About noon the next day a couple of porters stood waiting for the service-lift at the Royal Palace hotel. Each man had a sole-leather trunk on his shoulder, a trunk so new that the initialing "G. V. S." was still wet. It was something else which halted Napier in the act of sending up his card to Miss Ellis, a glimpse of Singleton's face behind an outspread newspaper.

"Cabs full of stuff keep coming," was the gentleman's sotto voce comment.

Napier wondered drily that anybody should expect to get the stuff out of England.

"Personal wardrobe. Member of household of cabinet minister. Special privileges. And nobody knows better that avoidance of publicity is worth thousands of pounds to Sir William and, I daresay, to the Government. She's playing it for all she's worth. She's got this Mr. Julian Grant in her pocket, too. He's up with her now."

The lift came down with Nan. She made a little hurried bow, and was for escaping. Napier stood there in front of her.

"Just a minute."

"I can't; I'm sorry. I haven't got a minute."

"Yes, you have," he said bitterly, "when I tell you it's about Miss Greta's affairs."

"Oh, about Greta—"

The face was whiter, more transparent, than he had ever seen it.

"You don't look as if you'd had a wink of sleep."

Although Singleton had vanished, Nan showed little disposition to linger. As Napier stood there, looking down at the face alight with fidelity and eager service, he knew in his soul he was thankful there wasn't time, nor this the place, to wring her heart with the disgraceful truth about her friend. The last thing he expected to say was the first to come out.

"A ... you don't gather, I suppose, that Miss Greta is at all harassed about money?"

"It is kind of you to think that!" She smiled at him. "The fact is, Greta—that is, I did cable home last night. I am going back to the bank now, to see if they've heard."

Napier arrested her slight movement. "Just let me understand. Do you mean that you've overdrawn your account?"

"Oh, not overdrawn. But the gold I got this morning just finished it. I seem to have needed a good deal of money lately, one way and another."

"You got gold this morning, you say?"

"Yes; wasn't it lucky? Greta has a prejudice against paper money. She thinks it unsanitary."

"Oh, I see. And you were able to give her all she needs—of the sanitary sort?"

"No. I could get only sixty pounds."

"Not in gold?"

"Forty in sovereigns, twenty in half-sovereigns."

"You were uncommon lucky; but Miss Greta will have to give you back that sixty pounds, or the inspector will take it away at the station."

"Oh, surely not!"

"Beyond a doubt. They don't allow more than twenty pounds to be taken out of the country, and that mustn't be in gold."

She stared. "What do people do who have hundreds of pounds in your banks?"

"They have to leave it behind till the end of the war."

"Not Americans?"

Nobody, he said significantly, would be allowed to carry English gold to Germany.

Gravely, for a moment, she considered the astonishing statement.

"Heavens, the time!" Her eyes over his shoulder had found the clock.

"Only a little after twelve." He didn't stir from the stand he'd taken in front of her.

"You don't realize how much there is to do," she pleaded. Then, as he stood there so immovable, she made the best of it. "I believe, after all, I'll tell you."

"Better," he agreed.

"Well, only half an hour ago we decided Greta couldn't go alone. I'm going with her."

All his life he would remember what he went through in those next seconds.

"Julian,"—she threw in with a hurried glance at Napier's face—"Julian thinks it will be all right."

"You imagine you'll be allowed to go?" Napier said, with infinitely more firmness than he felt.

"Who would try to prevent?"

"Maybe your own embassy."

"Oh, the embassy!"

"It couldn't be anything but very unpleasant in Germany just now."

"Not for an American," she said.

"Even an American," he replied with an edge in his voice, "who has already overdrawn at the bankers' and whose cable can't, I should say, be answered in time."

A teasing, tricksy expression put her burdened seriousness to flight. "Of course I know, if I asked you, you'd lend me what I need."

"To go to Germany?"

"Well, wouldn't you?"

"No."

She smiled. A secret rapture escaped out of her eyes. "You wouldn't?" And then she seemed to put him to some test. "Julian is kinder."

"That's as it should be," he said.

She made a little harassed movement. "I must manage somehow. Julian's going to get my ticket. He's telephoning about all that now. But Greta wouldn't like me to ask Julian for a loan for her."

