CHAPTER VII

TO Sylvia's surprise and relief, the conquerors paid no attention to the

house that night. Michael, after he had listened for a while to the

dampered progress of that soft-shod army, fell back upon his pillow

without comment and slept very tranquilly. Sylvia, who had now not the

least doubt of his recovery, busied herself with choosing what she

conceived to be absolute necessities for the immediate future and

packing them into her valise. In the course of her preparations she put

on one side for destruction or abandonment the contents of the golden

shawl. Daguerreotypes and photographs; a rambling declaration of the

circumstances in which her alleged grandfather had married that ghostly

Adèle her grandmother, and a variety of letters that illustrated her

mother's early life: all these might as well be burned. She lay down

upon her bed of overcoats and skirts piled upon the floor and found the

shawl a pleasant addition to the rubber hot-water-bottle she had been

using as a pillow. Michael was still sleeping; it seemed wise to blow

out the candle and, although it was scarcely seven o'clock, to try to

sleep herself. It was the first time for a week that she had been able

to feel the delicious and inviting freedom of untrammeled sleep. What

did the occupation of a Bulgarian army signify in comparison with the

assurance she felt of her patient's convalescence? The brazier glowed

before her path toward a divine oblivion.

When Sylvia woke up and heard Michael's voice calling to her, it was six

o'clock in the morning. She blew up the dull brazier to renewed warmth,

set water to boil, and in a real exultation lighted four candles to

celebrate with as much gaiety as possible the new atmosphere of joy and

hope in the stark room.

"It's all very mysterious," Michael was saying. "It's all so

delightfully mysterious that I can hardly bear to ask any questions lest

I destroy the mystery. I've been lying awake, exquisitely and

self-admiringly awake for an hour, trying to work out where I am, why

I'm where I am, why you're where you are, and where Stella is."

Sylvia told him of the immediate occasion of his sister's departure, and

when she had done so had a moment of dismay lest his affection or his

pride should be hurt by her willingness to leave him in the care of one

who was practically a stranger.

"How very kind of you!" he said. "My mother would have been distracted

by having to look after her grandson in the whirlpool of war-work upon

which she is engaged. So you had typhus, too? It's a rotten business,

isn't it? Did you feel very weak after it?"

"Of course."

"And we're prisoners?"

"I suppose so."

The water did not seem to be getting on, and Sylvia picked up her family

papers to throw into the brazier.

"Oh, I say, don't destroy without due consideration," Michael protested.

"The war has developed in me a passionate conservatism for little

things."

"I am destroying nothing of any importance," Sylvia said.

"Love-letters?" he murmured, with a smile.

She flushed angrily and discovered in herself a ridiculous readiness to

prove his speculation beside the mark.

"If I ever had any love-letters I certainly never kept them," she

avowed. "These are only musty records of a past the influence of which

has already exhausted itself."

"But photographs?" he persisted. "Let me look. Old photographs always

thrill me."

She showed him one or two of her mother.

"Odd," he commented. "She rather reminds me of my sister. Something

about the way the eyes are set."

"You're worrying about her?" Sylvia put in, quickly.

"No, no. Of course I shall be glad to hear she's safely by the sea on

the other side, but I'm not worrying about her to the extent of fancying

a non-existent likeness. There really is one; and if it comes to that,

you're not unlike her yourself."

"My father and my grandfather were both English," Sylvia said. "My

mother was French and my grandmother was Polish. My grandfather's name

was Cunningham."

"What?" Michael asked, sharply. "That's odd."

"Quite a distinguished person according to the old Frenchman whom the

world regarded as my grandfather."

She handed him Bassompierre's rambling statement about the circumstances

of her mother's birth, which he read and put down with an exclamation.

"Well, this is really extraordinary! Do you know that we're second

cousins? This Charles Cunningham became the twelfth Lord Saxby. My

father was the thirteenth and last earl. What a trick for fate to play

upon us both! No wonder there's a likeness between you and Stella. How

strange it makes that time at Mulberry Cottage seem. But you know, I

always felt that underneath our open and violent hostility there was a

radical sympathy quite inexplicable. This explains it."

Sylvia was not at all sure that she felt grateful toward the

explanation; mere kinship had never stood for much in her life.

"You must try to sleep again now," she said, sternly.

"But you don't seem at all amazed at this coincidence," Michael

protested. "You accept it as if it was a perfectly ordinary occurrence."

"I want you to sleep. Take this milk. We are sure to have a

nerve-racking day with these Bulgarians."

"Sylvia, what's the matter?" he persisted. "Why should my discovery of

our relationship annoy you?"

"It doesn't annoy me, but I want you to sleep. Do remember that you've

only just returned to yourself and that you'll soon want all your

strength."

"You've not lost your baffling quality in all these years," he said, and

lay silent when he had drunk the warm milk she gave him and while she

tidied the floor of the coats that served her for a bed. The letters and

the photographs she threw into the brazier and drove them deep into the

coke with a stick, looking round defiantly at Michael when they were

ashes. He shook his head with a smile, but he did not say anything.

Sylvia was really glad when the sound of loud knocking upon the door

down-stairs prevented any further discussion of the accident of their

relationship; nevertheless, she found a pleasure in announcing to the

Bulgarian officer her right to be found here with the sick Englishman,

her cousin: it seemed to launch her once more upon the flow of ordinary

existence, this kinship with one who without doubt belonged to the world

actively at war. The interview with the Bulgarian officer took place in

that stark and dusty room where she had argued with Stella for the right

to stay behind with her brother. Now, in the light of early morning, it

still preserved its scenic quality, and Sylvia was absurdly aware of her

resemblance to the pleading heroine of a melodrama, when she begged this

grimy, shaggy creature, whose slate-gray overcoat was marbled by time

and weather, to let her patient stay here for the present, and,

furthermore, to accord her facilities to procure for him whatever was

necessary and obtainable. In the end the officer went away without

giving a more decisive answer than was implied by the soldier he left

behind. Sylvia did not think he could have understood much of her

French, so little had she understood of his, and the presence of this

soldier with fixed bayonet and squashed Mongolian countenance oppressed

her. She wondered what opinion of them the officer had reached, and

ached at the thought of how, perhaps, in a few minutes, she and Michael

should be separated, intolerably separated forever. She made a sign to

the guard for leave to go up-stairs again; but he forbade her with a

gesture, and she stood leaning against the table, while he stared before

him with an expression of such unutterable nothingness as by sheer

nebulosity acquired a sinister and menacing force. He was as

incomprehensible as a savage beast encountered in a forest, and the

fancy that he had ever existed with his own little ambitions in a human

society refused to state itself. Sylvia could make of him nothing but a

symbol of the blind, mad forces that were in opposition throughout the

old familiar world, the blindness and madness of which were fitly

expressed by such an instrument.

Half an hour of strained indifference passed, and then the officer came

back with another who spoke English. Perhaps the consciousness of

speaking English well and fluently made the new-comer anxious to be

pleasant; one felt that he would have regarded it as a slight upon his

own proficiency to be rude or intransigent. Apart from his English there

was nothing remarkable in his appearance or his personality. He went

up-stairs and saw for himself Michael's condition, came down again with

Sylvia, and promised her that, if she would observe the rules imposed

upon the captured city, nothing within the extent of his influence

should be done to imperil the sick man's convalescence. Then, after

signing a number of forms that would enable her to move about in certain

areas to obtain provisions and to call upon medical help, he asked her

if she knew Sunbury-on-Thames. She replied in the negative, which seemed

to disappoint him. Whereupon she asked him if he knew Maidenhead, and he

brightened up again.

"I have had good days in the Thames," he said, and departed in a bright

cloud of riverside memories.

The next fortnight passed in a seclusion that was very dear to Sylvia.

The hours rolled along on the easy wheels of reminiscent conversations,

and Michael was gradually made aware of all her history. Yet at the end

of it, she told herself that he was aware of nothing except the voyages

of the body; of her soul's pilgrimage he was as ignorant as if they had

never met. She reproached herself for this and wanted to begin over

again the real history; but her own feelings toward him stood in the way

of frankness, and she feared to betray herself by the emotion that any

deliberate sincerity must have revealed. Yet, as she assured herself

rather bitterly, he was so obviously blind to anything but the

coincidence of their relationship that she might with impunity have

stripped her soul bare. It was unreasonable for her to resent his

showing himself more moved by the news of Hazlewood's death than by

anything in her own history, because anything in her own history that

might have moved him she had omitted, and his impression of her now must

be what his impression of her had been nine years ago--that of a hard

and cynical woman with a baffling capacity for practical kindliness. She

had often before been dismayed by a sense of life slipping out of her

reach, but she had never before been dismayed by the urgent escape of

hours and minutes. She had never before said _ruit hora_ with her will

to snatch the opportunity palsied, as if she stood panting in the

stifling impotence of a dream. Already he was able to walk about the

room, and, like all those who are recovering from a serious illness, was

performing little feats of agility with the objective self-absorption of

a child.

"Do people--or rather," she corrected herself, quickly, "does existence

seem something utterly different from what it was before you saw it fade

out from your consciousness at Kragujevatz?"

"Well, the only person I've really seen is yourself," he answered. "And

I can't help staring at you in some bewilderment, due less to fever than

to the concatenations of fortune. What seems to me so amusing and odd is

that, if you had known we were cousins, you couldn't have behaved in a

more cousinly way than you did over Lily."

"When I found myself in that hospital at Petrograd," Sylvia declared,

"I felt like the Sleeping Beauty being waked by the magic kiss--" she

broke off, blushing hotly and cursing inwardly her damned

self-consciousness; and then blushed again because she had stopped to

wonder if he had noticed her blush.

