The very thing!" In the baggy dressing-gown Julian had twisted the upper part of his thin body sidewise, leaning towards the messenger.

"The trouble is," she began in a lower voice, and then hesitated.

"What's the matter?" His impatience made him irritable. "You aren't so silly as to suppose we can't say what we like before Gavan and my mother?"

"No, oh, no," she answered with a haste that convicted her. "I was just going to tell you Mr. Norfolk seems to think"—and for all Julian's assurance and her own acceptance of it, her voice sank—"the mails aren't safe."

"Not safe?"

She shook her head.

"Not any more. Mr. Norfolk says there's a—a supervision already."

"What?"

"Oh, not openly."

"A secret censorship! Hah! Hear that?" he challenged his friend. "That's what your policy's come to!"

"What makes Norfolk think—" Gavan began at his calmest.

"He doesn't think. He knows." There was a little pause. "Things don't get through. And the things that don't get through, they're always, he says, things of a certain kind." She broke the strain of the next few moments' silence. "I said if they didn't trust the mails why shouldn't Mr. Norfolk take his book over along with your 'League of Nations Manifesto' that they're all so wanting to get into President Wilson's hands. They asked me what I thought the inspectors would be doing while Mr. Norfolk was walking about with contraband literature under his arm. Did you ever hear such an excuse? I said: 'Do you think the inspectors would stop you? Well, the inspectors wouldn't stop me!' Yes," she added in a slightly offended tone, "they laughed, too. I didn't mind that so much as to see them accepting the—interference, and just sitting there. Talking! It made me wild. 'Do you really want to get that into the President's hands?' I asked them. 'Very well. You give it to me.'"

"You'd take it!" The involuntary exclamation slipped over Gavan's lips.

Julian hadn't needed to ask.

"You darling!" He held out his hand.

"Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr. Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's "Manifesto," then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they said."

"They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Arthur, seriously.

"What risk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British Government hasn't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own country. Besides, they wouldn't find it. And suppose they did, the English couldn't shoot me. I told them this afternoon, 'I'm not bound by your horrid war regulations.' But no," she said lugubriously through the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody's afraid."

"Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining in his moved face. "It's a great bond."

Gavan recognized the fact now, and all its implications, that Julian, with his pale halo of martyrdom, was able to draw closer to the girl than anybody else on her idealist side. Politics? She wasn't thinking about the future of governments and the stamp to be set on civilization, Napier told himself. She was thinking that bayonet work was cruel and revolting. She was prepared to let the great ideals be bayonetted like the babies of the Belgian stories, rather than let the war go on!

The last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening toward the end of January, about half-past six. Julian's convalescence, not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting: "Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs.

"And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being pelted."

She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America and the labor parties everywhere.

Away from that slavery to sickroom sensibilities, Gavan couldn't bear it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the peacemongers weren't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to Sir William, who had just lost his second son!

"Not Niel! Oh, Gavan, Niel!"

"Yes, blown to atoms at Soissons."

"Niel! Niel, too!" she cried. "If only they had been able to stop it in time!"

"Stop it! Stop men from going into a war like this! I'm not an idealist myself,"—he couldn't, to save his life, keep bitterness out of his voice—"but I do know there have been men who went into this war to defend the weak and to right wrong. A good many of those men can't speak for themselves any longer—" For a moment even Gavan couldn't speak for them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists—nearly every friend I had."

"Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian."

"Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go." He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they fight on, some of them because—other men have died and mustn't have died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. It's the dead call the loudest, 'Come, join up!'"

The tears stood in her eyes, but she shook her head.

"The dead can't speak for themselves. I wish they could. Soldiers—people who've been in it—aren't half so hot for going on with the struggle as a civilian like you."

"I'm not a civilian. I'm gazetted to the Scottish Borderers. This is the last time I'll see you."

"Oh, Gavan!" She held up her shaking hands.

He longed to beg her forgiveness, to say he hadn't meant in the very least to tell her like that; but all he could do was to explain, "The last, I mean, till I get my first leave," he ended in his most casual voice.