Napier glanced at the clock. There was still, thank Heaven, the passport difficulty. He scribbled a line on a card. All that was really essential was to make Julian abandon his efforts to remove the obstacles, and Nan would be spared what couldn't fail to be a horrible shock. His aching tenderness for the girl asked why she should ever know the truth unless, indeed, Greta von Schwarzenberg should succeed in carrying off the goose that laid the golden eggs. By all the gods, he must prevent that!

Eagerly she had watched him writing, and now she gave her own interpretation to the card Napier despatched upstairs. "It is kind of you to come and see if you can help us. But you oughtn't to have kept me! Send for a taxi, will you?" she called to the passing commissionaire. "Julian's promised not to leave poor Greta alone till I get back."

Taxis were beginning to grow scarce in London. Napier had followed her to the door; they could see the page-boy pursuing a cab. "Nan—"

She began to speak in a nervous, forestalling haste. "You've never understood about Greta. I believe it's people of strong natures that suffer the most. Last night she couldn't sleep!"

"How do you know?"

"I watched the crack of light under her door. Twice I knocked and tried to make her let me come in. She wouldn't. 'Go to sleep,' she said. As if I could! Once she unbolted the door and came on tiptoe into my room. What do you think for? To get a needle out of my case. Greta! sewing! And what do you think she found to sew? She wouldn't tell me, but I saw this morning. She had been trying to put herself to sleep by changing the buttons on that very-buttony ulster of hers. Took off all the round, bumpy ones and put on a flat kind instead. I can't see it's any improvement. But, then, I always hate buttons that don't button anything, except when they're on cute little page-boys."

The cab had rushed up to the door with Buttons on the footboard. Another of the button brotherhood stood by Napier's side.

"Will you please, sir, come up to seventy-two?"

He heard Julian's high voice through the closed door, and as it was opened, "All that doesn't matter a straw," he was shouting impatiently into the receiver. "Those regulations, you know as well as I do, can be set aside for the special case. I know she'll have to have a passport. You've got to tell the fella at the American Embassy. What? Look here, Tommy, you don't understand. I'll be round before you go to luncheon."

Napier had made his way among cardboard boxes and clothes-encumbered chairs, to the sofa where Miss Greta half sat, half lay, in a becoming mauve tea-gown. She gave him her hand.

"Hello!" said Julian, already looking up a new telephone number.

Madge came out of the adjoining bedroom, dragging an enormous brown-paper parcel along the floor. "Did you know Nan had got you the sealskin coat? How do, Mr. Gavan. It's a love of a coat. You'll wear it, won't you?"

"No; pack it," said Miss Greta, indifferently.

"But on the boat, Miss Greta. You'll want some warm—"

"I've got a coat," she said impatiently. "Take that thing back where you found it."

"I say,"—Julian jumped up to lend a hand—"I didn't know you'd come back, Madge. I might as well go now and see about the passport. What's this?"

"Can't imagine. That's why I brought it in." Between Madge and her unskilful assistant, the cord round the great bundle, already loose, came off. The contents bulged. Julian picked the unwieldy thing up in his arms, and a fold of heavy fur oozed out. And then the whole thing had half slithered out of his hold and fell along the floor.

"Lawks!" remarked Madge, with wide eyes on the superb black-fox rug, beaver-lined.

"Too heavy for anything but a Russian sledge," Julian objected.

"Well, will you take it back in there, and put it in the canvas hold-all!" Miss Greta settled back wearily against the ulster, as Madge and Julian struggled into the next room with the rug between them. "I understood Madge was going to bring the maid to do the packing," Miss Greta murmured discontentedly.

Napier leaned forward.

"Do you approve this plan of Miss Ellis going to Germany?" he asked.

"I can easily believe you don't approve it," she said with a gleam of Schadenfreude.

"I do more than disapprove," he answered under his breath. "I am going to prevent it."

"Oh? And how do you propose to do that?"

"I had meant to put a spoke in the passport wheel. But there's a better—a shorter way."

"Oh?"

He leaned nearer. "I have done my part to prevent Miss Ellis's knowing"—Greta raised her china-blue eyes—"the things some of the rest of us know."

"You are very considerate—of Miss Ellis."

"Exactly. I am too considerate of her to let her even apply for a passport without my first of all—enlightening her before you leave."

"Ah,"—she drew in her breath—"you would, would you?"