"I don't think anything that happened during this war to me personally,"

Michael said, "could ever make any impression now. The war itself always

presents itself to me as a mighty fever, caught, if you will, by taking

foolish risks or ignoring simple precautions, but ultimately and

profoundly inevitable in the way that one feels all illness to be

inevitable. Anything particular that happens to the individual must lose

its significance in the change that he must suffer from the general

calamity. I think perhaps that as a Catholic I am tempted to be less

hopeful of men and more hopeful of God, but yet I firmly believe that I

am more hopeful of men than the average--shall we call him humanitarian,

who perceives in this war nothing but a crime against human brotherhood

committed by a few ambitious knaves helped by a crowd of ambitious

fools? I'm perfectly sure, for instance, that there is no one alive and

no one dead that does not partake of the responsibility. However little

it may be realized in the case of individuals, nothing will ever

persuade me that one of the chief motive forces that maintain this state

of destruction to which the world is being devoted is not a sense of

guilt and a determination to expiate it. Mark you, I'm not trying to

urge that God has judicially sentenced the world to war, dealing out

horror to Belgium for the horror of the Congo, horror to Serbia for the

horror of the royal assassination, horror to France, England, Germany,

Austria, Italy, and Russia for their national lapses from grace--I

should be very sorry to implicate Almighty God in any conception based

upon our primitive notions of justice. The only time I feel that God

ever interfered with humanity was when He was incarnate among us, and

the story of that seems to forbid us our attribution to Him of anything

in the nature of fretful castigation. The most presumptuous attitude in

this war seems to me the German idea of God in a _pickelhaube_, of

Christ bound to an Iron Cross, and of the Dove as a bloody-minded Eagle;

but the Allies' notion of the Pope as a kind of diplomat with a license

to excommunicate seems to me only less presumptuous."

"Then you think the war is in every human heart?" Sylvia asked.

"When I look at my own I'm positive it is."

"But do you think it was inevitable because it was salutary?"

"I think blood-letting is old-fashioned surgery: aren't you confusing

the disease with the remedy? Surely no disease is salutary, and I think

it's morally dangerous to confuse effect with cause. At the same time

I'm not going to lay down positively that this war may not be extremely

salutary. I think it will be, but I acquit God of any hand in its

deliberate ordering. Free will must apply to nations. I don't believe

that war which, while it brings out often the best of people, brings out

much more often the worst is to be regarded as anything but a vile

exhibition of human sin. The selflessness of those who have died is

terribly stained by the selfishness of those who have let them die. Yet

the younger generation, or such of it as survives, will have the

compensation when it is all over of such amazing opportunities for

living as were never known, and the older generation that made the war

will die less lamented than any men that have ever died since the world

began. And I believe that their purgatory will be the grayest and the

longest of all the purgatories. But as soon as I have said that I regret

my words, because I think it will be fatal for the younger generation to

become precocious Pharisees; and so I reiterate that the war is in every

human heart, and you're not to tempt me any more into making harsh

judgments about any one."

"Not even the great Victorians?" said Sylvia.

"Well, that will be a difficult and very penitential piece of

self-denial, I admit. And it is hard not to hope that Carlyle is in

hell. However, I can just avoid doing so, because I shall certainly go

to hell myself if I do, where his Teutonic borborygmi would be an added

woe, gigantic genius though he was. But don't let's joke about hell.

It's--infernally credible since August, 1914. What were we talking about

before we began to talk about the war? Oh, I remember--the new world

that one gets up to face after a bad illness."

"Perhaps my experience was peculiar," Sylvia said.

But what did it matter how he regarded the world, she thought, unless he

regarded her? Already the topic was exhausted; he was tired by his

vehemence; once more the ruthless and precipitate hour had gone by.

During this period of seclusion Sylvia often had to encounter in its

various capacities the army of occupation, by which generally she was

treated with consideration and even with positive kindness. Nish had

been so completely evacuated that, after the medley which had thronged

the streets and squares, it now seemed strangely empty. The uniformity

of the Bulgarian characteristics added to the impression of violent

change; there was never a moment in which one could delude oneself with

the continuation of normal existence. At the end of the fortnight the

English-speaking officer came to make a visit of inspection in order to

give his advice at headquarters about the future of the prisoners.

Michael was still very weak, and looked a skeleton, so much so, indeed,

that the officer went off and fetched a squat little doctor to help his

deliberation; the latter recommended another week, and the prisoners

were once more left to themselves. Sylvia was half sorry for such

considerate action; the company of Michael which had seemed to promise

so much and had in fact yielded so little was beginning to fret her with

the ultimate futility of such an association. She resented the emotion

she had given to it in the prospect of a more definitely empty future

that was now opening before her, and she gave way to the reaction

against her exaggerated devotion by criticizing herself severely. The

supervention of such an attitude made irksome what had been so dear a

seclusion, and, going beyond self-criticism, she began to tell herself

that Michael was cold, inhuman, and remote; that she felt ill at ease

with him and unable to talk, and that the sooner their separation came

about the better. Perhaps she should be released, in which case she

should make her way back to England and become a nurse.

At the end of the third week Sylvia desperately tried to arrest the

precipitate hour.

"I think I suffer from a too rapid digestion," she announced.

He looked at her with a question in his eyes.

"You were talking to me the other day," she went on, "about your

contemplative experiences, and you were saying how entirely your purely

intellectual and spiritual progress conformed to the well-trodden

mystical way. You added, of course, that you did not wish to suggest any

comparison with the path of greater men, but, allowing for conventional

self-depreciation, you left me to suppose that you were content with

your achievement. At the moment war broke out you felt that you were

ripe for action, and instead of becoming a priest after those nine years

of contemplative preparation, you joined a hospital unit for Serbia. You

feel quite secure about the war; you accept your fever, your possible

internment for years in Bulgaria, and indeed anything that affects you

personally without the least regret. In fact, you're what an American

might call in tune with the infinite. I'm not! And it's all a matter of

digestion."

"My illness has clouded my brain," Michael murmured. "I'm a long way

from understanding what you're driving at."

"Well, keep quiet and listen to my problems. We're on the verge of

separation, but you're still my patient and you owe me your attention."

"I owe you more than that," he put in.

"How feeble," she scoffed. "You might have spared me such a

pretty-pretty sentence."

"I surrender unconditionally," he protested. "Your fierceness is

superfluous."

"I suppose you've often labeled humanity in bulk? I mean, for instance,

you must have often said and certainly thought that all men are either

knaves or fools."

"I must have thought so at some time or another," Michael agreed.

"Well, I've got a new division. I think that all men have either normal

digestions, slow digestions, rapid digestions, or no digestions at all.

Extend the physical fact into a metaphor and apply it to the human

mind."

"Dear Sylvia, I feel as if I were being poulticed. How admirably you

maintain the nursing manner. I've made the application. What do I do

now?"

"Listen without interrupting, or I shall lose the thread of my argument.

I suppose that you'll admit that the optimists outnumber the pessimists?

Obviously they must, or the world would come to an end. Very well, then,

we'll say that the pessimists are the people with no digestions at all:

on top of them will be the people with slow digestions, the great

unthinking herd that is optimistic because the optimists shout most

loudly. The people with good normal digestions are of course the

shouting optimists. Finally come the people whose digestions are too

rapid. I belong to that class."

"Are they optimists?"

"They're optimists until they've finished digesting, but between meals

they're outrageously pessimistic. The only way to illustrate my theory

is to talk about myself. Imagine you're a lady palmist and prepare for a

debauch of egotism from one of your clients. All through my life,

Michael, I've been a martyr to quick digestion. Your friend Guy

Hazlewood suffered from that complaint, judging by the way he talked

about the war. I can imagine that his life has been made of brief,

exquisite illusions followed by long vacuums. Am I right?"

Michael nodded.

"Cassandra, to take a more remote instance, suffered from rapid

digestion--in fact, all prophets have the malady. Isn't it

physiologically true to say that the unborn child performs in its

mother's womb the drama of man's evolution? I'm sure it's equally true

that the life of the individual after birth and until death is a

microcosm of man's later history, or rather I ought to say that it might

be, for only exceptional individuals reproduce the history of humanity

up to contemporary development. A genius--a great creative genius--seems

to me a man whose active absorption can keep pace with the rapidity of

his digestion. How often do we hear of people who were in advance of

their time! This figure of speech is literally true, but only great

creative geniuses have the consolation of projecting themselves beyond

their ambient in time. There remain a number of sterile geniuses, whom

Nature, with her usual prodigality, has put on the market in reserve,

but for whom later on she finds she has no use on account of the economy

that always succeeds extravagance. These sterile geniuses are left to

fend for themselves and somehow to extract from a hostile and suspicious

environment food to maintain them during the long, dreary emptiness that

succeeds their too optimistic absorption. Do you agree with me?"

"At one end of the pole you would put Shakespeare, at the other the

Jubilee Juggins?" Michael suggested.

"That's it," she agreed. "Although a less conspicuous wastrel would

serve for the other end."

"And I suppose if you're searching for the eternal rhythm of the

universe, you'd have to apply to nations the same classification as to

individuals?" he went on.

"Of course."

"So that England would have a good normal digestion and Ireland a too

rapid digestion? Or better, let us say that all Teutons eat heartily

and digest slowly, and that all Kelts are too rapid. But come back to

yourself."

Sylvia paused for a moment, and then continued, with swift gestures of

self-agreement:

"I certainly ascribe every mistake in my own life to a rapid digestion.

Why, I've even digested this war that, if we think on a large scale, was

evidently designed to stir up the sluggish liver of a world. I'm sick to

death of the damned war already, and it hasn't begun yet really. And to

come down to my own little particular woes, I've labored toward

religion, digested it with horrible rapidity, and see nothing in it now

but a half-truth for myself. In art the same, in human associations the

same, in everything the same. Ah, don't let's talk any more about

anything."

In the silence that followed she thought to herself about the

inspiration of her late theories; and looking at Michael, pale and

hollow-eyed in the grim November dusk, she railed at herself because

with all her will to make use of the quality she had attributed to

herself she could not shake off this love that was growing every day.

"Why in God's name," she almost groaned aloud, "can't it go the way of

everything else? But it won't. It won't. It never will. And I shall

never be happy again."

