Napier arrived at the White House some minutes before the time set for his interview. Hardly had he embarked upon a little kill-time tour through the public rooms when he heard hurrying steps behind him, and turned to confront Nan Ellis.

Her greeting was the strangest, considering all things.

"How do you do? I wanted to know—oh, have you seen Greta?"

No, he hadn't, he could not forbear adding, Why should he?

"She was to meet me here." The girl turned and scanned the corridor, but in an excited, absent-mindedness as though her thoughts couldn't pretend to follow her eyes. "I expect they won't let her go. Her own Embassy is immensely polite to Greta. I never knew she had so many grand acquaintances." She broke off, and then added breathlessly, "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting to see—certain people. I don't need to ask what you are here for," he added.

Her eyelids winked as though he had flicked something in her face. "Oh,"—she considered a second,—"I suppose you do know more or less, since Julian made me talk before you. Do you know what I think?"

"I'd rather like to."

"Well, you shall. I think men are the indiscreetest people on the earth." And then, with that same suppressed excitement, she added, "All except one."

He made a movement toward a sofa—a movement she misinterpreted.

"O Gavan, don't go in just yet! He's got cart-loads of people to talk to, and I haven't anybody. You see, it must be somebody that as good as knows already. There isn't any one but you, is there? Of course, what I came for was to see the President. Every good American wants to see the President. So I done it—" she laughed as she threw up her head—"like Huck Finn."

"Not, I gather, with the hoi polloi?"

"The what?" But she didn't stop. "Oh, the trouble I had! I wrote and I wrote. I might just as well have been in an effete monarchy trying to approach the throne on my hands and knees. It made me mad, I can tell you. I said so. Told Senator Harned so. He's a friend of my mother's. But Senator Harned wanted me to give him the papers. Imagine!"

"Julian's manifesto?"

"Everything. As if I would! I've come all the way from Europe for a personal interview, and a personal interview I've got to have, or—well, something would have to be done." She wagged her head.

"I see. Something with boiling oil in it."

"Oh, they came to their senses at last, this very morning." She shone in the refulgence of the late-risen sun. "But do you know, up to the very last minute I had to be as firm as the Washington monument. He sent a Private Secretary to see me. And the Private Secretary tried to make me 'abandon the matter.' Called it 'the matter'! I denied that 'matter' was the main object. I must see the President. I was an American. Hadn't every American the right to see the President? Every American had the right to wring his poor hand in the presence of hundreds of other Americans. 'Very well,' I said, 'if I mayn't see him, I'll tell Senator Harned that I applied and sent in his letter, and waited for days, and was turned away at last.

"He asked me to wait a minute—the Private Secretary did. So I 'done it' again. After a while another man came and spoke to me, a gloomy man with a face like a clergyman who's got a crime on his soul, and he took me into the Presence." She was only half laughing. "The Presence and I said, 'How do you do.' I was almost too excited to look at him properly, now that I'd got him. But, O Gavan, he is, he really is!"

"H'm," replied Gavan.

"Wait till you see! He asked me why I'd come. Melancholy man still hung about. 'I should like to speak to you alone,' I said. Do you think he would? No. As much a 'fraid-cat as any king. But he looked at the melancholy man, and melancholy man went and looked out of the window. It was really as good as having him out of the room if I lowered my voice. Then I told him. I gave him Julian's Manifesto and the rest. Yes, I had them all in the green suit-case." She laughed triumphantly.

"Well, I wouldn't advise you to carry such merchandise again."

"I sha'n't," she agreed, "not in any such way as that. Babyish, I call it. But it was all right this time. I sat and watched him while he read Julian's Manifesto. He read it twice. It took hold of him. I could see that. Then I found him looking at me through his glasses.

"'What do your friends want me to do?'

"'To save civilization,' I said."

Napier could see her "doing Julian" for the President.

"I was awfully excited, but I remembered some more. He listened. He listens well. He makes you do your best. I felt encouraged. I made a case. Then I told him—oh, you won't like it, but I told him that Julian and the rest had far more backing in England than the newspapers gave the smallest inkling of. I told about the kind of men who were opposing the loss of liberty in the fight for liberty.

"'It is a menace before every country,' he said, in a discontented sort of way. He seemed not to want to think about it. I could see he was tired of considering me as a messenger any longer. I felt in the queerest way my best strength, my value, all going when I found him beginning to look at me as just a girl. He asked me questions that hadn't a thing to do with the great business. They were kind questions; oh, yes, kind, and as if he were really interested. He gave me a feeling, too, that he'd make everything all right. He made me feel very small and insignificant myself, but mighty proud of America."

