"Schwarzenberg and her friends will be a little straitened for a while after this," said Taylor.

The expression "her friends" grated on Napier, and Napier was already in a restless, uncertain mood. Taylor had noticed that. Significant as both men "deemed" the interview with the President, Napier had hurried over it to canvass and sift the Hahn adventure.

Taylor, lounging on the sofa, sipped his liqueur at his ease. How did he know the bulk of the bureau's money went into Schwarzenberg's pocket? Two reasons. First, she'd earned it. Languishing business doing a roaring trade from the moment she took hold. Second, the fellow she set to watch the rogues she'd put in charge was a rogue himself.

"Oh, we've deserved well of our country in blocking up a few of those rat-holes," Taylor concluded.

"My interest in it," Napier paused to say, "wasn't pure patriotism. It's made me pretty sick to see this Miss Ellis—rather a friend of mine she is, very intimate with my chief's family—so hopelessly taken in. I had an idea this bureau business might show up—"

Taylor abandoned his lounging posture. He sat looking at Napier very steadily out of his greenish eyes.

"Oh, I quite understand," Napier went on, "the exposure is too discreet to be of any use to me."

"I should rather think so!" remarked Mr. Taylor.

"All the same, it isn't fair, leaving people like the Ellises in the dark. The mother is off to the Pacific coast to-morrow." Napier added that he was due at their hotel in half an hour. He was going to talk to them, he said.

Still Taylor sat there, regarding his guest through a haze of cigar smoke. "I thought," he said after a moment, "you mentioned that you had talked to them—to the girl, anyway."

"I said I'd told Miss Ellis what Singleton found in Schwarzenberg's box. And God knows that ought to have been enough—"

"Too much," said Taylor, quietly. "Of course they passed it on to Schwarzenberg."

Napier doubted that. "You don't know the Ellises," he said, ignoring the limitations of his own acquaintance. No, his mistake had not been in telling too much. His mistake was that he hadn't told the Ellises enough. He was going to repair the mistake to-night.

"How are you going to do that?" Taylor asked in the same careful tone.

By telling them—telling the girl, anyway—that he'd avoided telling her before—the proved desperate character of this woman's accomplices.

A peculiar fixity came into Taylor's green eyes.

"You can't pass on information we've put in your way here."

"Certainly not," returned Napier with some heat. "What I shall tell has nothing whatever to do with you. I sha'n't hint bureau." Again he consulted his watch. The time dragged.

"You'd mind, I suppose, giving me an idea what you do mean to hint?"

"I sha'n't hint at all. And I've come here to-night expressly to tell you, first, that I mean the Ellises to know about Gull Island. About Greta von Schwarzenberg's connection with it and with the man we found there."

There was silence in the room.

"I dare say you are wondering why, in the face of the exigency, I've put it off?"

Taylor had stopped smoking, but he said nothing.

"If I'd told her what I found Carl Pforzheim up to on Gull Island, she'd have to know what became of Carl. Well, I'm now going to tell her."

"You can't do that!" Taylor had come to life. He leaned forward, blinking his white lashes as if a cinder had blown in his eye.

"Why can't I?"

"For one thing, telling the Ellises would be as good as giving Schwarzenberg the key to the whole Gull Island business."

"Well, why not? Do her good. Put the fear of God into her, perhaps. And she can't spoil a game that's over and ended."

Taylor laid down his cigar.

"The Gull Island game," he said in his guarded voice, "isn't over and ended."

Napier stood waiting.

"We've got one of our best men there this minute, personating Carl Pforzheim." Taylor nodded in the face of Napier's stark astonishment. "Your friend Singleton. He's managed the Gull Island job from the beginning. Went up again the day after you were there. Wirelessed the German agent at Amsterdam that he'd had wind of a raid on the island. He was going to destroy every trace and get out. Singleton saw to it that the truth of that much was verified, and duly reported to the Wilhelmstrasse. He promised them—still, of course, in the character of Pforzheim—to get back to the island as soon as it was safe. Well, he has got back."

"What the devil could he tell of any use to Germany that wasn't fatal to us?" Napier demanded.