A rainy nightfall symbolized for her the darkness of the future, and

when, in the middle of their evening meal, while they were hacking at a

tin of sardines, a message came from headquarters that to-morrow they

must be ready to leave Nish, she was glad. However, the sympathy of the

English-speaking officer had exercised itself so much on behalf of the

two prisoners that the separation which Sylvia had regarded as immediate

was likely to be postponed for some time. The officer explained that it

was inconvenient for them to remain any longer in Nish, but that

arrangements had been made by which they were to be moved to Sofia and

therefore that Michael's convalescence would be safe against any

premature strain. They would realize that Bulgaria was not unmindful of

the many links, now unfortunately broken, which had formerly bound her

to England, and they would admit in the face of their courteous

treatment how far advanced his country was upon the road of

civilization.

"Splendid," Michael exclaimed. "So we sha'n't be separated yet for a

while and we shall be able to prosecute our philosophical discoveries.

The riddle of life finally solved in 1915 by two prisoners of the

Bulgarian army! It would almost make the war worth while. Sylvia, I'm so

excited at our journey."

"You're tired of being cooped up here," she said, sharply. And then to

mask whatever emotion might have escaped, she added: "I'm certainly sick

to death of it myself."

"I know," he agreed, "it must have been a great bore for you. The

invalid is always blissfully unconscious of time, and forgets that the

pleasant little services which encourage him to go on being ill are not

natural events like sunrise and sunset. You do well to keep me up to the

mark; I'm not really forgetful."

"You seem to have forgotten that we may have months, even years of

imprisonment in Bulgaria," Sylvia said.

He looked so frail in his khaki overcoat that she was seized with

penitence for the harsh thoughts of him she had indulged, and with a

fondling gesture tried to atone.

"You really feel that you can make this journey? If you don't, I'll go

out and rout out our officer and beg him for another week."

Michael shook his head.

"I'm rather a fraud. Really, you know, I feel perfectly well. Quite

excited about this journey, as I told you."

She was chilled by his so impersonally cordial manner and looked at him

regretfully.

"Every day he gets farther away," she thought. "In nine years he has

been doing nothing but place layer after layer over his sensitiveness.

He's a kind of mental coral island. I know that there must still exist a

capacity for suffering, but he'll never again let me see it. He wants to

convince me of his eternal serenity."

She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in

embarrassment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness.

"It was just the reverse of embarrassment, really," he said. "But I

don't want to spoil things."

"By doing what?" she demanded.

"Well, if I told you--" He stopped abruptly.

"I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you've

begun you must finish."

"Nothing will induce me to. I'll say what I thought of saying before we

separate. I promise that."

"Perhaps we never shall separate."

"Then I shall have no need to finish my sentence."

Sylvia lay awake for a long time that last night in Nish, wondering,

with supreme futility as she continually reminded herself, what Michael

could have nearly said. Somewhere about two o'clock she decided that he

had been going to suggest adopting her into his family.

"Damned fool," she muttered, pulling and shaking her improvised bed as

if it were a naughty child. "Nevertheless, he had the wit to understand

how much it would annoy me. It shows the lagoon is not quite encircled

yet."

The soldiers who arrived to escort them to the railway station were like

grotesques of hotel porters; they were so ready to help with the luggage

that it seemed absurd for their movements to be hampered by rifles with

fixed bayonets. The English-speaking officer accompanied them to the

station and expressed his regrets that he could not travel to Sofia; he

had no doubt that later on he should see them again, and, in any case,

when the war was over he hoped to revisit England. Sylvia suddenly

remembered her big trunk, which she had left in the consigne when she

first reached Nish nearly two months ago. The English-speaking officer

shrugged his shoulders at her proposal to take it with her to Sofia.

"The station was looted by the Serbs before we arrived," he explained.

"They are a barbarous nation, many years behind us in civilization. We

never plunder. And of course you understand that Nish is really

Bulgarian? That makes us particularly gentle here. You heard, perhaps,

that when the Entente Legations left we gave them a champagne lunch for

the farewell at Dedeagatch? We are far in front of the Germans, who are

a very strong but primitive nation. They are not much liked in Bulgaria:

we prefer the English. But, alas, poor England!" he sighed.

"Why poor?" Sylvia demanded, indignantly.

He smiled compassionately for answer, and soon afterward, in a

first-class compartment to themselves, Michael and she left Nish.

"Really," Michael observed, "when the conditions are favorable,

traveling as a prisoner of war is the most luxurious traveling of all.

I've never experienced the servility of a private courier, but it's

wonderful to feel that other people are under an obligation to look

after you. However, at present we have the advantages of being new toys.

Our friend from Sunbury-on-Thames may be as compassionate as he likes

about England, but there's no doubt it confers on the possessor a quite

peculiar thrill to own English people--even two such non-combatant

creatures as ourselves. It's typical of the Germans' newness to European

society that they should have thought the right way to treat English

prisoners was to spit at them. I remember once seeing a grandee of Spain

who'd been hired as secretary by a Barcelona Jew, and by Jove! he wasn't

allowed to forget it. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, have a

superficial air of breeding, which they've either copied from the Turks

or inherited from the Chinese. Didn't you love the touch about the

champagne lunch at Dedeagatch? There's a luxurious hospitality about

that which you won't find outside the _Arabian Nights_ or Chicago.

Really the English nation should give thanks every Sunday, murmuring

with all eyes on the east window and Germany: 'There, but for the grace

of God blowing in the west wind, goes John Bull.' Yet I wonder if the

hearts would be humble enough to keep the Pharisee out of the

thanksgiving."

The train went slowly, with frequent stoppages, often in wild country

far from any railway station, where in such surroundings its existence

seemed utterly improbable. Occasionally small bands of _comitadjis_

would ride up and menace theatrically the dejected Serbian prisoners who

were being moved into Bulgaria. There was a cold wind, and snow was

lying thinly on the hills.

In the rapid dusk Michael fell asleep; soon after, the train seemed to

have stopped for the night. Sylvia did not wake him up, but sat for two

hours by the light of one candle stuck upon her valise and pored upon

the moonless night that pressed against the window-panes of the

compartment with scarcely endurable desolation. There was no sound of

those murmurous voices that make mysterious even suburban tunnels when

trains wait in them on foggy nights. The windows were screwed up; the

door into the corridor was locked; in the darkness and silence Sylvia

felt for the first time in all its force the meaning of imprisonment.

Suddenly a flaring torch carried swiftly along the permanent way threw

shadowy grotesques upon the ceiling of the compartment, and Michael,

waking up with a start, asked their whereabouts.

"Somewhere near Zaribrod, as far as I can make out, but it's impossible

to tell for certain. I can't think what they're doing. We've been here

for two hours without moving, and I can't hear a sound except the wind.

It was somebody's carrying a torch past the window that woke you up."

They speculated idly for a while on the cause of the delay, and then

gradually under the depression of the silence their voices died away

into occasional sighs of impatience.

"What about eating?" Sylvia suggested at last. "I'm not hungry, but it

will give us something to do."

So they struggled with tinned foods, glad of the life that the fussy

movement gave to the compartment.

"One feels that moments such as these should be devoted to the most

intimate confidences," Michael said, when they had finished their dinner

and were once more enmeshed by the silence.

"There's a sort of portentousness about them, you mean?"

"Yes, but as a matter of fact, one can't even talk about commonplace

things, because one is all the time fidgeting with the silence."

"I know," Sylvia agreed. "One gets a hint of madness in the way one's

personality seems to shrink to nothing. I suppose there really is

somebody left alive in the world? I'm beginning to feel as if it were

just you and I against the universe."

"Death must come like that sometimes," he murmured.

"Like what?"

"Like that thick darkness outside and oneself against the universe."

"I'd give anything for a guitar," Sylvia exclaimed.

"What would you play first?" he inquired, gravely.

She sang gently:

_"La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento,_

_Muta d'accento e di pensiero,_

_Sempre un amabile leggiadro viso,_

_In pianto o in riso, è menzognero--_

and that's all I can remember of it," she said, breaking off.

"I wonder why you chose to sing that."

"It reminds me of my father," she answered. "When he was drunk, fair

cousin, he always used to sing that. What a charming son-in-law he would

have made for our grandfather! Oh, are we ever going to move again?"

she cried, jumping up and pressing her face against the viewless pane.

"Hark! I hear horses."

Michael rose and joined her. Presently flames leaped up into the

darkness, and armed men were visible in silhouette against the bonfire

they had kindled, so large a bonfire, indeed, that, in the shadows

beyond, the stony outcrop of a rough, steep country seemed in contrast

to be the threshold of titanic chasms. A noise of shouting reached the

train, and presently Bulgarian regulars, the escort of the prisoners,

joined the merrymakers round the fire. Slow music rumbled upon the air,

and a circle of men shoulder to shoulder with interwoven arms performed

a stately, swaying dance.

"Or are they just holding one another up because they're drunk?" Sylvia

asked.

"No, it's really a dance, though they may be drunk, too. I wish we could

get this window open. It looks as if all the soldiers had joined the

party."

The dance came to an end with shouts of applause, and one or two rifles

were fired at the stars. Then the company squatted round the fire, and

the wine circulated again.

"But where are the officers in charge?" Michael asked.

"Playing cards, probably. Or perhaps they're drinking with the rest.

Anyway, if we're going to stay here all night, it's just as well to have

the entertainment of this _al fresco_ supper-party. Anything is better

than that intolerable silence."

Sylvia blew out the stump of candle, and they sat in darkness, watching

the fire-flecked revel. The shouting grew louder with the frequent

passing of the wine-skins; after an hour groups of _comitadjis_ and

regulars left the bonfire and wandered along the permanent way, singing

drunken choruses. What happened presently at the far end of the train

they could not see, but there was a sound of smashed glass followed by a

man's scream. Those who were still sitting round the fire snatched up

their weapons and stumbled in loud excitement toward the center of the

disturbance. There were about a dozen shots, the rasp of torn woodwork,

and a continuous crash of broken glass, with curses, cries, and all the

sounds of quarrelsome confusion.