"He seems to have taken your measure very accurately."

"What do you mean by that?" she asked, up in arms.

"Oh, we've been told he knows how to deal with women. He can manage even the Suffragettes."

"Now you are a little spiteful. I know. You are jealous because you haven't got a President. You've only got King George."

"I've come to be grateful for George," said Napier, fervently.

"That may be, but nobody can call him exciting."

Napier assured her that was the precise ground of his gratitude.

The assurance went unheeded. She was still simmering with the excitement of her interview.

"Now the President is exciting. Perfectly wonderful, I call him. And perfectly splendid about peace, though he did say"—the little pucker gathered between her brows—"he did say we might have to fight for it. I forgot to ask him what he meant by that. I shall be dying to hear what you think about him. Couldn't we"—she hesitated, and then as Napier did not make the hoped-for suggestion she made it herself—"couldn't we meet?"

"Nothing I 'd like better—if you're not with—if you're here with your mother."

No, her mother was still in New York with the children. That was one reason Nan was having to go back. For Mrs. Ellis was leaving on Saturday for California. "Father needs her, and she says I don't, now I have Greta."

"I see; you have Greta."

"Greta is dining out to-night." She scanned his face with an expression which, in the retrospect, comforted him even more than to remember her delight at the arrangement finally made. He was to call for her. "Not later than half-past seven," because she had the packing to do before bed—time. Yes, they were going to New York by the early train. Greta had to be in New York to-morrow night for a meeting.

"Hallet Newcomb's, I suppose?"

Nan opened her eyes.

"How odd you should guess! But isn't it fair-minded for her to go to a pro-Ally lecture by an Englishman?"

He smiled faintly as he hurried back to the anteroom.

On the way out, after his interview with the President, Napier could not fail to see among the waiting crowd, composed chiefly of men, the very striking figure of a yellow-haired woman in deep conversation with a certain senator much at the moment in the public eye. But Miss von Schwarzenberg did not leave Mr. Napier's recognition to chance.

"Oh, here you are!" She turned her back on the important person and joined Napier with as much effrontery as though the meeting were what she so successfully gave the impression it was, a matter mutually arranged. In face of the absence on his part of the least response, she walked on at his side. "I'm the only one here in all this throng," she said in a confidential tone, "who isn't waiting to see the President."

"That's a lie!" he said to himself as he stalked on.

"I'm waiting to see you. You must bear with me, I'm afraid," she said in gentle accents. "It's about Nan. You haven't been to see her because I'm there. Isn't that a pity?"

Napier's apparent obliviousness of her presence vanished. He made no effort to keep his indignation out of his face as he stopped abruptly to say: "I decline to discuss that or anything else with you." He turned his back on her with unmistakable finality, marched out into the corridor, and so to the columned porch, with never a look behind.

Napier hadn't often betrayed in public such heat of anger as the woman's audacity had stirred in him. Much she cared! he told himself, still tingling. She would shrug her handsome shoulders and return to her senator. Presently she would be entering the sanctum Napier had just left. To-morrow, in Hallett Newcomb's audience. Newcomb was one of those Britons invited by American friends to come and correct transatlantic misapprehension, and to present facts. Yet even such unorganized and unofficial efforts, so slight in sum, were not suffered by the thoroughgoing German propagandists to pass unchallenged or unneutralized. In this connection Roderick Taylor had set down to Miss Greta's credit an astute discovery. It was that, as some one put the case, "pro-Ally Americans stayed away from these meetings in vast numbers." Your pro-Ally American didn't need converting. He was occupied in other ways. What he failed to recognize was that in the absence of a sufficiently represented pro-Ally element in these audiences, Miss Greta's confederates, judiciously disposed about the hall, could and frequently did get up a powerful and "spontaneous" pro-German demonstration. By this means certain meetings convened in the interests of the Allies were turned into triumph for their enemies.

In front of Napier, at the office desk in Miss Ellis's hotel, stood a man impressing on the clerk in an undertone the importance of a letter he had brought. Could he have a receipt for it? Could he see the bell-boy who was to deliver it? That business despatched, the clerk was free to attend to Mr. Napier. Yes, he had been told a gentleman of that name would call for Miss Ellis at 7:30. A bell-boy was waiting to take Mr. Napier up.

