The morning of arrival found every one in the natural state of excitement induced by eight days' anticipation and three thousand miles of progress toward a given goal. Napier's glimpse of Nan, hurrying out of the breakfast-salon by an opposite door as he went in, showed excitement in her, too. Notwithstanding all that had happened, he was determined not to part from her on that note of last night. Anything, the merest commonplace, rather than that, he told himself, unable to strangle a larger hope.

Not in vain he, in his turn, despatched breakfast in short order and went above. There she was on the promenade-deck, her back to him, her face to the faint, still far-off outline of her native land.

In the raw chill of that February morning the prospect appeared anything but welcoming to Napier. It was different for her. In the forefront of her mind she was no doubt waving the Stars and Stripes. But, Napier could have sworn, deep in her heart was the thought of him and a secret planning of one of those "meetings in New York" she had spoken of in the first days. She stood there lightly poised, a little wistful, more than a little alluring. Another man, noting the empty deck, remembering that other sea they had stood by, locked together, would have gone up to her and put an arm about the waiting figure. The scene of pretty confusion and tender yielding, the withdrawal, "Some one is sure to come!" and the hurried arrangement to meet—he saw it all. He wondered afterward what would have happened had he played his part.

When she found him at her side with "Good morning," she turned sharply as though to fly. It was all in the convention.

"You must be very happy to-day," he said.

"Happy! Why should I be happy?"

"Well, to be so near home."

"Oh, home!" She lifted her shoulder slightly. "New York is less my home than—" she stopped short.

"Than England?" he said.

"There's one thing, anyway," she said in her elusive way. "If I can't go back for a good while, neither can you."

He stared at her, a great hope contending with mystification.

"Do I understand," he forced himself to answer lightly, "that you refuse to let me return home without you?"

Her cheeks showed sudden color.

"The Germans refuse to let either of us go if what Greta has heard is so."

"And what has she heard?"

"That soon after we sailed the Kaiser declared a blockade of England, an Atlantic war zone."

She saw that Napier had already had the wireless news before he asked:

"How does that affect you and me?"

"Even neutral ships aren't safe after to-morrow," she said, accepting with the hypnotized docility shown by so many in those early days any edict bearing the German stamp. "What I've been thinking is, you'll be over here till the end of the war, so there'll be time to—to understand—to get some things straight, anyhow." She turned to answer the good morning of one of the ship's officers.

Napier always believed that the first real shock to Nan's faith in Greta came as the passengers of the Britannia were about to disembark an hour later. Mr. Vivian Boxborough, very smart in new ultra-English clothes, had been observed threading his way among the crowd on deck, plainly in quest of Miss Ellis. No sooner had he caught sight of her than he pressed forward, and no sooner was he near her than he stopped short, his eyes intent on the lady at Miss Ellis's side.

Greta had forborne to challenge curiosity by absolutely concealing her features. But probably no one better than she understood the serviceability for disguise of a heavily figured white-lace veil.

Mr. Roxborough must have known her well to be able to say with such assurance: "Why, Greta—" and then in the rebound from that betrayal of too close acquaintanceship away to the other end of the scale: "I didn't know you were on board, Mrs. Guedalla."

Greta stared at him through the meshes of the elaborate pattern and said with her grand air: "Some mistake, I think."

Roxborough pinched his lips. "Oh, you don't remember me! Well, perhaps you'll remember your husband. I'm rather expecting my manager to meet me on the dock. Or perhaps it's you Mr. Guedalla is waiting for," Roxborough added with a peculiar smile.

Greta put a hand through Nan's arm and drew her near the gangway. Something must have been said for the girl turned her back with decision upon her late admirer. But her face was more than disturbed; it was shamed, frightened. A cut in public is a terrible thing to the innocent mind.

Napier stood close behind the pair, waiting for the excuse he felt that Mrs. Guedalla would make for not going down with the crowd to confront her husband. But the lady was too entirely mistress of herself for that. Perhaps she counted on Mr. Guedalla's knowledge of the wisdom of not interfering with his wife. Straight down the gangplank she walked, Nan behind her, recovering herself enough to make little signals toward a group—two ladies, a young man, and three children with flags—waving and smiling at Nan Ellis, first from the end of the crowded pier, then running along at the side, and now waiting finally at the bottom of the gangway to fall upon the girl with their welcome.