"The drunken brutes are breaking up the train," Michael exclaimed. "We'd

better sit back from the window for a while."

Sylvia cried out to him that it was worse and that they were dragging

along by the heels the bodies of men and kicking them as they went.

"Good God!" he declared, standing up now in horror. "They're murdering

the wretched Serbian prisoners. Here, we must get out and protest."

"Sit down, fool," Sylvia commanded. "What good will your protesting do?"

But as she spoke she gave a shuddering shriek and held her hands up to

her eyes: they had thrown a writhing, mutilated shape into the fire.

"The brutes! The filthy brutes!" Michael shouted, and, jumping upon the

seat of the compartment, he kicked at the window-panes until there was

not a fragment of glass left. "Shout, Sylvia, shout! Oh, hell! I can't

remember a word of their bloody language. We must stop them. Stop, I

tell you. Stop!"

One of the prisoners had broken away from his tormentors and was running

along the permanent way, but the blood from a gash in the forehead

blinded him and he fell on his face just outside the compartment. Two

_comitadjis_ banged out his brains on the railway line; with

clasp-knives they hacked the head from the corpse and merrily tossed it

in at the window, where it fell on the floor between Sylvia and Michael.

"My God!" Michael muttered. "It's better to be killed ourselves than to

stay here and endure this."

He began to scramble out of the window, and she, seeing that he was

nearly mad with horror at his powerlessness, followed him in the hope

of deflecting any rash action. Strangely enough, nobody interfered with

their antics, and they had run nearly the whole length of the train, in

order to find the officers in charge, before a tall man descending from

one of the carriages barred their progress.

"Why, it's you!" Sylvia laughed, hysterically. "It's my rose-grower!

Michael, do you hear? My rose-grower."

It really was Rakoff, decked out with barbaric trappings of silver and

bristling with weapons, but his manners had not changed with his

profession, and as soon as he recognized her he bowed politely and asked

if he could be of any help.

"Can't you stop this massacre?" she begged. "Keep quiet, Michael; it's

no good talking about the Red Cross."

"It was the fault of the Serbians," Rakoff explained. "They insulted my

men. But what are you doing here?"

The violence of the drunken soldiers and comitadjis had soon worn itself

out, and most of them were back again round the fire, drinking and

singing as if nothing had happened. Sylvia perceived that Rakoff was

sincerely anxious to make himself agreeable, and, treading on Michael's

foot (he was in a fume of threats), she explained their position.

Rakoff looked up at the carriage from which he had just descended.

"The officers in command are drunk and insensible," he murmured. "I'm

under an obligation to you. Do you want to stay in Bulgaria? Have you

given your parole?" he asked Michael.

"Give my parole to murderers and torturers?" shouted Michael. "Certainly

not, and I never will."

"My cousin has only just recovered from typhus," Sylvia reminded Rakoff.

"The slaughter has upset him."

In her anxiety to take advantage of the meeting she had cast aside her

own horror and forgotten her own inclination to be hysterical.

"He must understand that in the Balkans we do not regard violence as

you do in Europe. He should remember that the Serbians would do the same

and worse to Bulgarians."

Rakoff spoke in a tone of injured sensibility, which would have been

comic to Sylvia without the smell of burned flesh upon the wind, and

without the foul blood-stains upon her own skirt.

"Quite so. _À la guerre comme à la guerre_," she agreed. "What will you

do for us?"

"I'm really anxious to return your kindness at Nish," Rakoff said,

gravely. "If you come with me and my men, we shall be riding southward,

and you could perhaps find an opportunity to get over the Greek

frontier. The officer commanding this train deserves to be punished for

getting drunk. I'm not drunk, though I captured a French outpost a week

ago and have some reason to celebrate my success. It was I who cut the

line at Vrania. _Alors, c'est entendu? Vous venez avec moi?_"

"_Vous êtes trop gentìl, monsieur._"

"_Rìen du tout. Plaisir! Plaisir!_ Go back to your carriage now, and

I'll send two of my men presently to show you the way out. What's that?

The door is locked on the outside? Come with me, then."

They walked back along the train, and entered their compartment from the

other side, on which the door had been broken in.

"You can't bring much luggage. Wrap up well. _Il fait très-froid._ Is

your cousin strong enough to ride?"

At this point Rakoff stumbled over the severed head on the floor, and

struck a match.

"What babies my men are!" he exclaimed, with a smile.

He picked up the head and threw it out on the track. Then he told Sylvia

and Michael to prepare for their escape, and left them.

"What do you think of my esthetic Bulgarian?" she asked.

"It's extraordinary how certain personalities have the power to twist

one's standards," Michael answered, emphatically. "A few minutes ago I

was sick with horror--the whole world seemed to be tumbling to pieces

before human bestiality--and now, before the blood is dry on the railway

sleepers, I've accepted it as a fact, and--Sylvia--do you know what I

was thinking the last minute or two? I'm in a way appalled by my own

callousness in being able to smile--but I really was thinking with

amusement what a pity it was we couldn't hand over a few noisy

stay-at-home Englishmen to the sensitive Rakoff."

"Michael," Sylvia demanded, anxiously, "do you think you are strong

enough to ride? I'm not sure how far we are from the Greek frontier, but

it's sure to mean at least a week in the saddle. It seems madness for

you to attempt it."

"My dear, I'm not going to stay in this accursed train."

"I've a letter of introduction for a clerk in Cavalla," Sylvia reminded

him, with a smile.

"Let's hope he invites us to lunch when we present it," Michael laughed.

The tension of waiting for the escape required this kind of feeble

joking; any break in the conversation gave them time to think of the

corpses scattered about in the darkness, which with the slow death of

the fire was reconquering its territory. They followed Rakoff's advice

and heaped extra clothes upon themselves, filling the pockets with

victuals. Sylvia borrowed a cap from Michael and tied the golden shawl

round her head; Michael did the same with an old college scarf. Then he

tore the Red Cross brassard from his sleeve:

"I haven't the impudence to wear that during our pilgrimage with this

gang of murderers. I've tucked away what paper money I have in my boots,

and I've got twenty sovereigns sewn in my cholera belt."

Two smiling _comitadjis_ appeared from the corridor and beckoned the

prisoners to follow them to where, on the other side of the train,

ponies were waiting; within five minutes, the wind blowing icy cold

upon their cheeks, the smell of damp earth and saddles and vinous

breath, the ragged starshine high overhead, the willing motion of the

horses, all combined to obliterate everything except drowsy intimations

of adventure. Rakoff was not visible in the cavalcade, but Sylvia

supposed that he was somewhere in front. After riding for three hours a

halt was called at a deserted farm-house, and in the big living-room he

was there to receive his guests with pointed courtesy.

"You are at home here," he observed, with a laugh. "This farm belonged

to an Englishman before the war with Greece and Serbia. He was a great

friend of Bulgaria; the Serbians knew it and left very little when their

army passed through. We shall sleep here to-night. Are you hungry?"

The _comitadjis_ had already wrapped themselves in their sheepskins and

were lying in the dark corners of the room, exhausted by the long ride

on top of the wine. A couple of men, however, prepared a rough meal to

which Rakoff invited Sylvia and Michael. They had scarcely sat down

when, to their surprise, a young woman dressed in a very short tweed

skirt and Norfolk jacket and wearing a Tyrolese hat over two long plaits

of flaxen hair came and joined them. She nodded curtly to Rakoff and

began to eat without a word.

"Ziska disapproves of the English," Rakoff explained. "In fact, the only

thing she really cares for is dynamite. But she is one of the great

_comitadji_ leaders and acts as my second in command. She understands

French, but declines to speak it on patriotic grounds, being half a

Prussian."

The young woman looked coldly at the two strangers; then she went on

eating. Her silent presence was not favorable to conversation; and a

sudden jealousy of this self-satisfied and contemptuous creature

overcame Sylvia. She remembered how she had told Michael's sister the

secret of her love for him, and the thought of meeting her again in

England became intolerable. She had a mad fancy to kill the other woman

and to take her place in this wild band beside Rakoff, to seize her by

those tight flaxen plaits and hold her face downward on the table, while

she stabbed her and stabbed her again. Only by such a duel could she

assert her own personality, rescuing it from the ignominy of the present

and the greater ignominy of the future. She had actually grasped a long

knife that lay in front of her, and she might have given expression to

the mad notion if at that moment Michael had not collapsed.

In a moment her fantastic passions died away; even Ziska's sidelong

glance of scorn at the prostrate figure was incapable of rousing the

least resentment.

"He should sleep," said Rakoff. "To-morrow he will have a long and

tiring day."

Soon in the shadowy room of the deserted farm-house they were all asleep

except Sylvia, who watched for a long time the dusty lantern-light

flickering upon Ziska's motionless form; as her thoughts wavered in the

twilight between wakefulness and dreams she once more had a longing to

grip that smooth pink neck and crack it like the neck of a wax doll.

Then it was morning; the room was full of smoke and smell of coffee.

Sylvia's forecast of a week's journeying with the comitadjis was too

optimistic; as a matter of fact, they were in the saddle for a month,

and it was only a day or two before Christmas, new style, when they

pitched their camp on the slopes of a valley sheltered from the fierce

winds of Rhodope about twenty kilometers from the Bulgarian outposts

beyond Xanthi.

"We are not far from the sea here," Rakoff said, significantly.

Whatever wind reached this slope had dropped at nightfall, and in the

darkness Sylvia felt like a kiss upon her cheek the salt breath of the

mighty mother to which her heart responded in awe as to the breath of

liberty.