Side by side in the elevator they shot through story after story, to be set down near the roof. With his thumb pressing the envelop to a little brass tray, the bell-boy held in its place, address face-downward, the much-sealed packet which had been the object of so much solicitude. At the end of an interminable corridor the bell-boy tapped at a door. Without waiting, he opened it and went in, returning almost at once with the tray empty and the words, "This way, sir."

The instant Napier was over the threshold, the door was shut behind him. He stood facing Miss von Schwarzenberg. She had risen in the act of laying the sealed packet on the table. In the midst of his surprise Napier mentally registered the fact that he had never seen her in more brilliant good looks. She was wearing over her dinner dress a superb fur coat, thrown back to show her jeweled neck.

"I am too early," Napier said. "I will wait downstairs."

"You are not too early. It is Nan who is late. She won't be a minute." Miss Greta pointed to a chair as Napier stood that instant rigid by the door. "Don't," she cried softly—"don't be so hard upon me! Can't you see that I'm not standing in your way any more?"

"If that is so, you have your own reason for it." He turned and laid his hand on the door-handle. These American fastenings! He turned the knob fruitlessly.

"Don't be so hard!" She had come toward him; her voice burred softly over his shoulder. "When I'm trying to keep the straight road, don't force me down into the dark ways I abhor. Oh, listen, Gavan! Give me a chance to explain!"

"What's the matter with this door?" he demanded.

"How do I know?" She pressed her lace handkerchief to her lips.

He rattled the handle.

"For God's sake! don't make a scene!" she cried in a harsh whisper. "Are you so bent on humiliating me!—both in private and in public as you did this morning? Another woman wouldn't forgive you this morning. And now, again, you want to humiliate me. Before hotel servants!"

"You told that bell-boy to fasten the door."

"Hush! For Nan's sake, anyway, don't make a scandal here!"

Napier turned and looked at her. "Whatever your motive is you are wasting time."

"Not if you give me five minutes to explain. For you, too," she said with meaning, "it won't be wasting time."

His answer was to lift his hand and press the electric bell.

"Ah,"—she stepped back,—"you are implacable! You—you don't care how much you injure yourself if only you can injure me. Yes, you—!" She broke off and turned away. For several moments she stood in that attitude, giving him ample time to relent, her meek head bent, the dazzling whiteness of her neck set off by the dark fur collar falling away from her shoulders. The silence was broken by a stifled sob as she carried her handkerchief to her lips and began to walk up and down. "I can't disguise it from myself any longer. You"—she stopped in the middle of the room—"you are the great disaster of my life." She waited. She gave him time to disavow the role. "Very well"—she folded her arms under the heavy fur—"very well," she repeated with a quiet intensity, "I shall not go out of your life, either, without leaving my mark. She shall make it up to me! Yes, and she shall make it up to Julian Grant for what he has given and lost. Be sure I shall see to that!" She came forward with an air of great dignity, slipped some catch, and opened the door. "Go!" she said in a penetrating voice.

Out of the elevator that shot up in response to Napier's ring stepped the same bell-boy. Napier's last look back showed the boy running down the corridor, one of the long list of Greta's slaves.

The elevator stopped at the second floor. Nan stood waiting.

"Why," she exclaimed with boundless surprise, "where have you come from?"

"There has been some mistake," Napier said. "I was taken to the wrong floor."

"I should think so! I was going down to see if my message had been forgotten. Oh, come while I get my gloves."

She disappeared through a sitting-room into a room beyond. Clearly Greta had taken some trouble to achieve her brief tÊte-À-tÊte.

As Nan came back, drawing on a long white glove, Napier was aware of some one flying down the stairs, some one for whom express elevators ran too slowly. A moment after the terrified face of the bell-boy appeared at the open door. "Come! Come quick! She's dying!"

"Who is dying? What has happened?" Nan demanded.

"Miss von Schwarzenberg," he gasped. "Quick!"

"But Miss von Schwarzenberg has gone out!"

"No! no! She's upstairs. Come quick, or it will be too late." He rushed to the elevator and rang. "It's coming!" he cried over his shoulder.

"Is he crazy?" Nan asked, dazed, but following Napier.

"It is probably some device to prevent your going out with me," he said as the elevator stopped.

Again the boy sped down that interminable upper corridor, the two hurrying at his heels.

"I'll wait for you," Napier said. They had come to the door which the boy had not dared to open till he was supported by the presence of others. He knocked now, opened, and stood back.