Napier was aware of having to brace himself to meet the unexpected dart of malignity out of the round eyes. But it passed—taking in the open door of the bedroom as it dropped. And in its place came pure scorn, controlled, intensely quiet, as she inquired in her society manner: "And you think Nan would believe you? You suppose for one moment that your word would stand any chance against mine?"

Napier concealed his harrowing doubt on this head. "I am to understand, then, you are willing that the facts we have been at pains to suppress should be known? Very well. I'll begin by enlightening Mr. Grant and saving him the trouble of seeing about the passport." He caught the sudden shift of focus in the china-blue eyes. "That's what I came up for," Napier added.

There was silence for an instant, except for the talk floating in through the open door: "No, let's fold it in three. I'll show you."

Was it the threat to enlighten Julian which had given her pause? "We have Singleton downstairs,"—Napier quietly suggested witnesses for the convincing of Mr. Grant—"and Grindley up."

"As if I didn't know!"

"Then you must know, too, that we are none of us making this experience harder for you than is necessary. But"—their eyes met—"we are not going to let you take that girl along."

"Couldn't live without her, eh?" she burst out. For the first time in Napier's experience of her there was a common tang in her tone.

He rose to his feet. "Simply, she is not going with you. I thought you might prefer to decide this yourself, or to tell her you have ascertained that the passport difficulty is insuperable; anything you like." She sat looking down on the film of handkerchief held affectedly in the thick, white hand. There was no sign of anxiety or haste in either her face or her weary attitude. "The alternative," Napier went on in a quick undertone, "is that she will be staying behind with full knowledge of all that we have up to now kept back."

She turned to him with smothered vehemence. "It never was my plan to take her. I don't know what on earth I'd do with her."

Napier repressed the jubilation crying out in his heart. "The question, as I say, is merely, will you give her up after struggle and exposure or will you do it quietly?"

She seemed to make a rapid calculation. "If I agree to this, will you promise that she shall never know what I've gone through, this last twenty-four hours?" The handkerchief went to her lips.

"No," said Napier, sternly, "but I'll promise that I won't enlighten her before you leave."

"And Mr. Grant? If you tell him, you may as well tell every one. He couldn't keep anything to save his neck."

"If you keep to the course I've laid down, I don't know any special reason for enlightening Mr. Grant." Napier knew that he was showing weakness over the point. Yet, after all, in a few hours the woman would be out of the country. Behind that wall of the German lines she would be lost.

By the time Julian returned to the sitting-room, Miss Greta had accepted the inevitable.

"I don't want to seem rude,"—she turned to Napier with her weary grace—"but I think I must ask to be left alone awhile. Perhaps you'll be so very kind as to explain to Mr. Grant that in these circumstances of family affliction"—only Napier recognized the Adelphi touch in the phrase and in the lace-bordered handkerchief pressed to heroic lips—"the more I think of it, the more I feel it would be best for me to go home alone."

Napier went back to the hotel at five o'clock with Julian, who drove his own big car to take the three to the station. The progress was slow and penitential, for Miss Greta declined to lose sight of the two taxis which followed with the luggage. Napier, with Madge at his side, sitting opposite Nan and Miss Greta, found himself taking refuge from the unconscious reproach in Nan's face by studying the buttons on Miss Greta's ulster. There was a great many of those buttons. The immense labor of changing them induced thoughtfulness. They were thicker, but weren't the bigger ones exactly sovereign size? The smaller on collar, cuffs, and pocket-flaps—weren't they precisely of half-sovereign dimensions, excepting, again in thickness? He began to count....

"Look at that shop!" Nan leaned forward over the long narrow cardboard box she was carrying.

The front glass was smashed, the place empty. Over the door was a sign, "Zimmerman, Family Baker." A little way on stood yet another shop with demolished front. On the opposite side was a third. There were seven in all, over each a German name.

Nan looked away. Miss Greta seemed not to have heard the exclamation, seemed to see nothing.

Some recruits for the army came lumping along, out of step, a sorry enough crew, pasty-faced, undersized, in ill-fitting, shabby, civilian clothes.

The china-blue eyes that had "gone blind" in front of raided German shops were full of vision before this mockery of militarism. As she looked out upon the human refuse for which war had found a use at last, the subtle pity in Miss Greta's face asked as plain as words, "What chance have these poor deluded 'volunteers' against the well-drilled German, fed and fashioned for war?"

The station at last! As Napier helped Miss Greta out, the front of her ulster swung heavily against his leg. "Sovereigns!" he said to himself.