It had been a strange experience, this month with Rakoff and his band,

and seemed already, though the sound of the riding had scarcely died

away from her senses, the least credible episode of a varied life. Yet,

looking back at the incidents of each day, Sylvia could not remember

that her wild companions had ever been conscious of Michael and herself

as intruders upon their monotonously violent behavior. Even Ziska, that

riddle of flaxen womanhood, had gradually reached a kind of remote

cordiality toward their company. To be sure, she had not invited Sylvia

to grasp, or even faintly to guess, the reasons that might have induced

her to adopt such a mode of life; she had never afforded the least hint

of her relationship to Rakoff; she had never attempted to justify her

cold, almost it might have been called her prim mercilessness. Yet she

had sometimes advised Sylvia to withdraw from a prospective exhibition

of atrocity, and this not from any motive of shame, but always obviously

because she had been considering the emotions of her guest. It was in

this spirit, when once a desperate Serbian peasant had flung a stone at

the departing troop, that she advised Sylvia to ride on and avoid the

fall of mangled limbs that was likely to occur after shutting twenty

villagers in a barn and blowing them up with a charge of dynamite. She

had spoken of the unpleasant sequel as simply as a meteorologist might

have spoken of the weather's breaking up. Michael and Sylvia used to

wonder to each other what prevented them from turning their ponies'

heads and galloping off anywhere to escape this daily exposure to the

sight of unchecked barbarity; but they could never bring themselves to

pass the limits of expediency and lose themselves in the uncertainties

of an ideal morality; ultimately they always came back to the

fundamental paradox of war and agreed that in a state of war the life of

the individual increased in value in the same proportion as it

deteriorated. Rakoff had taken pleasure in commenting upon their

attitude, and once or twice he had been at pains to convince them of

the advantages they now enjoyed of an intellectual honesty from which in

England, so far as he had been able to appreciate criticism of that

country, they would have been eternally debarred. But perhaps no amount

of intellectual honesty would have enabled them to remain quiescent

before the rapine and slaughter of which they were compelled to be

cognizant if not actually to see, had not the journey itself healed

their wounded conscience with a charm against which they were powerless.

The air of the mountains swept away the taint of death that would

otherwise have reeked in the very accoutrements of the equipage. The

light of their bivouac fires stained such an infinitesimal fragment of

the vaulted night above that the day's violence used to shrink into an

insignificance which effected in its way their purification. However

rude and savage their companions, it was impossible to eliminate the

gift they offered of human companionship in these desolate tracts of

mountainous country. In the stormy darkness they would listen with a

kind of affection to the breathing of the ponies and to the broken

murmurs of conversation between rider and rider all round them. There

was always something of sympathy in the touch of a sheep-skin coat,

something of a wistful consolation in the flicker of a lighted

cigarette, something of tenderness in the offer of a water-flask; and

when the moon shone frostily overhead so that all the company was

visible, there was never far away an emotion of wonder at their very

selves being a part of this hurrying silver cavalcade, a wonder that

easily was merged in gratitude for so much beauty after so much horror.

For Sylvia there was above everything the joy of seeing Michael growing

stronger from day to day, and upon this joy her mind fed itself and

forgot that she had ever imagined a greater joy beyond. Her contentment

may have been of a piece with her indifference to the sacked villages

and murdered Serbs; but she put away from her the certainty of the

journey's end and surrendered to the entrancing motion through these

winds of Thrace rattling and battling southward to the sea.

And now the journey was over. Sylvia knew by the tone of Rakoff's voice

that she and Michael must soon shift for themselves. She wondered if he

meant to hint his surprise at their not having made an attempt to do so

already, and she tried to recall any previous occasion when they would

have been justified in supposing that they were intended to escape from

the escort. She could not remember that Rakoff had ever before given an

impression of expecting to be rid of them, and a fancy came into her

head that perhaps he did not mean them to escape at all, that he had

merely taken them along with him to wile away his time until he was

bored with them. So insistent was the fancy that she looked up to see if

any comitadjis were being despatched toward the Bulgarian lines, and

when at that moment Rakoff did give some order to four of his men she

decided that her instinct had not been at fault. Some of her

apprehension must have betrayed itself in her face, for she saw Rakoff

looking at her curiously, and to her first fancy succeeded another more

instantly alarming that he would give orders for Michael and herself to

be killed now. He might have chosen this way to gratify Ziska: no doubt

it would be a very gratifying spectacle, and possibly something less

passively diverting than a spectacle for that fierce doll. Sylvia was

not really terrified by the prospect in her imagination; in a way, she

was rather attracted to it. Her dramatic sense took hold of the scene,

and she found herself composing a last duologue between Michael and

herself. Presumably Rakoff would be gentleman enough to have them killed

decently by a firing-party; he would not go farther toward gratifying

Ziska than by allowing her to take a rifle with the rest. She decided

that she should decline to let her eyes be bandaged; though she paused

for a moment before the ironical pleasure of using her golden shawl to

veil the approach to death. She should turn to Michael when they stood

against a rock in the dawn, and when the rifles were leveled she should

tell him that she had loved him since they had met at the masquerade in

Redcliffe Hall and walked home through the fog of the Fulham Road to

Mulberry Cottage. But had Mulberry Cottage ever existed?

At this moment Michael whispered to her a question so absurdly redolent

of the problems of real life and yet so ridiculous somehow in present

surroundings that all gloomy fancies floated away on laughter.

"Sylvia, it's quite obvious that he expects us to make a bolt for the

Greek frontier as soon as possible. How much do you think I ought to tip

each of these fellows?"

"I'm not very well versed in country-house manners," Sylvia laughed,

"but I was always under the impression that one tipped the head

gamekeeper and did not bother oneself about the local poachers."

"But it does seem wrong somehow to slip away in the darkness without a

word of thanks," Michael said, with a smile. "I really can't help liking

these ruffians."

At that moment Rakoff stepped forward into their conversation.

"I'm going to ride over to our lines presently," he announced. "You'd

better come with me, and you'll not be much more than a few hundred

meters from the Greek outposts. The Greek soldiers wear khaki. You won't

be called upon to give any explanations."

Michael began to thank him, but the Bulgarian waved aside his words.

"You are included in the fulfilment of an obligation, _monsieur_, and

being still in debt to _mademoiselle_, I should be embarrassed by any

expression from her of gratitude. Come, it is time for supper."

Throughout the meal, which was eaten in a ruined chapel, Rakoff talked

of his rose-gardens, and Sylvia fancied that he was trying to reproduce

in her mind her first impression of him in order to make this last meal

seem but the real conclusion of their long railway journey together. She

wondered if Ziska knew that this was the last meal and if she approved

of her leader's action in helping two enemies to escape. However, it was

waste of time to speculate about Ziska's feelings: she had no feelings:

she was nothing but a finely perfected instrument of destruction; and

Sylvia nodded a casual good-night to her when supper was over, turning

round to take a final glance at her bending over her rifle in the dim,

tumble-down chapel as she might have looked back at some inanimate

object which had momentarily caught her attention in a museum.

They rode downhill most of the way toward the Bulgarian lines, and about

two hours after midnight saw the tents, like mushrooms, under the light

of a hazy and decrescent moon.

"Here we bid one another farewell," said Rakoff, reining up.

In the humid stillness they sat pensive for a little while, listening to

the ponies nuzzling for grass, tasting in the night the nearness of the

sea, and straining for the shimmer of it upon the southern horizon.

"Merci, monsieur. Adieu," Michael said.

"_Merci, monsieur, vous avez été plus que gentil pour nous. Adieu_,"

Sylvia continued.

"_Enchanté_," the Bulgarian murmured: Michael and Sylvia dismounted.

"Keep well south of those tents and the moon over your right shoulders.

You are about three kilometers from the shore. The sentries should be

easy enough to avoid. We are not yet at war with Greece."

He laughed, and spurred away in the direction of the Bulgarian tents;

Michael and Sylvia walked silently toward freedom across a broken

country where the dwarfed trees, like the dwarfed Bulgarians themselves,

seemed fit only for savage hours and pathetically out of keeping with

this tranquil night. They had walked for about half an hour when, from

the cover of a belt of squat pines, they saw ahead of them two figures

easily recognizable as Greek soldiers.

"Shall we hail them?" Sylvia whispered.

"No, we'll keep them in view. I'm sure we haven't crossed the frontier

yet. We'll slip across in their wake. They'd be worse than useless to us

if we're not on the right side of the frontier."

The Greeks disappeared over the brow of a small hill; when Sylvia and

Michael reached the top they saw that they had entered what looked like

a guard-house at the foot of the slope on the farther side.

"Perhaps we've crossed the frontier without knowing it," Michael

suggested.

Sylvia thought it was imprudent to make any attempt to find out for

certain; but he was obstinately determined to explore and she had to

wait in a torment of anxiety while he worked his way downhill and took

the risk of peeping through a loophole at the back of the building.

Presently he came back, crawling up the hill on all-fours until he was

beside her again.

"Most extraordinary thing," he declared. "Our friend Rakoff is in there

with two or three Bulgarian officers. The fellows we saw _were_

Greeks--one is an officer, the other is a corporal. The officer is

pointing out various spots on a large map. Of course one says 'traitor'

at first, but traitors don't go attended by corporals. I can't make it

out. However, it's clear that we're still in Bulgaria."

"Oh, do let's get on and leave it behind us," Sylvia pleaded, nervously.

But Michael argued the advisableness of waiting until the Greeks came

out and of using them as guides to their own territory.

"But if they're traitors they won't welcome us," she objected.

"Oh, they can't be traitors. It must be some military business that

they're transacting."

In the end they decided to wait; after about an hour the Greeks emerged,

passing once more the belt of pines where Sylvia and Michael were

waiting in concealment. They allowed the visitors to get a long enough

lead, and then followed them, hurrying up inclines while they were

covered, and lying down on the summits to watch their guides' direction.

They had been moving like this for some time and were waiting above the

steep bank of a ravine, the stony bed of which the Greeks were crossing,

when suddenly the corporal leaped on the back of the officer, who fell

in a heap. The corporal rose, looked down at the prostrate form a

moment, then knelt beside him and began to perform some laborious

operation, which was invisible to the watchers. At last he stood

upright, and with outspread fingers flung a malediction at the body,

kicking it contemptuously; then, with a gesture of despair to the sky,

he collapsed against a boulder and began to weep loudly.

