a pair of Turkish slippers, while over his shoulder he saw the girl, now the soldiers were gone, step daintily into the road and go on down, with her delicate prinking walk, an exquisite moth among hard-eyed, ferocious-looking insects.

About an hour later he made his way once more to the establishment of Mr. Dainopoulos. That gentleman at once exclaimed at the improved appearance of his friend, but without quitting his accounts which littered the desk and overflowed on to the shelves along the sides. He offered a chair and a cigarette. Mr. Spokesly watched him with respect. He had sense enough to see that Mr. Dainopoulos was only doing business in the old-fashioned way, as it was done in England and in New England, too, before shipowners became too exalted to talk to their own shipmasters or to go down to meet their own ships. There might be something in this business for him even after the war. If it grew there would be an overlooker needed. He let his mind go forward. Perhaps the Tanganyika's sudden eclipse was really a blessing in disguise-an ill wind blowing prosperity in his direction. It would be unjust to say of him that he did not regret the loss of those lives. He did, as sincerely as anybody else. But he was alive and they were dead, and if there is one thing men learn promptly it is the difference between the quick and the dead. So he let his mind go forward. And when Captain Ranney suddenly came in, Mr. Spokesly almost failed to recognize him. Not that Captain Ranney particularly desired recognition. He sat down and continued a monologue on the decay of morals in the merchant service. Went back to the ship and what did he find? Nothing done. Mate and engineer playing cards in the cabin. Cook drunk. And so on. From bad to worse.

"But where's the harm in a game of cards, Captain?" asked Mr. Spokesly, slightly amused.

This question upset Captain Ranney

very much. He was unused to questions from strangers. It interrupted the flow of his thought. He looked down at his feet and took out a cigarette.

"Ah!" he said, as though an astonishingly fresh argument was about to be born. "Ah! That's the point, that's the point. No harm at all. It's the principle that's at stake I expressly stated my dislike of the cabin being used as a gambling den and these officers of mine expressly disregard my repeated instructions. And it's coming to a point," he added, darkly, as Mr. Dainopoulos hurried across the street to speak to an acquaintance, “when either they get out or I do."

It was obvious that Captain Ranney lived in a world of his own, a world in which he was the impotent, dethroned, and outraged deity. Now he was prepared to abdicate into the bargain. He hinted at ultimatums, distinct understanding, and all the other paraphernalia of sovereignty, for all the world as though he were a European power. By all this he meant nothing more than to impress Mr. Spokesly with the solemn responsibility of being chief officer under him. But Mr. Spokesly was regarding him with attention and he was not impressed. He was looking for the elusive, yet indubitable, mark of character which is so necessary in a commander, a gesture, often closely imitated, which carries out to men the conviction that he bears within himself a secret repository of confidence and virtue, to be drawn upon in moments of conflict with the forces of nature and the turbulent spirits of men. And having failed to find what he was looking for, the genius of command, he began to wonder what there was inside this man at all. It couldn't be simply all this tosh he was emitting. He must have some springs of love and hate in him, some secret virtue or vice which kept him going.

It was Mr. Spokesly's chance question, whether the captain was a visitor at the house, which let him fully into

the mind and temper of his new employer.

"He's not that sort of man," said Mr. Dainopoulos, shoveling beans into his mouth with a knife. "My wife, she wouldn't like him, I guess.

He's got something of his own, you understand. Like your friend, Mr. Bates, only he don't drink. He take the pipe a leetle. You savvy?"

Mr. Spokesly remembered this conversation later on, when events had suddenly carried him beyond the range of Mr. Dainopoulos and his intense respectability. He remembered it because he realized that Mr. Dainopoulos, at that time, and behind his mask of bourgeois probity, was devising a daring and astute stroke of business based on his exact knowledge of the Egean and his relations with the late consuls of enemy powers. And Captain Ranney, of course, had been aware of this. But at the moment Mr. Spokesly easily abandoned the morals of his new comrander and listened to what might be I called the wisdom of the Near East. He thought there was no harm in asking Mr. Dainopoulos what he thought of the emerald ring. That gentleman evidently thought a great deal of it. He offered to buy it, spot cash, for a thousand drachma, about one-sixth of its actual value. He merely shrugged his shoulders when he heard the tale of a woman giving it to Archie. According to his own experience that sort of women did not give such things away to anybody. He noted a minute flaw in the stone, and finally handed it back hurriedly, telling Mr. Spokesly to give it away to some lady.