The station was already densely crowded. While Napier and Madge mounted guard over Behemoth and the lesser luggage, Julian and Nan, with Miss Greta between them, disappeared in the crush.

When the reconnoitering party reappeared, Singleton was with them, porters at his beck, in his hand Miss Greta's ticket, passport, and German and Dutch money to the value of twenty pounds. He met the chief inspector as if by appointment, near the luggage, that loomed so important by contrast with that of other travelers.

To Miss Greta—although in her ugly ulster she looked less a person of consequence than she might—was plainly accorded a special consideration. Mr. Singleton was there to see to that. He could not, to be sure, prevent some respectful interrogation as to the money, etc., she was taking out of the country, some perfunctory examination of luggage.

The only anxious face in the group was Nan's. Miss Greta, calm as a May morning, her round eyes trustingly raised to the inspector's face, with eighty to ninety pounds in English gold on her coat, and how much more elsewhere who should say, offering her purse and keys. "One is an American lock. I may have to help you with that," she said sweetly.

Napier half-turned his back on them, but he stood so that he could keep an eye on the stricken face above the long cardboard box which Nan was carrying as if it were an infant. Through the din Greta's innocent accents reached him. "Nobody ever told me! Oh, dear, my poor little savings!" When Nan turned her tear-filled eyes away from the group about Behemoth, Napier joined her.

"What shall you do after—after she is gone?" he asked.

"I haven't an idea beyond going back to the hotel to wait for my cable from home." She made a diversion of opening the long cardboard box and taking out six glorious roses tied with leaf-green and rose-colored ribbon. But she held the flowers absently.

"I shall be at my chambers. If I can be of any—"

"Oh, thank you. I shan't need anything."

When Napier faced round again, Greta was smiling gently on the melted inspector. Perhaps that functionary wouldn't have "forgotten" to confiscate the few pieces of gold so frankly shown had he known they were the mere residue left over from the lady's midnight activities.

They found themselves on the platform with, unhappily, time still to spare. Singleton made polite conversation with Miss Greta, abetted by Julian and Madge—who was taking the approaching parting with astonishing composure. A lesson to poor Nan who couldn't keep the tears out of her eyes. Her effort to smile very nearly cost both her and Napier their self-possession. She went abruptly away from him, and stood dumb behind Greta at Julian's side.

"Take your places!"

A whistle blew. Miss Greta was shaking hands with Singleton. "Thank you so much. You have been kind." Her good-by to Julian and to Napier were quieter, but entirely cordial. She embraced Madge with dramatic fervor. "My darling child! We'll never forget—"

Nan stood, the tears running down her cheeks unchecked, and probably unaware. A little apart she stood, all her sympathy, her very soul, flowing out as a final offering. "Good-by, my Nanchen!" Miss Greta kissed her on both cheeks. "You'll write me? And you won't forget me?"

Nan was far past power of words. She thrust the roses toward Greta with a look that made Napier himself feel he could fall to crying. Even Miss Greta seemed touched by some final compunction. The carriage-door had no sooner slammed on her than she turned suddenly as if she had forgotten something. "Nanchen!" she leaned out and took the girl's face in her two hands. She bent and whispered. The guards shouted. The train began to move.

"Oh, will you? Will you, Greta?" Nan was running along the platform with upturned face.

Miss Greta leaned far out, giving a flutter of white to the wind and leaving a smile for memory.

Thank God! Napier breathed an inward prayer. She can't do any more harm here.

Nan stood staring at the last coaches. Napier touched her arm. "Well?" he said gently.

"I oughtn't to be miserable," she wiped her wet cheeks. "To have Greta soon to help me to bear things—ought to make it possible to bear them now."

"You are still counting on her help?"

She nodded, "I'm to hold myself ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To join her. I shall pack my trunk to-night."

At the tail of the dispersing crowd, they were following Julian and Madge down the platform. Napier slowed his pace, looking down at the face beside him. Weeks, months, of passionate, fruitless waiting—no! "I promised her," he said,—"the lady we've just seen the last of—that I wouldn't enlighten you about her true character till she was gone. You won't feel so badly at losing her when you hear what we know about Miss von Schwarzen—"

"Oh, oh!" Nan stood quite still an instant. "I thought Greta did you an injustice! You—you disappoint me horribly." She fled on to catch up the others.

