A good part of that last night in London, Napier spent in writing Nan a full account of the results of Singleton's visit to Lamborough. He wound up by warning her that Greta was in London, disguised as a Belgian refugee. Moreover, Scotland Yard would have full and accurate knowledge of those with whom the woman held any, even the slightest and most innocent, communication.

He sealed the letter and left it in the trusty keeping of his servant. The packet was not to go out of Day's hands except to be placed in those of Miss Ellis.

Napier's secret was well kept. His own family had so little idea of his change of plan that until he had cabled them from New York, they supposed him to have vanished, in the now familiar way, into the B. E. F.

Before ever the Atlantic liner left the docks, Napier's eyes, or rather, his ears, in the first instance, began to open. What they took in was the fact of the singular pervasiveness of the German tongue. On examining the speakers, they were seen to be men young or youngish and certainly KriegsfÄhig. The stamp that the German system sets on the person who has been trained to military command differentiated certain of these foreign-speaking passengers from the ordinary reservist. There were at least four Germans of good military rank on board, no doubt calling themselves "Americans returning to their American homes." Here was a chance to observe at short range one of the greatest difficulties of those days: how was England to safeguard herself without wounding the susceptibilities of a friendly, but officially neutral, nation?

As he shouldered a way among his alien enemies, that new, involuntary hatred of the Teuton accent may have played some part in the rapture with which his ears greeted a voice not English, indeed, yet sounding for him its special harmonies.

He turned with a leap of the heart toward the voice that floated up from the crowd pressing to the gangway, a voice that called out to a porter something about a "green suit-case." Looking down from, the height of the tall ship, for all his hungry eagerness, he couldn't see the face that went with that voice, nothing but hats: men's soft felts and hard bowlers; the feathers and ribbons of ladies' headgear. Then came a moment when, among them all, a little cap of brown came slowly up on its golden wings till it landed Nan Ellis on the deck.

This latest manifestation of the cap of magic produced in Napier's mind a medley of instinctive joy, an utter bewilderment, and that readiness of acceptance, apparently without effort or cost, with which we greet those strokes of fortune whose strangeness throws us back on the essential mystery through which the most commonplace of us daily threads his way.

Her first words in another mouth would have been an intolerable irony:

"So this is how you go to the Front!" He was glad of the quick flush that rose to ask his pardon.

"To accept the worst construction on my being here," he answered, smiling, "I am not the only shuttle-cock."

She evaded the explanation of her own presence with a speech that even at the time struck Napier as being more odd than her apparition on board the Britannia.

"Forgive me for saying that. I know, wherever you are in these days, you are at the Front."

It was something. It was undoubtedly too much, and yet it comforted. The eager hope rose in him: she had come to know of Greta's return. Without Napier's intervention, she had come to know of matters in that connection which had made her flee. Hardly was the hope framed when it was dashed.

"I got tired of waiting to hear from Greta," she explained. Besides, she had a feeling she couldn't go on. She'd written him that. To show him she really had got off, the letter was to be posted from Queenstown. It was in—Heavens! where was the green suit-case? Seeing him had put it out of her head.

Oh, Napier would look for, he would find, the green suit-case!

But, no, she dashed after him. "Certainly not," she faltered as she caught him up, unless by any chance she shouldn't find it in her cabin. With consternation in her face, she flew down the companionway.

Serenity had returned when Napier met her a quarter of an hour later on the way to the dining-saloon.

"It's a wonder I knew you," he said, "in a different hat."

"Can't wear the Mercury on board ship. But I won't have you mocking at it." She stood with several letters in her hand.

"Why mayn't I mock at a Mercury cap if I like?" He remembered he hadn't waited till now to commit that indiscretion.

"Because my Mercury cap is your responsibility."

"My—"

"You've forgotten already!" As they went down, she reminded him of that time she appeared in the blue hat with Michaelmas daisies. "You perfectly hated it." Yes, he remembered he hadn't liked it. And Julian had quoted Herbert Spencer. Nobody was ever satisfied with hitting on the right thing. If a person found a special kind of ink-pot that suited him, or a milk-jug that would pour without spilling, or clothes that were just right, "we were so certain to want a change that the same thing wasn't made again," Miss Nan supplemented. "But my same-shaped hat has been made again and again, and you never noticed! That's all I get."

It was only to himself that Napier said: "No! no! She got more—more than was wise or well."

"Did you find the green suit-case?" he asked, "and my letter?"

"Oh, yes. But the letter was hardly worth showing."

He claimed the sealed envelope and opened it on the spot. He read:

Dear Gavan:

This is to say good-by. Since my talk with you I haven't felt I could go on staying here in England. So, as I have no news from Germany and hear that my mother is in New York, I'm moving heaven and earth to get off to-morrow in the only really good sailing this month. I wish I need not think of you over there in France, but I don't know how I can help that.