"You don't yet appreciate the situation," Taylor said softly. "It's a post of special advantage just because the man in charge can choose his own time to be there. He can give important information that reaches Germany the merest trifle too late, or information that he knows they've had already from another quarter. They're fond of verifying their intelligence. And he tells them things they want to believe and can't check—things they have to take his word for, things that will throw dust in the eyes they count on seeing clearest. I tell you, Gull Island is one of the cogs in the wheel of the British machine. You won't mind if I'm frank? Well, then, you'd have hard work to commit any indiscretion"—Taylor rubbed it in—"that would serve Schwarzenberg's ends so well as to enable her to warn the Germans that a British decoy was nesting in Carl Pforzheim's place."

As he stood there, a prey to increasing uneasiness, Napier had his further glimpse of one of the disintegrating effects of wartime: the unknown quantity in character. How that had been forced home! Taylor had seemed "one of the best." No one in the British service was more trusted, and, Napier's instinct told him, no one more justly. None the less, Napier didn't see headquarters writing "all this" from the other side.

"I suppose," he found himself saying, "I oughtn't to ask you how you heard about the decoy duck on the island?"

"Well"—Taylor reflected an instant,—"after all, my instructions—yes, I'll tell you. I have it on the best possible authority. Ernst Pforzheim told me."

"Ernst! Ernst Pforzheim is in an English prison, or rather, he was before—"

"Exactly. Before he became of such use to our side. Clever dog as that fellow Singleton is, he couldn't have worked the Gull Island oracle without Ernst Pforzheim's help."

Ernst had helped Singleton! No! no! there were limits. It was, anyway, safe to say, "You must in that case rather deplore his death."

"What makes you think he's dead?" Taylor asked.

"His particular friend, Miss von Schwarzenberg, had the news yesterday."

"She had, had she? Ha! ha! The canny Ernst!" Taylor subdued his mirth to say: "Just so. Wilhelmstrasse doesn't have the news. We're all right; and Master Ernst can go on drawing pay from two governments. Oh, he's a very practical person, is Ernst. The situation is his own invention. A piece of 'war economy,' he called it. 'You English hard up for ammunition. Why waste it shooting a spy when he can give you more valuable information than anybody in the German Secret Service?'"

"You can't seriously mean we were such fools as to trust a man like that?"

"So far from trusting him, we keep him under surveillance every hour of his life. Two of our men specially detailed."

"You aren't telling me he's over here!"

"Been here six weeks."

"Then he's a free man!"

Taylor smiled. "A man who's been doing the sort of business Ernst has, is never a free man. Nobody knows better than Ernst how little his life would be worth if he took any liberties. And why should he? This is his harvest-time. He knows he'll get more out of us than—"

"Than out of Germany?"

"They'd ask very awkward questions of Ernst in Germany; he can evade them here. But there's a day of reckoning waiting for Mr. Ernst in the fatherland. No one knows better than he that he's safer with us, looked after by two capital fellows, till after the war. Then off to South America with a fat bank-account. And, by Jove! he'll have earned it! The cheek of the devil! Except for one enterprise!" and Mr. Taylor chuckled as he relit his cigar.

"We'd been wondering," he went on, "Macray and I, why the beggar had grown so content never to go out. No more music, no theater, no smart restaurants, and so far as we could see, no reason on earth why, with one or other of the men who stick to him day and night, he shouldn't revisit his old haunts. Not he!" Again that pleased chuckle. "Not so long as Greta von Schwarzenberg is circulating about New York!"

"Why, he and she are, or they were, thick as thieves."

Taylor nodded.

"And it would be undeniably useful to us to have that relation continue. It's where our friend draws the line. 'All very well to laugh,' he says to me, 'you don't know the woman. I do. Nein, danke.' So he sits and smokes and plays cards, drinks and overeats himself, and is losing his figure. I can take you round any evening, and you'll see for yourself."

"I've come to say good-by." Napier stood before Nan Ellis in the great public parlor of her hotel. More and more his most private experiences of American life had seemed conditioned by the vast restlessness of these places. He noticed that Nan, like many of her compatriots, was able to achieve an obliviousness to such surroundings that amounted to a kind of privacy.

Instead of relinquishing his hand, she had clutched it tighter: "You are not going back to England?"