Sylvia had seen enough violence in the last month to accept the murder

of one Greek officer as a mere incident on such a night; but somehow she

was conscious of a force of passion behind the corporal's action that

lifted it far above her recent experience of bloodshed. She paused to

see if Michael was going to think the same, unwilling to let her emotion

run away with her now in such a way as to deprive them of making use of

the deed for their own purpose. Michael lay on the brow of the cliff,

gazing in perplexity at the man below, whose form shook with sobs in the

gray moonlight and whose victim seemed already nothing more important

than one of the stones in the rocky bed of the ravine.

"I'm hanged if I know what to do," Michael whispered at last.

"Personally," Sylvia whispered back, "it's almost worth while to spend

the rest of our life in a Bulgarian prison-camp, if we can only find out

first the meaning of this murder."

"Yes, I was rather coming to that conclusion," he agreed.

"Don't think me absurd," she went on, hurriedly. "But I've got a quite

definite fancy that he's going to play an important part in our escape.

Would you mind if I went down and spoke to him?"

"No, I'll go," Michael said. "You don't know Greek."

"Do you?" she retorted.

"No. But he might be alarmed and attack you."

"He'll be less likely to attack a gentle female voice," Sylvia argued;

and before Michael could say another word she began to slide down the

side of the gully, repeating very quickly, "Don't make a noise; we're

English," laughing at herself for the probable uselessness of the

explanation, and yet all the time laughing with an inward conviction

that there was nothing to fear from the encounter.

The corporal jumped up and held high his bayonet, which was gleaming

black with moonlit blood.

"English?" he repeated, doubtfully, in a nasal voice.

"Yes, English prisoners escaped from the Bulgarians," Sylvia panted as

she reached him.

"That's all right," said the corporal. "You got nothing to be frightened

of. I'm an American citizen from New York City."

Sylvia called to Michael to come down, whereupon the corporal took hold

of her wrist and reminded her that they were still in Bulgaria.

"Don't you start hollering so loud," he said, severely.

She apologized, and presently Michael reached them.

"Wal, mister," said the Greek, "I guess you saw me kill that dog. Come

and look at him."

He turned the dead man's face to the moon. On the forehead, on the chin,

and on each cheek the flesh had been sliced away to form [Greek: P].

"[Greek: Prodotês]," explained the corporal. "Traitor in American. I'm

an American citizen, but I'm a Greek man, too. I fought in the last war

and was in Thessaloniki. I killed four Toiks and nine Voulgars in the

last war. See here?" He pointed to the pale-blue ribbons on his chest.

"I went to New York and was in a shoe-shine parlor. Then I learned the

barber-shop. I was doing well. Then I come home and fought the Toiks.

Then I fought the Voulgars. Then I went back to New York. Then last

September come the mobilizing to fight them again. Yes, mister, I put my

razor in my pocket and come over to Piræus. I didn't care for

submarines. Hundreds of Greek mens come with me to fight the Voulgars.

The Greek mens hate the Voulgars. But things is different this time.

They was telling tales how our officers was chummy with the Voulgar

officers. I didn't believe it. Not me. But it was true. With my own eyes

I see this dog showing the plans of Rupel and other forts. With my own

ears I heard this sunnavabitch telling the Voulgars the Greek mens

wouldn't fight. My heart swelled up like a watermelon. My eyes was

bursting and I cursed him inside of me, saying, 'I wish your brains for

to become beans in your head.' But when we was alone I thought of what

big mens the Greeks was in old times, and I said to him, '[Greek: kyrie

lochage],' which is Mister Captain in American, 'what means this what we

have done to-night?' And he says to me, 'It means the Greek men ain't

going to fight for Venizelo, who is a Senegalese and [Greek: prodotês]

of his country.' And he cursed the French and cursed the British and he

said that the Voulgars must be let drive them into the sea. But I said

nothing. I just spit. Then, after a bit, I said, [Greek: kyrie lochage],

does the other officers think like you was?' And he says all Greek mens

what is not traitors think like him, and if I tell him who is for

Venizelo in our regiment I will be a sergeant good and quick. But I

didn't say nothing: I am only spitting to myself. Then we come to this

place, and my heart was bursting out of my body, and I killed him. Then

I took my razor and marked his face for a [Greek: prodotês]."

The corporal threw up his arms to heaven in denunciation of the dead

man. They asked him what he would do, and he told them that he should

hide on his own native island of Samothrace until he could be an

interpreter to an English ship at Mudros, or until Greece should turn

upon the Bulgarians and free his soul from the stain of the captain's

treachery.

"Can you help us get to Samothrace?" they asked.

"Yes, I can help you. But what you have seen to-night swear not to tell,

for I am crying like a woman for my country; and other peoples and mens

must not laugh at Hellas, because to-night this [Greek: skylaki], this

dog, has had the moon for eats."

"And how shall we get to Samothrace?" they asked, when they had promised

their silence.

"I will find a caique and you will hide by the sea where I show you. We

cannot go back over the river to Greece. But how much can you pay for

the caique? Fifty dollars? There are Greek fish-mens, sure, who was

going to take us."

Michael at once agreed to the price.

"Then it will be easy," said the corporal, after he had calculated his

own profit upon the transaction.

"And ten dollars for yourself," Michael added.

"I don't want nothing out of it for myself," the corporal declared,

indignantly; but after a minute's hesitation he told them that he did

not think it would be possible to hire the caique for less than sixty

dollars, and looked sad when Michael did not try to contest the higher

figure.

They had started to walk seaward along the bed of the ravine when the

corporal ran back with an exclamation of contempt to where the dead

officer was lying.

"If I ain't dippy!" he laughed. "Gee! I 'most forgot to see what was in

his pockets."

He made up for the oversight by a thorough search and came back

presently, smiling and slipping the holster of the officer's revolver on

his own belt. Then he patted his own pockets, which were bulging with

what he had found, and they walked forward in silence. The end of the

ravine brought them to an exposed upland, which they crossed warily,

flitting from stunted tree to stunted tree, because the moonlight was

seeming too bright here for safety. The upland gave place to sandy

dunes, the hollows of which were marshy and made the going difficult;

but the night was breathless and not a leaf stirred in the oleander

thickets to alarm their progress.

"Not much wind for sailing," Michael murmured.

"That's all right," said the corporal, whose name was Yanni Psaradelis.

"If we find a caique, we can wait for the wind."

Sylvia was puzzled by Rakoff's not having said a word about any river to

cross at the frontier. She wondered if he had salved his loyalty

thereby, counting upon their recapture, or if by chance they were to get

away, throwing the blame on Providence. Yet had he time for such

subtleties? It was hard to think he had, but by Yanni's account of the

river it seemed improbable that they would ever have escaped without his

help, and it was certainly strange that Rakoff, if his benevolence had

been genuine, should not have warned them. And now actually the dunes

were dipping to the sea; on a simultaneous impulse they ran down the

last sandy slope and knelt upon the beach by the edge of the tide,

scooping up the water as though it were of gold.

"Say, that's not the way to go escaping from the Voulgars," Yanni told

them, reproachfully. "We got to go slow and keep out of sight."

The beach was very narrow and sloped rapidly up to low cliffs of sand

continually broken by wide drifts and watercourses; but they were high

enough to mask the moonlight if one kept close under their lee and one's

footsteps were muffled by the sand. They must have walked in this

fashion for a couple of miles when Yanni stopped them with a gesture

and, bending down, picked up the cork of a fishing-net and an old shoe.

"Guess there's folk around here," he whispered. "I'm going to see. You

sit down and rest yourselves."

He walked on cautiously; the sandy cliffs apparently tumbled away to a

flat country almost at once, for Yanni's figure lost the protection of

their shadow and came into view like a gray ghost in the now completely

clouded moonlight. Presumably they were standing near the edge of the

marshy estuary of the river between Bulgaria and Greece.

"How will he explain himself to any of the enemy on guard?" Sylvia

whispered.

"He must have had the countersign to get across earlier to-night,"

Michael replied.

"It's nearly five o'clock," she said. "We haven't got so very much

longer before dawn."

They waited for ages, it seemed, before Yanni came back and told them

that there was no likelihood of getting a caique on this side of the

river, but that he should cross over in a boat and take the chance of

finding one on the farther beach before his captain's absence was

remarked. He should have to be careful because the Greek sentries would

be men from his own regiment and his presence so far down the line might

arouse suspicion.

"But if you find a caique, how are we going to get across the river to

join you?" Michael asked.

"Say, give me twenty dollars," Yanni answered, after a minute's thought.

"The fish-mens won't do nothing for me unless I show them the money

first. I'll say two British peoples want to go Thaso. We can give them

more when we're on the sea to go Samothraki. They'd be afraid to go

Samothraki at first. You must go back to where we come down to the sea.

Got me? Hide in the bushes all day, and before the [Greek: pheggari],

what is it, before the moon is beginning to-morrow night, come right

down to the beach and strike one match; then wait till you see me, but

not till after the moon is beginning. If I don't come to-morrow, go back

and hide and come right down the next night till the moon is beginning.

And if I don't come the next night--" He stopped. "Sure, Yanni will be

dead."

Michael gave him five sovereigns; he walked quickly away, and the

fugitives turned on their traces in the sand.

"Do you feel any doubt about him?" Sylvia whispered, after a spell of

silence.

"About his honesty? Not the least. If he can come, he will come."

"That's what I think."

They found by their old footprints the gap in the cliffs through which

they had first descended, and took the precaution of scrambling back

farther along so that there should remain only the marks of their

descent. In the first oleander thicket they hid themselves by lying flat

on the marshy ground; so tired were they that they both fell asleep

until they were awakened by morning and a drench of rain.

"One feels more secluded and safe somehow in such weather," said Sylvia,

with an attempt at optimism.

"Yes, and we've got a box of Turkish-delight," said Michael.

"Turkish-delight?" she repeated, in astonishment.