Napier had no difficulty in deciding which of them was her mother in face of the fact that Mrs. Ellis looked more like an elder sister. Yes, that must be a nice woman; but stupid, he decided, noting the cordiality, after the first motion of surprise, with which Mrs. Ellis received the lady in the baffling veil. She kissed Greta through the lace. Bah! With Nan's address in his pocket, he could afford to leave her and her party in the hands of a customs officer, opening trunks on the pier.

Indeed, he had little choice, he found himself appropriated by an English friend and an American steel magnate—carried away into a world about which all that he had heard had very little prepared him.

His private as well as patriotic interest in the possibilities unfolded did not prevent him from putting himself in touch with the British Intelligence Department before he dined that first night on American soil.

The chief agent in New York was, or had been, as Napier knew, the British partner in an American shipping house. That he had married an American heiress, Napier also knew. He was the more surprised to find Mr. Roderick Taylor installed en garÇon at an hotel.

"My w-wife," said the long, fair young man with the strictly pomaded hair, "is in P-Paris with her sister, who is or-organizing American Hospital Relief. In any case,"—his smile seemed to accept Napier as one to be treated frankly—"all sorts of coming and going is less marked in a c-caravansary like this." The luxurious sitting room bore at that moment, though it was not yet six o'clock, signs of the indicated traffic. A bridge table not long abandoned, to judge by the glasses and cigar ends, stood there.

He had run across Stein, coming out from luncheon, said Mr. Taylor. Old Viennese friend of his, Stein. Had him up along with O'Leary, the Sinn Feiner, and a German-American dark horse, Bieber. "We are all dining at Bieber's to-morrow," Mr. Taylor smiled as one who preserves a native modesty in full view of triumph. It wasn't the smile he showed to his experimental bridge parties. "Greta von S-S—" the slight, very slight stammer gave a touch of unreadiness which perhaps prevented the extreme competency of Mr. Roderick Taylor from being too marked. Napier noticed later than the stammer was hardly discernible when the engaging young man was off duty.

"Yes, von Schwarzenberg." He helped Taylor over the barbed-wire of Teutonic syllables.

"Know her?" Taylor could go on glibly enough. "Rather!" And what, he asked, made Mr. Napier think the woman who had crossed with him as Mademoiselle La Farge was—

Clearly Mr. Taylor, whether in obedience to his own judgment or to the issue of some mot d'ordre, was disposed to take Napier at face-value; but he was far from accepting Napier's facts on the sole ground of Napier's belief in them. After the Schwarzenberg incident had been probed and sifted, Mr. Taylor sat back in his chair, gently perplexed and obviously perturbed.

"It's not that we haven't been expecting her. The chief value of one of our men is that he has hitherto been able to keep in touch with her. But if she really has left the other side, he ought to have warned us." He took up the receiver of his desk telephone, and then laid it down. "We go warily with Miss von Schwarzenberg." He rose and opened a door at the very moment that a frail, grizzled man entered the adjoining room from the hall. "Oh, Macray, just a moment!"

The man did not stop to take off either hat or coat. Middle-aged, dyspeptic-looking, he came in, settling his black-rimmed pince-nez on an insufficient nose. He took a reporter's note-book out of his pocket and stood there, sour, hopeless, a mere sketch of a man in black and white.

"Greta Schwarz is back," said Mr. Taylor. Without a pause and in the same low voice he ran rapidly over the main facts in the story Napier had told him. "Just set them to work," he wound up. "Quickest way to get on her track—" he turned to Napier—"what's the American girl's address?" Napier did not disguise his reluctance to produce that particular information.

"You understand," he repeated for the benefit of the pessimist with the note-book, "this Miss Ellis is under the most complete misapprehension about the woman."

"Of course, of course," agreed Mr. Taylor.

Macray impassively poised his pen. Napier gave the address. Macray set down a grudging stroke or two, and then: "All New York knows where to find Schwarzenberg," he said, dragging out the information as though to talk increased his affliction, whatever it was. "Just heard. Been seeing reporters all afternoon."

"Who's been seeing reporters?" Taylor demanded.

"Schwarz."

"The deuce she has!"

Macray felt in his pocket. He drew out an evening paper, damp from the press, and folded to display:

Napier stood at Mr. Taylor's side, and together they read how Miss von Schwarzenberg had not been an hour on this dear American soil, before she perceived with pain that, while Germany was fighting for freedom of the seas, for human rights, America was forgetting she'd ever won hers. After a genial reference in passing to the burning of Washington by the British, the lady protested that history wasn't her strong point. Would some one, therefore, kindly tell her who had given the seas to the British? Upon the eloquent pause that seemed to have followed that request, the lady illustrated the service Germany was rendering the United States in protesting against English domination. It must be very humiliating, the lady thought, for Americans to have their mail-bags opened, their letters confiscated. "Of course some of the letters are for Germany. Why not? Is England to tell you to whom you may write? Isn't America a neutral? Or is that a pretense?" She gave cases of bitter hardships, German parents, old, ill, dying, whom faithful sons had long been accustomed to supply with remittances from America. In suffering British interference, America, so Miss Greta told the interviewer, had failed in dignity. Weakly, supinely, slavishly, America was submitting to British insolence.