"Or throw it into the sea," he added, drinking a glass of wine in a gulp. "What for?" demanded Mr. Spokesly, mystified by this sudden fancy.

"Bad luck," said Mr. Dainopoulos, laconically. "It belong to a drowned man, you understand! Better give it away.

"I'll give it to Miss Solaris.' Mr. Dainopoulos eyed Mr. Spokesly

over his shoulder as he sat with his elbows on the table, holding up his glass. Mr. Spokesly put the ring in his pocket.

"She'll take it, all right," said his friend, at length, and drank.

"What makes you so sure?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

Mr. Dainopoulos was not prepared to answer that question in English. He found that English, as he knew it, was an extraordinarily wooden and cumbersome vehicle in which to convey those lightning flashes and glares and sparkles of thought in which most Latin intelligences communicate with each other. You could say very little in English, Mr. Dainopoulos thought. He could have got off some extremely good things about Evanthia Solaris in the original Greek, but Mr. Spokesly would not have understood him. If he were to take a long chance, however, by saying that the vulture up in the sky sees the dead mouse in the ravine, he was not at all sure of the result.

"Aw," he said in apology for his difficulty, "the ladies, they like the pretty rings."

"I can see you don't like her," said Mr. Spokesly, smiling a little.

"My friend," said Mr. Dainopoulos, and he turned his black, bloodshot eyes, with their baggy pouches of skin forming purplish crescents below them, on his companion. "My friend, I'm married. Women, I got no use for them, you understand? You no understand.

By

and by, you know what I mean. My wife, all the time she sick, all the time. She like Miss Solaris. All right. For my wife anything in the world. But me, I got my business. By and by, ah!"

At the transport office they did not see the officer who had been so anxious for Mr. Spokesly to visit the Persian Gulf during the coming summer. That gentleman had gone to see a dentist, it appeared, and a young writer informed them that it would be all right so long as the captain of the vessel was British.

"Yes, he's British all right-Captain Ranney-he's got a passport," said Mr. Dainopoulos. And when he was asked when he would be ready to load, he said as soon as the captain of the port gave him a berth.

"He put us three mile away, and it takes a tug an hour and a half to get to the ship," he remarked, "with coal like what it is now."

"Well, of course we can't put everybody at the pier, you know," said the young writer, genially, quite forgetting that Mr. Dainopoulos had deftly inserted an item in the charte-partie which gave him a generous allowance for light

erage.

66

‘All right," said he, as though making a decent concession. "You know they tell me they want this stuff in a hurry, eh?"

The young writer did not know, but he pretended he did, and said he would attend to it. So they bade him good day and took their way back to the Bureau de Change. Mr. Dainopoulos had left it in charge of a young Jew, a youth so desperately poor and so fanatically honest that he seemed a living caricature of all moral codes. Neither his poverty nor his probity seemed remarkable enough to keep him in employment, doubtless because, like millions of other people in southeastern Europe, he had neither craft of mind nor hand. Mr. Dainopoulos got him small situations from time to time, and in between these he hung about, running errands, and keeping shop, a pale, dwarfed, ragged creature, with emaciated features and brilliant, pathetic eyes. He was wearing a pair of women's boots, much too large for him, burst at the sides and with heels dreadfully run over, so that he kept twitching himself erect. Mr. Dainopoulos waved a hand toward this young paragon.

"See if you can find him a job on the Kalkis," he said. "Very honest young feller." They spoke rapidly to each other and Mr. Dainopoulos gave an amused grunt.

"He say he don't want to go in a ship. Scared she go down," he remarked. The boy looked down the street with an expression of suppressed grief on his face. He rolled his eyes toward his benefactor, imploring mercy. Mr. Dainopoulos spoke to him again.

"He'll go," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "Fix him to help the cook. And if you want anybody to take a letter, he's a very honest young feller."