"What's the use of my staying here?"

"The use?" She let his hand go. Napier received the impression that the lowering of her tone was less attributable to two or three other absorbed groups seated about the great room, than to some sudden rush of feeling that clouded her voice. "You are safe here."

He looked at her for a moment. Deliberately he shook off the impression her tone more than her words had made. "No,"—he shook his head,—"I'm far from safe where you can ring me up."

"You don't like me to ring you up?"

He could have laughed if he'd been less oppressed. "It's no use. I see I can't do anything to protect you. I might as well be on the other side of the world."

"No! no!" she protested with an eagerness that caught her breath. "Besides, you are very far from sure of getting to the other side of the world as things are."

His look of angry scorn, for the contingency implied, agitated her.

"Oh, do believe me! This is a thing I know more about than you do."

"It isn't a knowledge you should have," he said sternly.

She swept the rebuke aside in her alarm. "Don't imagine," she said in that strained undertone—"don't imagine the warnings in the papers aren't serious. It is one of the things I couldn't write. Why didn't you come and see me and my mother last Thursday?"

He was aware of being as little able now, to make idle conversation with Nan, as he had been that night, after Taylor had barred all use of the Gull Island evidence. He dropped out mumbled phrases, "Unexpected business," having "to go to Washington," and was there anything else she hadn't been able to write?

Yes, yes. There was a great deal more, more than she had any right to say. But this much she must tell him: "You aren't to ask me how I know, and you won't ask me to tell you more than I've a right to. I have a right!" She flashed an instant's defiance at some unseen opponent, "or I'll take it, anyhow. The torpedoing is going to be extended. Yes!" she said as though to convince her own shrinking incredulity as much as his. "Neutral as well as enemy ships. They're going on till England is as isolated as she's isolated Germany. If England won't believe that, if England doesn't realize,"—she waited an instant as if to give him time to throw out a life-line of hope to her proviso,—"then," she said as she took in Napier's motionless figure and stern face—"then what's before us is too horrible."

"I am glad you recognize the horror of the German policy."

"What good will that do!" she began hurriedly, "if you—" and then half to herself: "But you simply mustn't go! You didn't know, perhaps," she leaned nearer, "passenger-boats have been carrying guns."

"Really?" said Napier.

She nodded. "It's true. And that's why the Germans say they will sink passenger-boats. So they can't be used any more by travelers, now that they're warned."

"You see it as simple as that? Germany is to tell neutrals they are not to travel even in neutral waters!"

"If we don't use passenger-boats for passenger-boats, they aren't passenger-boats any more." (Napier heard Schwarzenberg speaking.) "They go loaded to the guards! Yes, war material for the Allies."

"If that is so, why is it? Would you see the Allies punished, enslaved, because the Allies haven't, as Germany has, devoted the last forty years to making and accumulating arms? Germany—"

"Oh, it's America I'm thinking of—after you!" she threw in. "If America's part is going to be just to grow rich and richer out of this awfulness, I don't know how I shall bear it. And that's what I'm telling Julian. But all that,"—she swept it aside with one of those quick motions of a flashing hand,—"if I beg you not to go—"

"It's no use," said Napier.

"Nothing I could say or do?"

He shook his head.

"Very well, then," she said with hurt mouth that quivered, "what is the name of your boat?"

He considered a moment. "Don't you think it would be very indiscreet of me to tell you?"

"It will be the discreetest thing you ever did in your life."

"Why do you want to know?"

"I want to know because"—again she bent to him—"because there's a black-list." He saw her eyes bright with terror. "You must give me time to find out...."

"I see," he interrupted. "You would like me to owe my life to Greta von Schwarzenberg."

"To me, Gavan,"—the pallor of her face yielded to a sudden flush,—"if you could bear that."

"I haven't decided on my boat," he said.

"But I thought you came to say good-by?"

He was going on a few weeks' tour on this side, he said.

Oh, the lightening in her face. He seemed bent only on teasing her a little, in withholding the answer to her quick: "Whereabouts are you going to tour?" When she had waited for the answer that didn't come she said: "You're afraid I'll tell. Everybody's afraid every one else will tell. Everybody's changed."