Nothing in the interview occasioned Napier so much concern as the fact that it was stated to have taken place at a named hotel, "where Miss von Schwarzenberg is staying with old friends."

Mr. Taylor laughed a trifle ruefully as he threw down the sticky paper and applied a pocket-handkerchief to his long, white fingers. "I like America, he assured the newcomer, but there's no denying it's a queer country and a queer people. Isn't it so, Macray?"

Macray's only answer was a faint groan. He picked up his newspaper and walked gloomily out.

"The very strangest mixture," Taylor went on, "of shrewdness and innocence. Take their attitude toward this woman. She impresses them enormously." He disregarded Napier's "She impresses most people." "Over here they take this Mrs. Guedalla, or Schwarz, or whatever her real name is—they take her not only for a woman of education, but a woman wohlgeboren. They accept her account of misuse of her name. An obscure Western actress who, you are told, bears a certain dubious likeness to the real Greta von Schwarzenberg had feloniously adopted that honorable name. 'You know the stage way,' says Schwarzenberg. 'Tottie Tompkins turns into Arabella Beauchamp.' The real Miss von Schwarzenberg has naturally never been on the stage. She is musical. All gebildete Germans are musical. And that fact had been her salvation, so she tells these fatuous friends of hers over here. Being musical in the thorough German way enabled her to hold out against her proud, despotic father. When he tried to compel her to marry the dissolute Freiherr of vast possessions, Miss Greta ran away with her governess. Oh, always the scene is carefully set! And then, in order not to live on the governess, Miss Greta took to teaching music. They swallow it all! They look upon her as a patriot. A German patriot, of course; but still laboring devotedly and legitimately for her native land."

What made Taylor's dealings with her a delicate matter was the fact that she had these powerful friends, Americans whose good faith and general decency of conduct no reasonable being could doubt. She had kept herself in close relations with these people even while she was abroad. His wife discovered that in Paris. How did Schwarzenberg keep up these useful relations? Through the one channel of organized participation in the war then open to American sympathizers, Relief.

"Lord! the jobs put through in the name of Relief!" Taylor exclaimed.

On his second evening in New York Napier went with the Van Pelts, his hosts, to hear "Lohengrin" at the Metropolitan. In a stage-box sat Miss Greta, very handsome, in green, with a silver wreath on her fair hair. The elderly lady beside her, according to the Van Pelts, was a well-known "society leader" with a taste for philanthropy. She had largely financed a certain branch of American relief work. That was her husband just coming into the box. But the girl—the Van Pelts couldn't make out the girl. Napier could.

The next day, three tables away from him, at a men's luncheon given to Napier at a hotel, Greta again, with a different party except for Nan. Napier saw the girl's face brighten in that instant of catching sight of him. He saw her half rise, and then, as Greta fixed her eyes on Nan's, Napier saw the girl subside. From time to time she looked over wistfully. In a general movement after luncheon, emptying and refilling the great room, he was able to time his going out so that he might snatch a word with her.

"You haven't forgotten where I am?" she said hurriedly after they had allowed new-comers to separate them a little from their respective parties.

No, he hadn't forgotten; but he had read that she—he nodded in Greta's direction—was also at the same hotel.

"And that keeps you away! That's all you care!"

"Do you want, then," he said, with that daring which the sense of being safely lost in a crowd will lend—"do you want me to care?"

"No! At least I oughtn't to." Greta and her guests were waiting. "If I'd known how to find you," Nan went on speaking deliberately, as though making a declaration of rights, "I should have written you. I could let you see part of a letter I've had from Julian. He tells news the papers don't."

Napier thanked her gravely and gave a private address. As he saw her disappear with "that woman," he said to himself for the thousandth time, If only he'd been allowed to tell Nan about that Gull Island villainy at the time, she couldn't have gone on making her loyalty a cloak for their common enemy!