"Yes; one of Rakoff's men gave it to me about a week ago, and I kept it

with a vague notion of its bringing us luck or something. Besides,

another thing in the rain's favor is that it serves as a kind of bath."

"A very complete bath I should say," laughed Sylvia.

They ate Turkish-delight at intervals during that long day, when for not

a single moment did the rain cease to fall. Sylvia told Michael about

the Earl's Court Exhibition and Mabel Bannerman.

"I remember a girl called Mabel who used to sell Turkish-delight there,

but she had a stall of her own."

"So did my Mabel the year afterward," she said.

Soon they decided it must be the same Mabel. Sylvia thought what a good

opening this was to tell Michael some of her more intimate experiences,

but she dreaded that he would, in spite of himself, show his distaste

for that early life of hers, and she could not bear the idea of creating

such an atmosphere now--or in the future, she thought, with a sigh.

Nevertheless, she did begin an apostrophe against the past, but he cut

her short.

"The past? What does the past matter? Without a past, my dear Sylvia,

you would have no present."

"And, after all," she thought, "he knows already I have a past."

Once their hands met by accident, and Michael withdrew his with a

quickness that mortified her, so that she simulated a deep preoccupation

in order to hide her chagrin, for she had outgrown her capacity to sting

back with bitter words, and could only await the slow return of her

composure before she could talk naturally again.

"But never mind, the adventure is drawing to a close," she told herself,

"and he'll soon be rid of me."

Then he began to talk again about their damned relationship and to

speculate upon the extent of Stella's surprise when she should hear

about it.

"I think, you know, when I was young," Michael said, presently, "that I

must have been rather like your husband. I'm sure I should have fallen

in love with you and married you."

"You couldn't have been in the least like him," she contradicted,

angrily.

For a moment, so poignant in its revelation of a divine possibility as

to stop her heart while it lasted, Sylvia fancied that he seemed

disappointed at her abrupt disposal of the notion that he might have

loved her. But even as the thought was born it died upon his offer of

another piece of Turkish-delight and of his saying:

"I think it's time for the eighth piece each."

So that was the calculation he had been making, unless, indeed, their

proximity and solitude through this long day in the face of danger had

induced in him a sentimental desire to express an affection born of a

conventional instinct to accord with favoring circumstance, bred of a

kind of pity for a wasted situation. If that were so, she must be more

than ever careful of her pride; and for the rest of the day she kept the

conversation to politics, forcing it away from any topic that in the

least concerned them personally.

A night of intense blackness and heavy rain succeeded that long day in

the oleander thicket. Moonrise could not be expected by their reckoning

much before three in the morning. The wet hours dragged so interminably

that prudence was sacrificed to a longing for action; feeling that it

was impossible to lie here any longer, sodden, hungry, and apprehensive,

they decided to go down to the beach and strike the first match at

midnight, and, notwithstanding the risk, to strike matches every

half-hour. The first match evoked no response; but the plash of the

little waves broke the monotony of the rain, and the sand, wet though it

was, came as a relief after the slime in which they had been lying for

eighteen hours. The second match gained no answering signal; neither did

the third nor the fourth. They consoled themselves by whispering that

Yanni had arranged his rescue for the hour before moonrise. The fifth

and sixth matches flamed and went out in dreary ineffectiveness; so

thick was the darkness over the sea it began to seem unimaginable for

anything to happen out there. Suddenly Michael whispered that he could

hear the clumping of oars, and struck the seventh match. There was

silence; then the oars definitely grew louder; a faint whistle came over

the water: the darkness before them became tremulous with a hint of

life, and their straining eyes tried to fancy the outline of a boat

standing off from the shore. Presently low voices were audible; then the

noise of a falling plank and a hurried oath for some one's clumsiness; a

little boat grounded, and Yanni jumped out.

"Quick!" he breathed. "I believe I heard footsteps coming right down to

the shore."

They pushed off the boat; and when they were about twenty strokes from

the beach, what seemed after so much whispering and stillness a demoniac

shout rent the darkness inland. Yanni and the fishermen beside him

pulled now without regard for the noise of the oars; they could hear the

sound of people's sliding down the cliff; there were more shouts, and a

rifle flashed.

"Those Voulgars," Yanni panted, "won't do nothing except holler. They

can't see us."

Another rifle banged, and Sylvia was thrilled by the way their escape

was conforming to the rules of the game; she reveled in the confused

sounds of anger and pursuit on land.

"They don't know where we are," laughed Yanni.

But the noise of the fugitives scrambling on board the caique and the

hoisting of the little boat brought round them a shower of bullets, the

splash of which was heard above the rain. One of these broke a jar of

wine, and every man aboard bent to the long oars, driving the perfumed

caique deeper into the darkness.

"I had a funny time getting this caique," Yanni explained, when, with

some difficulty, he had been dissuaded from firing his late captain's

revolver at the country of Bulgaria, by this time at least two miles

away. "I didn't have no difficulty to get across, but I had to walk

half-way to Cavalla before I found the old fish-man who owns this

caique. I told him two British peoples wanted him and he says, 'Are them

Mr. B.'s fellows for Cavalla?' I didn't know who Mr. B. was, anyway, so

I says, 'Sure, they're Mr. B.'s fellows,' but when we got off at dusk,

he says his orders was for Porto Lagos and to let go the little boat

when he could hear a bird calling. He didn't give a dern for no matches.

Wal, Mr. B.'s fellows didn't answer from round about Lagos, and he said

bad words, and how it was three days too soon, and who in hell did I

think I was, anyway, telling him Mr. B.'s fellows was waiting? So I

told him there was a mistake somewheres, and asked him what about taking

you Thaso for twenty dollars. We talked for a bit and he said, 'Yes.'

Now we got to make him go Samothraki."

At this point the captain of the caique, a brown and shriveled old man

seeming all the more shriveled in the full-seated breeches of the Greek

islander, joined them below for an argument with Yanni that sounded more

than usually acrimonious and voluble. When it was finished, the captain

had agreed, subject to a windy moonrise, to land them at Samothraki on

payment of another ten pounds in gold. They went on deck and sat astern,

for the rain was over now. A slim, rusty moon was creeping out of the

sea and conjuring from the darkness forward the shadowy bulk of Thasos;

presently, with isolated puffs that frilled the surface of the water

like the wings of alighting birds, the wind began to blow; the long oars

were shipped, and the crew set the curved mainsail that crouched in a

defiant bow against whatever onslaught might prepare itself; from every

mountain gorge in Thrace the northern blasts rushed down with life for

the stagnant sea, and life for the dull, decrescent moon, which in a

spray of stars they drove glittering up the sky.

"How gloriously everything hums and gurgles!" Sylvia shouted in

Michael's ear. "When shall we get to Samothrace?"

He shrugged his shoulders and leaned over to Yanni, who told them that

it might be about midday if the wind held like this.

For all Sylvia's exultation, the vision of enchanted space that seemed

to forbid sleep on such a night soon faded from her consciousness, and

she did not rouse herself from dreams until dawn was scattering its

roses and violets to the wind.

"I simply can't shave," Michael declared, "but Samothrace is in sight."

The sun was rising in a fume of spindrift and fine gold when Sylvia

scrambled forward into the bows. Huddled upon a coil of wet rope, she

first saw Samothrace faintly relucent like an uncut sapphire, where

already it towered upon the horizon, though there might be thirty

thundering miles between.

"I'm glad we ended our adventure with this glorious sea race," shouted

Michael, who had joined her in the bows. "Are you feeling quite all

right?"

She nodded indignantly.

"See how gray the sky is now," he went on. "It's going to blow even

harder, and they're shortening sail."

They looked aft to where the crew, whose imprecations were only visible,

so loud was the drumming of the wind, were getting down the mainsail;

and presently they were running east southeast under a small jib, with

the wind roaring upon the port quarter and the waves champing at the

taffrail. It did not strike either of them that there was any reason to

be anxious until Yanni came forward with a frightened yellow face and

said that the captain was praying to St. Nicholas in the cabin below.

"Samothraki bad place to go," Yanni told them, dismally. "Many fish-mens

drowned there."

A particularly violent squall shrieked assent to his forebodings, and

the helmsman, looking over his shoulder, crossed himself as the squall

left them and tore ahead, decapitating the waves in its course so that

the surface of the water, blown into an appearance of smoothness,

resembled the powdery damascene of ice in a skater's track.

"It's terrible, ain't it?" Yanni moaned.

"Cheer up," Michael said. "I'm looking forward to your shaving me before

lunch in your native island."

"We sha'n't never come Samothraki," Yanni said. "And I can't pray no

more somehows since I went away to America. Else I'd go and pray along

with the captain. Supposing I was to give a silver ship to the [Greek:

panagia] in Teno, would you lend me the money for the workmens to do

it?"

"I'll pay half," Michael volunteered. "A silver ship to Our Lady of

Tenos," he explained to Sylvia.

"Gee!" Yanni shouted, more cheerfully. "I'm going to pray some right

now. I guess when I get kneeling the trick'll come back to me. I did so

much kneeling in New York to shine boots that I used to lie in bed on a

Sunday. But this goddam storm's regular making my knees itch."

He hurried aft in a panic of religious devotion, whither Michael and

Sylvia presently followed him in the hope of coffee. Every one on board

except the helmsman was praying, and there was no signs of fire; even

the sacred flame before St. Nicholas had gone out. The cabin was in a

confusion of supplicating mariners prostrate amid onions, oranges, and

cheese; the very cockroaches seemed to listen anxiously in the wild

motion. The helmsman was not steering too well, or else the sea was

growing wilder, for once or twice a stream of water poured down the

companion and drenched the occupants, until at last the captain rushed

on deck to curse the offender, calling down upon his head the pains of

hell should they sink and he be drowned.

Michael and Sylvia found the most sheltered spot in the caique and ate

some cheese. The terror of the crew had reacted upon their spirits; the

groaning of the wind in the shrouds, the seething of the waves, and the

frightened litany below quenched their exultation and silenced their

laughter.