Yours,

Nan Ellis.

P.S.—Perhaps you wouldn't mind writing me. N. E.

She gave a New York address.

Only to himself he put the question, On what terms had she left Julian? What lay behind the delight in the eyes that welcomed Napier? Ask? Not he. He would try not so much as to wonder. Even if the shining of the hours in front of them was no more than the fragile iridescence of a bubble floating in the sun, the greater was the need not to touch such beauty with too inquiring finger.

They found their places in the haphazard way of the first luncheon, before the seating is arranged. By ones and twos others came in, till the table, at which Nan was the only woman, was full. The strangers at her end seemed disposed to silence. Such words as fell audibly, though English and addressed chiefly to the waiter, bore out the impression given by the faces. Napier saw the steward about it afterward. There were to be no Germans at his table as finally selected. He wished afterward he had added, and no American actors. In which case Miss Nan wouldn't have come up from dinner with Mr. Vivian Roxborough and walked the deck at his side a good half-hour. If it were only for Julian's sake, she couldn't be left to Mr. Vivian Roxborough. Napier made it his business to avert the chance.

That next day—forever and forever the sunshine and the sweetness of those hours would leave something of their flavor and their light behind. If only they could go on sailing, sailing, and never land!

So Napier said to himself, as he hurried back on the second afternoon, after a talk with the captain—a talk somewhat marred by a flickering fear as to whether that actor might have appropriated the guardian chair. No; one of those Germans! Napier's change of table had neither prevented Nan from bowing to some of the men she had broken bread with during that first meal on board, nor prevented chance conversation (initiated by one or other of the Germans) upon that promising opening, "You are American?"

Even Nan knew that the handsome big man who stood by her now was an officer. He may have been thirty-eight, and he was certainly in the pink of condition. In the midst of whatever it was he had been saying, Napier carried the lady off to the lower and less-frequented deck.

"How they must laugh at the stupid English, those Germans!" he muttered, as he strode along at her side. "Here we are, six months after the declaration of war, and enemy aliens still going back and forth as easily as in times of peace. Those that don't find their way back into the German Army—"

"How can they!"

"What's to prevent them? Anyway, those who don't take the popular pleasure trip, New York to Genoa and so to Germany, can be trusted to advance the German propaganda in the two Americas. But they won't find traveling so easy after this."

"Why? Who will prevent them?" Her questions had come quickly.

"The British Government will prevent them—after the Intelligence Department gets my report." He took out of his pocket a paper destined to have an effect, the least part of which was to give Napier many a sleepless night months after he had posted it.

The first eyes to rest on the report after Napier's own, regarded it, as he felt even at the time, with something more than disapproval.

"Don't send that!" the girl urged. She added reasons in whose syllabling Napier heard Julian's voice. Oh, he had well indoctrinated her! As Napier listened, obviously unmoved, there came into Nan's earnestness a note that gave him more uneasiness than her "opinions"—a note of anxiety, a note of something very like panic. "You can't send that! It—it might make such trouble, not only—not to people you call your enemies." She caught herself up. "As Julian says, 'The reactions from that kind of tyranny—'"

Napier said quietly he must accept the reactions.

"But you can't!" she repeated. "It's the greatest mercy you've showed it to me. Oh, Gavan, you don't want to make trouble between England and America? You will if you send in that report. I do beg you—"

Napier had seldom known more difficult moments than those that followed. As she stood beside him on the saloon-deck near the companionway-door, he glanced at the mail-box near the purser's window. Its open brass mouth seemed to bray a warning: "If you don't post that letter now, you never will." Napier stepped inside, and dropped the envelope through the slit.

Nan sat down on a folding-stool near the ship's railing. Napier went back and stood silent by her for a moment. Then he said:

"Give me what credit you can. I don't remember ever doing anything harder than that."

To his surprise, instead of reproaching him or punishing him with silence or with tears, "What do you expect your Government will do?" she said.

"Oh, I don't know." He didn't try to keep the touch of impatience out of his voice. "Regulate the traffic a little better, perhaps." He would have left it at that but for a trifling occurrence. The head of the German officer whom they had left a few minutes before on the upper deck appeared just then out of an open port in the dining-saloon. For the merest instant it was there, only to be withdrawn. And why, pray, shouldn't a man of any race look out at the sea from a public window? even, come to that, glance out at a pretty girl? "People may as well know," Napier said, "that the British Government has come to a point where it will be obliged to exercise its censorship openly and thoroughly instead of—" He frowned in the direction where the offending head had been. "I doubt if these fellows on board here have even been asked to make a declaration, let alone been examined."

"Why should they be examined?" The voice beside him rose indignant. "On the open sea! bound for a neutral country!"

He looked at her with different eyes. "The British port was the proper place," he said. "And perhaps people were examined. You know better than I."