"Not Miss Greta, surely?"

"Greta as much as anybody," she flung out. And then, as though she regretted that ebullition, she added hastily: "I suppose I mustn't ask you—what next, after the few weeks' tour."

"Yes, you may ask that," Napier said, the smile going out of his eyes. "France next."

They parted with no hint from him of the fact that one result of his second visit to Washington had been an extension of the highly successful unofficial mission.

For Taylor had been right in saying the old sharp demarcations between government departments were being erased. More and more diplomacy impinged on the twin provinces of trade and world finance. The astute were beginning to see that the problem of munitions was own brother to food supply, which in its turn was a matter of transport. In view of the now frequent sinkings of Allied ships, not only South American meat, wheat, but South American tonnage, might become of supreme importance in a protracted war. Unfortunately, German influence had attained dangerous proportions in those remote, fertile areas below the equator. Napier and another unofficial British envoy received orders from home to proceed to Rio on instructions from the British Ambassador at Washington.

He returned to New York early in May, to find the country in a state of excitement such as the United States had not known since the assassination of Lincoln. Some twenty-four hours before, the Germans had torpedoed the Lusitania. Fifteen hundred lives had been sacrificed. The effect on Napier was the effect on many. The Lusitania dead recruited tens of thousands.

On the afternoon of the day of his arrival in New York, Napier returned to his hotel, having engaged passage to England by the next ship.

A lady, he was told, waited to see him. What lady was likeliest to have news so quickly of his arrival? He shrank from the thought of Greta as from something reptilian. It couldn't be Greta on this day of all days. And who else, but the being of all the world he most hungered to see? So thinking, he made his way among the hosts of horror-stricken people, one sole theme in every mouth, Lusitania! Lusitania! Some, and not one most voluble or outwardly most excited, uttered the word War with an accent that Napier wished might have been heard across the Rhine. He kept on telling himself that he knew it would be Nan he should find waiting; but he was not prepared for the Nan he found, nor for that low exclamation: "At last! At last!" nor for the shaken voice in which she disposed of his question how had she known of his arrival.

"An arrangement with the clerk," she said, to ring her up as soon—

"Then that was before!"—said Napier hungrily.

"Yes, before the awful news." A shuddering vagueness seemed to close about her like a mist. It shut out the moment's shining at his coming. He could see that blank horror at the tragedy obscured for the moment everything else in life.

Only Napier, it seemed, felt the added strain of this coming and going of excited people, the bringing in of telegrams, the dictating of others. The girl paid no more attention to the other people scattered about the great room, to their tension or their tears, than they to hers. As she turned to throw her trembling body down in a chair by the window, the look in her eyes startled Napier.

"And did you see what the papers said?" she demanded.

The terrible newspaper accounts, which he had not yet found time to read, she had by heart. Behind that veil of nervous vagueness he caught glimpses of the intensity of her realization—her participation, one might almost say—in the scenes off the Irish coast.

"Had you any special friend on board?" he asked.

"Special fr—" she repeated in that low voice. And then her note climbed quickly to what for her was the climax of the huge disaster. "They were Americans!" So she confessed that limitation which a faulty imagination sets to our humanity—a limitation she had imagined she despised. "Americans they were, and innocent. I keep thinking most of the children. There were such lots of children, Gavan, on that boat. I kept seeing them all night long. I could hear their voices growing weaker—" her own failed her for a moment. And when she found it again, it was a different voice altogether, firm and bitter. "People say to me, 'the Lusitania was warned not to sail.'"

Yes, Napier had heard that was so.

"As if that could excuse—it's what Greta says. 'They were warned,' she keeps repeating. 'They disobeyed the warning.' The little children, the babies disobeyed the German warning! Oh-h!" The small tightened fist beat upon one knee to call back the self-control that threatened to desert her. "I've had a horrible morning with Greta. She—something has died in Greta. I'd been feeling ever since—" Again she broke off and seemed to seize upon comparative commonplace to steady her nerves. "It was true about her being married. She admitted it the day she read of Mr. Guedalla's death in the paper. She got some money. It wasn't her not telling us she was married; it was other things. Oh, I've been unhappy enough! But this—this! Gavan, I couldn't get her to say it was horrible. She wasn't even sorry. Oh, Gavan, she was glad!" The locked fingers writhed in her lap. She seemed not to know that she was weeping. "What do you think Greta said at last? 'It would be a lesson,' she said. A lesson! To torture and kill fifteen hundred innocent people. A lesson to the children! To little babies!" She turned her quivering face away a moment. "I think," she said under her broken breath—"I think I should have gone mad if you hadn't come back. Oh, I'm so glad you're back!"