Yanni, more yellow than ever, came up and asked Michael if he would mind

paying the captain now.

"He says he don't believe he can get into port, but if he can't, he's

going to try and get around on the south side of Samothraki, only he'd

like to have his money in case anything should happen."

Three hours tossed themselves free from time; and now in all its

majesty and in all its menace the island rose dark before them, girdled

with foam and crowned with snow above six thousand feet of chasms,

gorges, cliffs, and forests.

"What a fearful lee shore!" Michael exclaimed, with a shudder.

"Yes, but what a sublime form!" Sylvia cried. "At any rate, to be

wrecked on such a coast is not a mean death."

Yanni explained that the only port of the island lay on this side of the

low-lying promontory that ran out to sea on their starboard bow. In

order to make this, the captain would have to beat up to windward first,

which with the present fury of the gale and so lofty a coast was

impossible. The captain evidently came to the same conclusion, though at

first it looked as if he had changed his mind too late to avoid running

the caique ashore before he could gain the southerly lee of the island.

Sylvia held her breath when the mast lost itself against the darkness of

land and breathed again when anon it stood out clear against the sky.

Yet so frail seemed the caique in relation to the vast bulk before them

that it was incredible this haunt of Titans should not exact another

sacrifice.

"I think, as we get nearer, that the mast shows itself less often

against the sky," Sylvia shouted to Michael.

"About equal, I think," he shouted back.

Certainly the caique still labored on, and it might be that, after all,

they would clear the promontory and gain shelter.

"Do you know what I'm thinking of?" Michael yelled.

She shook her head, blinking in the spray.

"The Round Pond!" he yelled again.

"I can't imagine that even the Round Pond's really calm at present," she

shouted back.

Suddenly astern there was a cry of despair that rose high above the

howling of the wind; the tiller had broken, and immediately the prow of

the caique, swerving away from the sky, drove straight for the shore.

Two men leaped forward to cut the ropes of the jib, which flapped madly

aloft; then it gave itself to the wind and danced before them till it

was no more than a gull's wing against dark and mighty Samothrace.

The caique rocked alarmingly until the oars steadied her; the strength

of the rowers endured long enough to clear the promontory, but,

unfortunately, the expected shelter on the other side proved to be an

illusion, and, though a new tiller had been provided by this time, it

was impossible for the exhausted men to do their part. The caique began

to ship water, so heavily, indeed, that the captain gave orders to run

her ashore where the sand of a narrow cove glimmered between huge towers

of rock. The beaching would have been effected safely had it not been

for a sunken reef that ripped out the bottom of the caique, which

crumpled up and shrieked her horror like a live, sentient thing. Sylvia

found herself, after she had rolled in a dizzy switchback from the

summit of one wave to another, clinging head downward to a slippery

ledge of rock, her fingers in a mush of sea-anemones, her feet wedged in

a crevice; then another wave lifted her off and she was swept over and

over in green somersaults of foam, until there came a blow as from a

hammer, a loud roaring, and silence.

When Sylvia recovered consciousness she was lying on a sandy slope with

Michael's arms round her.

"Was I drowned?" she asked; then common sense added itself to mere

consciousness and she began to laugh. "I don't mean actually, but

nearly?"

"No, I think you hit your head rather a thump on the beach. You've only

been lying here about twenty minutes."

"And Yanni and the captain and the crew?"

"They all got safely ashore. Rather cut about, of course, but nothing

serious. Yanni and the captain are arguing whether Our Lady of Tenos or

St. Nicholas is responsible for saving our lives. The others are making

a fire."

She tried to sit up; but her head was going round, and she fell back.

"Keep quiet," Michael told her. "We're in a narrow, sandy cove from

which a gorge runs up into the heart of the mountains. There's a

convenient cave higher up full of dried grass--a goatherd's, I

suppose--and when the fire's alight the others are going to scramble

across somehow to the village and send a guide for us to-morrow. There

won't be time before dark to-night. Do you mind being left for a few

minutes?"

She smiled her contentment, and, closing her eyes, listened to the

echoes of human speech among the rocks above, and to the beating of the

surf below.

Presently Yanni and Michael appeared in order to carry her up to the

cave; but she found herself easily able to walk with the help of an arm,

and Michael told Yanni to hurry off to the village.

Sylvia and he were soon left alone on the parapet of smoke-blackened

earth in front of the cave, whence they watched the sailors toiling up

the gorge in search of a track over the mountain. Then they took off

nearly all their clothes and wandered about in overcoats, breaking off

boughs of juniper to feed the fire for their drying.

"Nothing to eat but cheese," Michael laughed. "Our diet since we left

Rakoff has always run to excess of one article. Still, cheese is more

nutritious than Turkish-delight, and there's plenty of water in that

theatrical cascade. The wind is dropping; though in any case we

shouldn't feel it here."

Shortly before sunset the gorge echoed with liquid tinklings, and an

aged goatherd appeared with his flock of brown sheep and tawny goats,

which with the help of a wild-eyed boy he penned in another big cave on

the opposite side. Then he joined Sylvia and Michael at their fire and

gave them an unintelligible, but obviously cordial, salutation, after

which he entered what was evidently his dwelling-place and came out with

bottles of wine and fresh cheese. He did not seem in any way surprised

by their presence in his solitude, and when darkness fell he and the boy

piped ancient tunes in the firelight until they all lay down on heaps of

dry grass. Sylvia remained awake for a long while in a harmony of

distant waves and falling water and of sudden restless tinklings from

the penned flock. In the morning the old man gave them milk and made

them a stately farewell; he and his goats and his boy disappeared up the

gorge for the day's pasturage in a jangling tintinnabulation that became

fainter and fainter, until the last and most melodious bells tinkled at

rare intervals far away in the dim heart of the mountain.

The cove and the gorge were still in deep shadow; but on the slopes

above toward the east bright sunlight was hanging the trees with

emeralds beneath a blue sky, and seaward the halcyon had lulled the

waves for her azure nesting.

"Can't we get up into the sunlight?" Michael proposed.

For all the sparkling airs above them, it was chilly enough down here,

and they were glad to scramble up through thickets of holm-oak, arbutus,

and aromatic scrub to a grassy peak in the sun's eye. Here not even the

buzzing of an insect broke the warm, wintry peace of the South, and it

was hard to think that the restless continent of Asia was lapped by that

tender and placid sea below. The dark, blue wavy line of Imbros and the

dove-gray bulk of Lemnos were the only islands in sight, though, like

lines of cloud upon the horizon, they could fancy the cliffs of

Gallipoli and hear, so breathless was the calm, the faint grumbling of

the guns.

"It was in Samothrace they set up the Winged Victory," Michael said.

Then suddenly he turned to Sylvia and took her hand. "My dear, when I

dragged you up the beach yesterday I thought you were dead, and I cursed

myself for a coward because I had let you die without telling you.

Sylvia, this adventure of ours, need it ever stop?"

"Everything comes to an end," she sighed.

"Except one thing--and that sets all the rest going again."

"What is your magic key?"

"Sylvia, I'm afraid to ask you to marry me, but will you?"

She stared at him; then she saw his eyes, and for a long while she was

crying in his arms with happiness.

"My dear, my dear, you've lost your yellow shawl in the wreck."

"The mermaids can have it," she murmured. "I shall wrap up the rest of

my memories in you."

Then she stopped in sudden affright.

"But, Michael, how can I marry you? I haven't told you anything really

about myself."

"Foolish one, you've told me everything that matters in these two months

of the most perfect companionship possible for human beings."

"Companionship?" she echoed, looking at him fiercely. "And cousinship,

eh?"

"No, no, my dear, you can't frighten me any longer," he laughed.

"Surely, telling things belongs to the companionship of a life

together--love has no words except when one is still very young and

eloquent."

"But, Michael," she went on, "all these nine years of mystical

speculation, are they going to end in the commonplace of marriage?"

"It won't be commonplace, and besides, the war isn't over yet, and after

the war there will be an empty world to fill with all we have learned.

Ah, how poor old Guy would have loved to fill it with his Spanish

castles."

"It seems wrong for us two up here to be so happy," Sylvia sighed.

"This is just a halcyon day, but there will soon be stormy days again."

"You mean you'll go back now to--" She stopped in a desperate

apprehension. "But, of course, we can't live forever in these days of

war between a blue sky and a blue sea. Yet, somehow, oh, my dearest and

dearest, I don't believe I shall lose _you_."

Like birds calling to one another, in the green thickets far away two

bells tinkled their monotone; and a small gray craft flying the white

ensign glided over the charmed sea toward Samothrace.

THE END

* * * * *

BOOKS BY

BASIL KING

_THE CITY OF COMRADES

ABRAHAM'S BOSOM

THE HIGH HEART

THE LIFTED VEIL

THE INNER SHRINE

THE WILD OLIVE

THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT

THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS

THE WAY HOME

THE LETTER OF THE CONTRACT

IN THE GARDEN OF CHARITY

THE STEPS OF HONOR

LET NOT MAN PUT ASUNDER_

HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK [ESTABLISHED 1817] LONDON

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BOOKS BY

ZANE GREY

THE U. P. TRAIL

THE DESERT OF WHEAT

WILDFIRE

THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE

DESERT GOLD

THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS

THE LONE STAR RANGER

THE RAINBOW TRAIL

THE BORDER LEGION

KEN WARD IN THE JUNGLE

THE YOUNG LION HUNTER

THE YOUNG FORESTER

THE YOUNG PITCHER

HARPER & BROTHERS

NEW YORK [ESTABLISHED 1817] LONDON

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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

when she was presented to Madema=>when she was presented to Madame

the last hour than in all the year that had gone by since=>the last hour

than in all the years that had gone by since

The Austrains are advancing more rapidly=>The Austrians are advancing

more rapidly

even the envelop that Hazlewood had given to her=>even the envelope that

Hazlewood had given to her

will be delighted to drink a cockataila with him=>will be delighted to

drink a cockatail with him

The French spelling & punctuation have not been corrected.

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