The temptation to use his knowledge now, strove in him with an instinctive as well as a reasoned shrinking. The Gull Island affair couldn't, he argued, still be a secret of any state importance. But in proportion as he cleared away that obstacle, the clearer yet another stood forth. It was one of the evils of a most evil time that he, Gavan Napier, of all men, had been forced to play a leading part in the violent end of a man with whom he and this gentle, sensitive girl had broken bread! Napier caught again that animal-like gleam of bared teeth as Carl Pforzheim writhed across the table for his pistol, saw again the gush of scarlet after the figure turned, met the knife, and fell back against the wall. Let all that horror be hidden in the island earth and in oblivion. If Nan knew, never, never could it be forgotten.

The "news" in the letter she sent from Julian, was all of the gathering strength of the peace movement and the glorious part in it which America was destined to play. President Wilson, "the man with more power and a greater range of action than any ruler on the earth to-day"—President Wilson was the hope of the world. The rest of the page had been torn off. Nan was learning discretion, poor child!

In the intervals of business conclaves in the city, trips to Pittsburgh and elsewhere, Napier continued to cultivate Mr. Roderick Taylor despite that gentleman's refusal to lunch out, or to dine out. Not with Mr. Napier! Taylor was never seen in the company he most liked, as he said in his pleasant way. But there were private smokes and talks during which many things that had been mysteries to Napier became clear. Those were the days when Taylor and his agents were almost daily unearthing evidences of the underground activity of the pro-German propagandist. Among these moles of international mischief Taylor's weasels came upon Schwarzenberg's traces only to lose them. "Suspects of more public weight and interest, particularly men, were far more easily dealt with. These border-line women were the devil."

Never in all that time was Napier wholly free from a dread of hearing the name of Ellis in connection with Schwarzenberg; for always in his mind the figure of the winged messenger followed the devious ways of the German, followed like her shadow. The girl he loved was lavishing faith and service, as well as financing this enemy of England. The thought was an anguish to him.

Nothing of all this to Taylor. The sole reference to the chief ground of Napier's own interest in the situation was a carelessly expressed opinion, "Schwarzenberg must be making a considerable hole in the Ellis pockets."

But, no. According to the omniscient Taylor, Schwarzenberg's spendings were on a scale quite outside the Ellis range. Taylor half closed his whitish eyelashes and regarded the end of his cigar. "I am, I believe, on the track of Schwarzenberg's new resources."

That telephone again! It was always ringing in here when Macray was out. Taylor listened, laughed, and made an appointment.

An Italian, he explained, a Mr. Luigi Montani, over here with his family. He had taken from some friends of Taylor's a furnished house in Washington. All arranged in twenty-four hours. Not a syllable in the press.

"He's just been telling me that when his servants, Italians, went downstairs the first morning, they couldn't open the front door for the mass of pro-German literature shoved through the letter-box overnight."

The incident set Taylor talking about "the slender thread" on which may hang "the everlasting things" in international relationships. He talked of America with, as Napier thought, an understanding given to few foreigners. You couldn't shake Taylor's faith in America. "But her ignorance of one entire hemisphere!"

Was it greater, Napier asked, than Old-World ignorance of the new?

No, no. Lack of mutual understanding was the common danger. To increase it was the German trump-card.

"People talk of America's largely unconscious power to wreck the world's best interests. She won't!" he cried with a passion that seemed alien to his nature; "but if there's even a danger of it, it is because of innocent susceptibilities which the underground people, Schwarzenberg and her crew, are rubbing raw." And there was another thing. "If they should 'get at' Wilson, we'd be in a bad way."

"The whole world would be in a bad way," said Napier, with a dizzying sense of the issues at stake.

"Yes, the whole world," Taylor agreed. And on his face, too, was a deeper gravity.

"I heard something last night"—Napier sat up suddenly—"that made me furious. I denied it. I want to hear you deny it. Fellow from Washington told us the President has given up receiving the British Ambassador."

"It's true."

"My God! then Bernstorff has got him!"

"Not at all. It's true Wilson's given up seeing the British ambassador, and it's true he's given up seeing the German ambassador. Oh, a long head, Wilson's! He corresponds with the accredited official representatives, and he sees the unofficial, the people he can learn from and the people he can indoctrinate. You'll be dealing with him less advantageously because of your mission, even though it's private. But"—Taylor got up to find a match. He paused to lay a hand on Napier's shoulder—"see Wilson soon."

It was already arranged, Taylor was told.

"Well, don't talk only munitions." Nobody better than the President, according to Taylor, knew that the old diplomacy was doomed. "This is the hour of the unofficial envoy."

In Washington, four days later, Napier had cause to remember that dictum.