He simply hadn't the courage at that moment to tell her he was going to sail for England the following day. He told her in a very gentle note sent late in the afternoon. They were to dine together.

She met him with steady looks.

"I've cabled to Julian," she said immediately, "that I'm coming back with you."

The Parnassian was to sail at ten.

Napier had stood outside the entrance to the dock, waiting for Nan, since ten minutes past nine. At twenty minutes to ten there she was at last.

"But where is your luggage?" he called out. He had warned her not to trust it to other hands. In that second before the cab drew alongside something in the face at the window prepared him for the answer. "That's why I am late. I had to have everything taken off. And I tried to telephone you. Just as I was leaving—this came." She held a paper toward him as she got out of the cab. She stood there while he read:

I depend on your waiting till I come sailing to-day Olympic.

Julian.

As Napier looked up, speechless in that first moment, she whispered: "Serves me right. Greta said, I was running away." She put out her hand and steadied herself against the window-frame of the cab. "Where you're going they shoot deserters, don't they! Well, I've been shot. Oh, not fatally! just in the leg. Enough to stop me."

"You are going to wait for Julian?"

"What else is possible?" She hung her head. "He and the others, they've depended on me. Well, they must not any more. And when he comes,"—her breast heaved as she brought it out,—"I shall tell him something else."

"Tell Julian! What shall you tell Julian?"

The lifted eyes were swimming.

"That it's you. That to see you go without me breaks my heart."

"Nan!" he cried and pulled himself up with an effort that brought the blood into his face. Other passengers, arriving late, for all their own agitation at the prospect of some hitch in getting themselves and their baggage on board, stared back over their shoulders at the leave-taking out in the street.

Napier flung a "Wait!" to the cabman, and held his watch in one hand. "Come," he said and took Nan by the arm. He walked her a little way from the dock entrance.

"I think," he went on gravely, "I wouldn't tell Julian. You see, Nan, you've got to consider that I mayn't be coming back." He didn't look at her. "What's the use of telling Julian? Isn't there enough misery in the world without adding to it?"

"That's what Julian and I think," she said, blurring her words. "Enough misery in the world without war. You never cared about that old misery as Julian did. And that's what makes it so—so—not to be borne that you should feel you have to go and meet the new horror out there."

"Well, I do feel like that," he said.

"And yet it isn't any longer just duty. You want to go!" she cried. "I saw that yesterday when we talked about the Lusitania."

"Yes," he said grimly, "I want to go."

"Well, so do lots of my countrymen." And Napier couldn't have told whether dismay or pride was dominant in the new note. His hand slipped down her arm and found her fingers. Napier's valet, Day, came running out of the dock-gates. He looked distractedly across the wide, open space before the slips.

"Yes!" Napier hailed him. "I'll be there!" He gripped her hand hard before he let it go. "I'll have to run for it. Good-by." On an impulse, whether mere instinct to cover his emotion or some obscurer working of the mind behind his wretchedness, he caught Julian's cable out of her hold. He held the paper in front of his misty eyes as he hurried toward the dock entrance. The hour the message had been sent from London struck him now for the first time. He halted suddenly. In a voice harsh with the effort to keep it steady he called back: "Did Greta know that you meant to go with me?"

"Yes," came the panting answer as the girl ran forward a few steps. "I told her before I saw you that I couldn't bear it over here any longer. And now you—you are leaving me!" She stopped.

"You'll lose the boat, sir!" Day called out.

Napier's last vision of Nan Ellis showed the girl still standing there looking after him and sobbing openly in the street.

This cable, he knew now was no reply to Nan's. It was the reply to some message sent hours earlier by Greta von Schwarzenberg.