"I know?" She stared at him.

"You know if they asked you to make a declaration before you came on board."

"Me? A declaration! About what?"

"As to what you are taking over." He heard his own stern voice as if it were some one else's.

"They asked," she said, with her chin up, "if I were taking over any letters to people in America?"

"And what did you say?"

"That I wasn't taking over any letters." Her note, like his, had grown less and less patient. "Though I don't call it their business to ask an American going to America if she—"

"Do you mean," the interrogation went on, "they didn't look for themselves?"

"Look! Look where?"

"Look through your luggage, your hand-bag, your 'green suit-case.'"

"Certainly not."

"Well, they ought. And I shall see that next time they do."

Not anger only, and not only spirited revolt, appeared on the face Napier loved. The something else he had been vaguely aware of showed there clearer. He glanced sharply round and then bent over her. "What would happen if they did their duty? What if they were to search you?"

"To search me!" She stood up.

"Sh!" He looked round again.

"They can't!" she triumphed. "Not now."

"Ah!" The emission of breath came as though forced out by a sudden physical anguish.

"What's the matter? What are you thinking?" she cried.

"I'm thinking that I wish to God you'd go and get all that infernal stuff of Julian's in the green suit-case and throw it overboard."

"I haven't got any 'infernal stuff,'" she said, with the faint pink rising in her cheeks.

To Napier's further characterization of "the stuff," his bitter denunciation of this using of English good faith to hamper, if not to betray, England, the girl had her defense. Or, rather, she had Julian's reinforced by the American's innocent belief, prior to 1917, that to the citizens of that favored land no Old-World rules need apply, no Old-World danger was a menace. "Americans don't recognize," was one of her phrases. "We make our own rules. You are talking in the air. I am not carrying over any letters."

"Look me in the eyes, Nan, and say that you are not carrying something that I would prevent from reaching America if I had the power."

She got up and walked alone toward the stern of the ship. As she turned to come back, Vivian Roxborough rose out of his chair. Before he reached her side, a capped and aproned figure darted out of the narrow corridor, near the smoking-room, and spoke to Miss Ellis. The girl and the stewardess went below together. No sign of Nan for the rest of the afternoon.

At six o'clock Napier sent a note to her cabin.

I hope you're not feeling out of sorts in any way. But if you are, mayn't I see you a moment?

Yours ever,

G. N.

The answer came back:

Not out of sorts at all, thank you,

Yours as always,

N. E.

When he didn't find her at the dinner-table,—she had been punctual hitherto—Napier went back to the upper deck and waited for her near the companionway. Ten minutes went by. She must, after all, have been below somewhere, and was no doubt at dinner by now. He went back to the saloon and looked in. She was not there. As he returned again to keep his watch on the corridor leading from her cabin, the same stewardess who had carried the girl off early in the afternoon came laboriously up from lower regions, carrying a tray.

"Oh—a—you are the one who is looking after Miss Ellis, aren't you?"

"Yes. I'm taking in her dinner."

"Oh, I see." But it wasn't true. He didn't see in the very least why he should be punished in this way, a sulky way, moreover, and singularly un-Nanlike, as he told himself.

Just after the luncheon-bugle sounded the next day, Napier met the same stewardess again. Again she came toiling up the companionway, tray-laden.

"You are taking that to Miss Ellis?"

Yes, she was.

"She is ill, then?"

"No, she isn't ill. Just having her dinner in Number Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four isn't Miss Ellis's number."

"No, sir. It's the number of the lady who isn't feeling very well, though she does eat well. I'll say that for her." The woman pursued her way with the access of vigor that a dash of vindictiveness will sometimes generate.

He had not so much as a glimpse of Nan until evening. Going down to dress, he met her coming out of the library with an armful of books.

"Well, at last!" He tried to take the books. She backed away from him.

"No, no, thank you. They're just nicely balanced."

"Look here, what have I done?"

"You've barred my way." She tried to pass.

"It isn't like you to take a mortal offense and not say how or what about."

"I haven't—taken offense." She leaned against the wall, hugging the books.

"Then why do you stay in your cabin the whole blessed time?"

"I haven't been in my cabin. I've been in—I've been looking after a lady who wasn't well when she came on board and who is a very bad sailor. So as I'm rather a good one—she will wonder what has become—" and before Napier could gather his wits, Nan was flying down the corridor.

The next day same program was continued, except that Napier hung much about corridor and companionway, waiting in vain for even a glimpse of the flying figure. While walking the deck he had located Number Twenty-four, noting with surprise that a passenger who was ill, especially a woman looked after by Nan, should keep her port closed in fine weather. He had of course looked up the number on the table diagram. Twenty-four was occupied by Mlle. La Farge, the devil take her!