After all, what was the use of quarreling about a woman who was out of the Saga? In a little while Nan would be able to bear the truth. Not yet, it was too soon.

Julian was to take her back to the hotel; and that wasn't the worst. Napier couldn't even go away by himself. He knew he ought to see Madge to Lowndes Square, where the McIntyre motor and maid were to call at seven o'clock for the purpose of conveying the young lady to Lamborough. It was, at all events, something to be thankful for that Madge wasn't howling. So far as Napier had observed, she hadn't shed a tear. This wasn't the first occasion upon which Madge's late self-possession had vaguely puzzled Napier.

The drive back to Lamborough was a silent one, except for that extraordinary five minutes or so, after Madge had turned to say, "I wish Nan had come back with us, don't you?"

"Yes," he said, "I wish she had."

"I begged her to. I said, 'What shall you do at that hotel?' and she said she hardly knew yet. She'd see. Rotten arrangement, I call it."

Napier smiled down at the girl. It occurred to him she was looking tired, too. And she hadn't cried a tear that Napier had seen. "You seem to be getting on better with our American friend," he said, teasing. "Stood it like a Spartan, even when you thought she was going to Germany with Miss Greta."

"Well, I thought Miss Greta needed somebody."

"But didn't you want the somebody to be you?"

"No."

He looked at her again. "I suppose you're expecting to have Miss Greta back after the war."

"No," she said again, looking straight in front of her.

The thought of the solicitude of her parents to keep the dear child in the dark, suddenly flashed over him, along with the conviction, Madge knows!

Was it possible she accepted Greta's guilt? He couldn't make it out at all. "Weren't you sorry to see her go?"

"It was horrid," she admitted. After a few seconds she found a steadier voice in which to say, "It's been pretty horrid anyway, you know. We could prevent people from saying things, but we couldn't prevent them from looking things. They wanted her to be a disgusting spy. They hated her worse for not being."

"Why don't you want her back when the war is over?"

She drew her red eyebrows together in a frown. "I expect," she said slowly, "it will be best for Germans to stay at home."

Napier laughed, but he felt sorry, in a way, to see Wildfire growing so sage. Evidently she had gone through a great deal in these weeks, a great deal of which she had given no sign. Behind her homesickness for her idol, Napier detected a great relief at the idol's being out of the way of suspicion and misprizing.

"That was why I wanted so to go and see her off. To try to make up a little; to do everything we could do just because I felt there'd never be any other chance." The tears came at last. "She was nice, wasn't she, Mr. Gavan?"

"She was wonderful." And before they fell back into that silence that lasted till they reached Lamborough, he asked, "How long have you known, Meggy?"

"Been sure only since yesterday—those men, what they did to her room."

There was good stuff in the McIntyre child, he said to himself. The part she'd played wouldn't have shamed Napier or even a Nicholson Grant.

There was nobody about to receive them on their return. When Madge had gone up to her mother, Napier took his way down the hall to Sir William's room. But he caught sight of him through the open door of the drawing-room at the far end. Sir William sat reading. That was natural enough, and he was sitting in his own chair. But as far away as Napier could see his chief, he was vaguely aware of something odd about the figure that was, or should be, so intimately familiar. It wasn't merely that Sir William did not instantly rise to his feet, seal-jingling, and call out, "Evening paper? Anything new about—" The first impression was of a man smaller than Napier had realized Sir William to be. Or had he—Napier half smiled at the grotesque idea—had he shrunken in these last hours? The great chair Miss Greta had fetched for him from Kirklamont certainly did seem ludicrously too big for a being so diminished, not only in body, but in spirit. His quick turns and vivid ways—what, Napier wondered with a dreamlike feeling as he walked down the room, had happened to all the familiar, foolish, endearing oddities? For an instant the thought thrust shrewdly, Is he dead? No, he moved.

"Well, sir, we have done your commission."

Like the action of a wooden automaton, one short-fingered hand was pushed out toward the reading-desk. It seemed to point to the small phial that lay on the ledge of the rack; the phial he had carried in his pocket for months now as precaution in the event of an attack of angina. But Sir William's eyes were not on the phial. They were fixed on an open telegram.

And it was that telegram Sir William had sat reading. For how long?

The telegram regretted to inform him that his son, Captain Colin McIntyre, while bravely leading his battalion, had been killed in action.