Greta, in the arm-chair, the fur coat at her feet, had flung bare arms out across the table and half sat, half lay there, moaning, with hidden face.

Nan rushed in and took the woman in her arms. Napier, full of disgust for what he looked on as a piece of cheap theatricalism, was startled as the face fell back against Nan's shoulder. That it should be so blotched, so disfigured in that short time, bore witness to the violence of whatever the feeling was that had torn and still was tearing the woman. More than by any other sign, the fact that her heavy hair had become loosened unbecomingly, grotesquely, brought Napier the conviction that for once Greta von Schwarzenberg wasn't acting. The great yellow mass of braids and curls had lurched over one ear, giving a look more of drunkenness than grief to the convulsed face. That one glimpse was enough. Napier turned away and paced the corridor for those leaden-footed minutes till Nan ran out, looking blindly up and down.

"Where are you? Oh, the most cruel, awful thing has happened! She has just had his letter. Greta's lover—Count Ernst Pforzheim is dead." The girl's eyes were full of tears. "Think of poor Greta running away up here to hide herself so as not to interfere with my pleasure!" She turned back to the room.

"Have you heard—any details?" Napier detained her to ask.

"Only that he died for the fatherland."

For all Taylor's professed anxiety to have Napier's report of his interview with the President, he was late. He was very late. Macray had looked in twice, the lines in his sallow face deepening as the black-rimmed glasses verified the solitary figure in the room.

Finally he came in and closed the door. He crossed the long room and stood at Napier's side before he said with that brisk familiarity that cost Napier something not to resent: "Remember that shady Bureau de Change, Mr. Taylor told you about?" As Napier did not instantly respond, Macray went on in his gloomy telegraphese, "Suspicious boom since Schwarz's reappearance."

Oh, yes, Napier remembered that.

"Hahn—fellow we've had investigating—been waiting for Taylor two mortal hours. Off to Chicago to-night—Hahn. 'Fore he goes, detail in bureau business got to be established. Hahn wants to go openly—one of the public—see 'f he c'n do business."

"Well, what's the objection?"

"No objection. Only Taylor's kept him waitin' such an infernal time, Hahn won't be able lay hands on anybody right sort before bureau shuts. Wants a witness. Fellow seems think I c'n hang fishin'-line out the window and hook what he calls 'suitable witness.' S'pose you wouldn't?"

Napier was growing accustomed to exigencies and odd manners. He had the man in. Once or twice before he'd seen here the clean-shaven young German-American, with his look of the typical waiter (which he wasn't) over-fed, under-exercised, a little scornful, with a leaden eye fixed on the main chance. One thought instinctively of tips as one's own eye, leaden or otherwise, took in his "waiting" air. He regarded his prospective companion without enthusiasm.

"You can't wear a stove-pipe hat," he said, "and you'd have to borrow a different overcoat."

Napier's instinctive reluctance was overborne by Macray's misinterpreting its origin. "Schwarz won't be there. No fear! All same, no sense exciting remark."

Napier in his turn made no secret of the ground of his special interest in the enterprise. "Why do you think she's behind this concern?"

Macray's curt: "Don't think. Know," decided Napier.

Two flights up, in a derelict office building on lower Broadway, they found a back room with a number on the door. It bore no business sign, no name.

The arrangement that Hahn should do the talking was initiated in the German tongue as they climbed the dingy stairs. Napier's secret uneasiness took alarm at the sound of steps behind. He looked back. On the first landing, under the flaring gas, which of itself was a sign of the outworn character of the place, a shabby old man in a fur cap was coming up behind them. Coming stealthily, Napier felt. But Hahn talked on stolidly about a hypothetical family in Karlsruhe. He knocked at the door, and then went in.

A hairless head, with outstanding ears, bent over a table, reading. The gas jet, directly above, was set in a green tin reflector, and all the light in the room seemed to concentrate itself on that corpse-white cranium; or, rather, the effect was as though the masked light, instead of being thrown on the man's head, had its origin there. A polished and luminous orb, it seemed to contain the shining like one of those porcelain globes over the old-time lamps.

"Is dis de blace vhere I can send money to Sharmany?" Hahn inquired.

"Yep," said the clerk. "Shut the door, will you?"

Hahn had not budged. "Bott safe, hein?" he said.

"Absolute." The man got up and shut the door. It was a drafty old place, he explained. "Safe?" he went on, resuming his place and gathering the light to himself again. This was not only a safe way; it was the only safe way.