A restless, wearisome day. He knew it an ill preparation for sleep. He turned up the light over his berth, the fierce, unshaded light, and read till his eyeballs burned. He extinguished the horrible glare and lay in the dark, turning and tossing, seeing in the renewal of his Nan-fever a punishment for defective loyalty to his friends. Twelve o'clock came. Is she asleep? As for him, he was wider awake than ever.

One o'clock in the morning. It wasn't to be borne. The real trouble was that instead of taking a proper amount of exercise, he'd hung about waiting. What was the night, the morning, rather—what was it like? He couldn't bring himself to turn on the fierce flood of light. He felt his way to the port. Yes, a gibbous moon, rolling lopsidedly among the cloud-rack over a corrugated-iron sea. Was it hot or cold away from the stifling steam heat? He opened his port and breathed deep. He was not the only sleepless passenger. Two heads showed dimly, two figures in long ulsters leaning against the rail.

Presently a voice: "Now a little more walking, and you'll feel better."

Nan! Good Samaritanizing! She was supporting the shorter figure, her arm round the thick waist. They started down the deck in the direction of Napier's open port, but thought better of it. They turned and went the other way in face of the wind.

Napier pulled on some clothes and hurried out. When he got to the other, the colder side, of the ship, there they were, going at a good round pace for an indisposed person, pounding down the deck locked in that embrace.

Well, women were odd beings. Here was evidently some frantic new friendship started. He drew back in the semi-darkness and leaned against the wall, smoking. The two heads hatless, with motor-veils tied round them, were close together. The invalid ceased speaking as they passed.

Nan's voice was blurred, troubled. "There must be some mistake—" the rest was lost.

As they turned to come back, the mild, intermittent shining of the moon lit the two faces for a passing moment—lit one delicate-featured, pale, eager; and the other, full, pink-cheeked, with heavy, handsome outlines and prominent eyes. By all the gods, it was?—No, it couldn't—Something worse than a headache must be the matter with Napier when he could imagine so startling a likeness.

"I don't know how to get any more," Nan was saying.

"You can borr-ch-ow some," said the other in remembered accents.

When the figures turned to come down again, the shorter of the two halted suddenly. Napier had come out of the shadow and stood in such dim light as there was, with his back against the ship's railing, waiting for them.

It was the invalid who first caught sight of him. She turned about, and before one could much more than blink, she had wrenched open the weather door and disappeared.

Nan stood still for a bewildered instant, while Napier went forward.

"So that's why!" he said. "Very well, then, you've got to know!" Leaning on the railing there beside her in the windy moonlight, he told her what Singleton had found in Greta's room.

Before he had gone far Napier was acutely aware of the girl's stiffening; aware of a withdrawal, infinitesimal as expressed in the body, a chasm as between their souls. He could feel that she was thinking: "Gavan looked on! He allowed that baseness at Lamborough!" That he should put a false construction upon what was found was the least of his misdoing.

"Oh, yes,"—she turned sharply away—"she told me you'd say that!"

Was it anger or suppressed tears that clouded her voice? Napier didn't know.

"What Greta must have suffered those horrible last hours at the McIntyres'! All to spare me, to save me the humiliation of knowing how you could treat my friend! She knew what that would mean to me. We,—" she gave him her eyes again—"we at home treated Greta like a princess. And she deserved it." As Napier made no attempt to rebut that view, she dropped her head, struggling an instant with some new enemy to self-control. "Greta puts me, too, to shame. That longing to see me again that made her risk coming back to England! Only to find that she might do me an injury, might compromise me! Imagine Greta in a thick veil, waiting about in the dusk to catch a glimpse—Saw me coming out of the shipping office with Madge. And when she found I was sailing on this boat, dropped everything to come along! Greta understands loyalty." She fell back upon ground evidently prepared for her. "Isn't it 'trying to undermine,' isn't it 'poisoning the mind,' if you ask me to put the worst construction on innocent things? Greta's diary! As she says, if you'd read my diary to my mother, you'd have me in the Tower. Oh, she is fair and just! She's been saying to me only to-night, that since I'll be going back there, perhaps living among them, I'm to remember it's only to the Germans the English are perfectly horrible. She was quite willing to leave me my illusions about you all till you yourself tear them away."

"Do you mind telling me how I've done that?" He tried to stem the torrent.

She steadied herself with an elbow on the railing.

"Haven't you told me yourself about going through my friend's trunks when she wasn't there? Oh, that—that, Gavan, was—" She turned suddenly and buried her face in her arm.

"Yes, it was a mistake."

She lifted a wet face up to him in the moonlight.

"The alternative," he said miserably, "would have been better. Instead of the private one, a public examination, Greta Schwarzenberg in prison instead of free—"

"Then she is right!" Nan stood back, clear of the railing, facing him. "You do want to be revenged."

She stood there, with the wind catching at the ends of her chiffon veil, blowing them back over her shoulder, for that instant before she, too, fled from him through the weather door.