The very honest young feller shrank away to one side, evidently feeling no irresistible vocation for the sea. Indeed, he resembled one condemned to die. He and his kind swarm in the ports of the Levant, the Semitic parasites of sea-borne commerce, yet rarely setting foot upon a ship. He drooped, as though his limbs had liquified and he was about to collapse. Mr. Dainopoulos, however, to whom ethnic distinctions of such refinement were of no interest, ignored him and permitted him to revel in his agony at a near-by café table.

"You come to my house to-night," he said to Mr. Spokesly. "I got one or two little things to fix."

Mr. Spokesly, driving along the Quai toward the White Tower, would have been the last to deny what Captain Ranney called "a common elementary right." He was invoking it himself. What he was trying to do all this while was to achieve an outlet for his own personality. This was really behind even his intrigue with the London School of Mnemonics. He was convinced he had something in him which the pressures and conventions of the world had never permitted to emerge. Merely becoming engaged had been an advance for Mr. Spokesly, because men like him can move neither upward nor downward without the aid of women. Once removed from the influence of Ada by a series of events which he could not control, he was the predestined prey of the next woman ahead. Those who view this career with contempt should

reflect upon the happiness and longevity of many who pursue it. Mr. Spokesly was no sensualist, in the strict meaning of the word. He simply experienced a difficulty in having any spiritual life apart from women. He could do with a minimum of inspiration, but such as he needed had to come from them. All his thoughts clustered about them. Just as he experienced a feeling of exaltation when he found himself in their company, so he could never see another man similarly engaged without regarding him as a being of singular fortune. Always, moreover, he conceived the woman he did not know as a creature of extraordinary gifts.

Evanthia Solaris seemed to have eluded classification because, without possessing any gifts at all beyond a certain magnetism bewilderingly composed of feminine timidity and tigerish courage, she had inspired in him a strange belief that she would bring him good fortune. This was the kind of woman she was. She went much farther back into the history of the world than Ada Rivers. Ada was simply a modern authorized version of Lady Rowena. She accepted man, though what she really wanted was a knight. Evanthia had no use for knights, save perhaps those of Aristophanes. She, too, accepted men; but they had to transform themselves quickly and efficiently into the votaries of a magnetic goddess. Sighs and vows of allegiance were as nothing at all to her. She had a divinely dynamic energy which set men going the way she wanted. The gay young devil who had been sent packing with the consuls and who was now sitting in his hotel in Pera, was wondering at his luck in escaping from her and scheming how to get back to her, at the same time. Yet, so astute had she been, that even now he did not suspect that she was scheming, too, that she was in an agony at times for the loss of him, and talked to Mrs. Dainopoulos of killing herself.

She was scheming as she came walk

ing among the grass plats at the base of the Tower and saw Mr. Spokesly descend from a carriage and take a seat facing the sea. She came along, as she so often did in her later period, at a vital moment. She came, in her suit of pale saffron, with the great crown of black straw withdrawing her face into a magically distant gloom, and holding a delicate little wrap on her arm against the night, for the sun was going down behind the distant hills and touching the waters of the Gulf with ruddy fire. Gulf with ruddy fire. She saw him sitting there, and smiled. He was

watching a ship going out, making for the narrow strait between the headland and the marshes of the Vardar, and thinking of his life as it was opening before him. He took out a cigarette, and his fingers searched a vest pocket for matches. They closed on the emerald ring and he held the cigarette for a while unlit, thinking of Evanthia, and wondered how he could make the gift. And as he sat there she seemed to materialize out of the shimmering radiance of the evening air, prinking and bending forward with an enchanting smile to catch his eye. And before he could draw a breath, she sat down beside him.

"What you do here?" she asked in her sweet, twittering voice. "You wait for somebody, eh?"

"Yes," he answered, rousing, "for you."

"Ah-h!" Her eyes snapped under the big brim. "How do I know you only tell me that because I am here?"

Her hand, gloved in lemon kid, was near his knee and he took it meditatively, pulling back the wrist of it until she drew away and removed it herself, smiling.

"Eh?" she demanded, not quite sure if he had caught her drift, so deliberate was his mood. He took the ring out of his pocket and grasped her hand while he slid the gem over a finger. She let it rest there for a moment, studying the situation. No one was near them just then. And then she looked up right