Hahn produced a worn pocket-book. He wanted to send fifteen dollars to Karslruhe.

Fifteen dollars? It was a long way to send only fifteen dollars. The worst of it was, the commission was heavier in proportion for a small sum like that. It cost the company as much to send fifteen dollars as it would cost to send five hundred.

"Vot gompany?"

"This one. Who sent you here?"

"Fleischmann, Sevent' Avenue."

"Well, didn't he tell you about the company?"

"All Fleischmann tell me is de address." What he wanted, Hahn went on, was to send fifteen dollars every fortnight.

"Oh, every fortnight." The polished head bent over the address.

Hahn opened his pocket-book and fingered some bills. But how was he to know the money would reach Karlsruhe?

"Simple enough; we guarantee it. I give you a receipt." The man opened a book of printed forms, dipped a pen into a dirty ink-stand, and wrote the date.

How long, the visitor insisted, before he would hear from his family that the money had come?

"Depends on how soon they write." The tone was distinctly superior. "Family habits in these matters are different, we find."

His family acknowledged their letters instantly, Hahn said, if they got them. They hadn't been getting them.

"You have been here before?"

"No."

"I thought not. Then why did you expect your letters to get through, above all if they had money in them?" The unshadowed eyes in the pudding visage rested on the three five-dollar bills Hahn still held in his hand.

Hahn wished to know how soon he might hear if his family acknowledged at once.

"As a rule inside six weeks."

What would be the longest time, Hahn then wished to know.

"Two months—"

"It is a lie!" came from a crack in the noiselessly opened door. At a child's height from the floor a fur cap was thrust in. The gray beard sticking out beyond the mangy headgear gave the old face a fierceness instantly contradicted by the eyes.

"I haf a letter," he said, trembling with excitement. "De money I send two mont' before Christmas it nefer come. De money my friend send t'ree veek before dat, it nefer come. You gif me my money back!" He came in, swinging his greasy coat-tails about his shambling legs. "Here is de baper to show you get my money."

The altercation went on in German, with excuses, threats. "Get out, or the police—"

"Oh, you vill not like bolice here."

There was righteous anger on the part of the man at the desk; but a certain caution, too. Nobody could say at a time like this that in one case out of thousands something wholly unforeseen might not happen to delay—

"It is not delayed!" the little man screamed. "It did not come! It vill not come! Vhere is it? Gif it back!"

"Ah-h, I remember you now!" the unlashed eyelids narrowed. "In your case, and to an address like that—"

"Vot de matter vid the address?" screamed the old man. "Berfectly goot address!"

"I warned you it would be wisest to insure." He turned bruskly away from the agitated figure. "I will talk to you when I've finished. These gentlemen are in a hurry."

"Not at all. No, certainly not." Hahn backed to the door. He would wait.

"Vy to insure," the old man was shrilling, "if to send by you is, like you said, so safe? Hein?" He leaned over and hammered the ink-stained desk with a dirty fist.

The man behind the receipt-book shifted his position. He got up, and the light in the globe he bore on his shoulders was extinguished as by the turn of a screw. Hands in pocket, he stood in a shadow above the green reflector. "Safe, money undoubtedly is, in our hands. If," he repeated, "in one case out of a thousand it gets out of our hands, what then? Maybe you have heard there is a war? Maybe you can read?"

The old man gibbered with rage and offended pride; but the lines of defeat, which life had stamped on his face, deepened.

"Very well," said the other, with an effrontery that said he had marked the signs, "since you can read, you know who it is who robs the mails. Only twice since the war have they caught us, and we have sent tens of thousands of dollars. Ask the thieves of English where your money is!"

"Ai!" In the middle of the tirade the old man had turned away and spread out his hands in impotent grief.

"In war," the agent called after the broken figure—"in war it is wise to insure."

"Gone! All gone! Ai!" The quavering old voice trailed down the dingy stair.

Hahn mumbled an excuse, and the two new clients withdrew despite vigorous protests. Once outside the room, Hahn plunged down the two flights as though in fear of his life. When Napier reached the street there was no trace anywhere of either the old man, or of Hahn.

He recognized their collaboration in the account given in the New York papers, a few days later, of an exposure of one of the several concerns, all, it was hinted, under one (unnamed) management which, with no capital beyond a back room, a table, a chair, and a clerk behind a book of receipt "blanks," raked in hundreds and thousands from gullible people who thought they were helping their friends in Germany.