"Oh, Gavan!" she repeated. And then she turned abruptly and went out of the room. Left him standing there. Not even good-by.

It had been hard enough for Gavan to arrange it even before that awful news about Niel.

"You aren't fit," Sir William had stormed. When he calmed down a little, he went and had another talk with the doctor. No medical man who knew his business would pass Mr. Napier, Sir William was told; but the need for officers was great. Mr. Napier would have his way. In the final issue Sir William had his.

The very same evening of the interview with Nan this new thing had been sprung on Napier.

Something, Sir William said, that Gavan could do for the country that the country needed more than it needed another amateur officer at the Front. Gavan was to go to America by the first ship on a secret mission.

The newly commissioned officer protested with all his might. He had no experience of missions, secret or otherwise; he had no experience of America. Nevertheless, there were others in high places who agreed with Sir William. In the scarcity of suitable men at that particular crisis, and in view of the confidence felt in Napier by the authorities, they were in agreement as to the advisability of despatching him, in addition to the practical expert from the Admiralty already over there, to pay a private visit to America, in the course of which certain government contracts for munitions of war were to be effected—quietly, without rousing pro-German opposition.

The exigency was put to Napier in a way difficult to meet. He had himself seen regiments of men in training for months in civilian clothes, and who had never held a firearm in their hands. He had seen an entire camp drilling with dummy rifles. He was aware of the lack even of the plants necessary to turn out rifles to equip a quarter of the recruits called for. And now Sir William told him the secret of the shortage of ammunition for British troops already at the Front.

"We've sent our men out there to face the German guns, and our men can't reply! We've got to have guns and shells and rifles ... everything. We've got to get them from America. You've got to get them from America; you and Jameson."

Sir William quoted yet another reason besides the main ones given, for Gavan Napier's being the man to go; his personal friendship with one of the chief of that group called "Steel Kings" overseas.

As usual in the case of projects with which William McIntyre had most to do, this one was quickly shaped and smartly carried through. Time was the essence of Napier's mission to America, not only in view of the needs of our men in France, but in order that neither the other neutral governments nor the Central empires should know of the attempt to tide over the interval of scarcity before the munition plants of Great Britain should be established and the output secure.

The night before he left England, Napier received his final sailing orders during a tÊte-À-tÊte dinner with Sir William at the club. The privacy of those last minutes was broken in upon by Tommy Durrant, hot-foot on Sir William's traces. Tommy was just back from the Front. Something ought to be done, according to Tommy, to lessen the ineffectiveness of the inspectors of refugees crossing over to England. He retailed the story then going the rounds about a man who spoke Walloon all right, arm bandaged, sling—all that sort of thing. Somebody on the boat didn't like the look of him, and had the wit to ask to see his wound. He was very sensitive about showing his wound. It was not unnatural, "doctor's orders," and that kind of thing. An R. A. M. C. man got the landing authorities to insist. Fearful shindy! Fella's arm as sound as Tommy's own. Didn't Sir William believe it? Very well, then. Not five hours ago, as Tommy was waiting to get through the barrier on this side, he had noticed a Belgian nun. He'd seen lots of nuns. Why should he have noticed this one? Couldn't make out till she turned her head with a backward look just as she disappeared. "And it was that woman who used to be at your house, Sir William; the governess."

Napier's heart failed him for one sick moment. To be leaving England at the very moment of Greta von Schwarzenberg's return! Tommy was asking Sir William why "a lady like that" should be coming back here in disguise. Surely there was something very fishy about it.

"Well, you say you've reported to Scotland Yard. Let them deal with it!" Sir William rattled his seals impatiently.

Poor Tommy was having no success at all with his news. It was plain that Sir William was more annoyed at being made a participant than at the fact itself. Napier couldn't refrain from warning him.

"She'll be trying to get into communication with Miss Ellis—with Madge."

Tommy, more considerate, soothed Sir William.

"She won't risk that, whatever's the explanation of her slinking back. She'll lay low for a while, anyway." Tommy registered his conviction, "She saw I'd recognized her, and didn't love me for it."