for example, and those men he met at the Consulate. And with a twinge he reflected they might say the same thing about Evanthia, if they knew it all. Yet they must be made to know, those of them who were left, that the game was up for the cheerful school-boy with no ascertainable ideas. The very vitality of these alien races was enough to sound a warning. After all, Mr. Marsh had said in his throaty way, you can't beat that type, you know. And the question looming up in the back of Mr. Spokesly's mind, as he sat on that seat in St. James Park was, "Couldn't you?"

He discovered with a shock that his friend the elderly lieutenant, who had been visiting the Admiralty that morning and so had met Mr. Spokesly, was explaining something.

"I told him that taking everything into consideration, I really couldn't see my way. Not now. You see, we aren't getting any younger, and my wife is so attached to Chingford she won't hear of leaving. And of course I couldn't go out there alone now."

"Where did you say it was?" Mr. Spokesly asked. He had not heard. "West Indies. It's a new oiling station, and they want an experienced harbor master. You see I knew about it, years ago, when the place was first projected and put in for it. And now he's offered it to me, I can't go. I don't have to, you see. And yet I should like to put some one in the way of it for the chap's sake. So I say, why don't you go round and see him? Three hundred a year and quarters. It isn't so dusty, I can assure you. If I hadn't been rather lucky in my investments I should be very glad to go, I can tell you that."

And the odd thing, to Mr. Spokesly's mind, was that he did not envy his elderly friend's happy position as to his investments. Here again luck masqueraded as a slippery word. Was he so lucky? From where he sat now, beneath the Arch of the great queen of the money-making, steam-engine era-the

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era, that is, when the steam engines made the money and the old order fattened upon rents and royalties, Mr. Spokesly was able to see that money was no longer an adequate gauge of a man's caliber. One had to grow, and that was another name for suffering.

In his hand was a newspaper, and as he turned it idly, his eye caught an urgent message in heavy type. The London School of Mnemonics pleaded with him to join up in the armies of Efficiency. They urged him to get out of the rut and fit himself for executive positions with high salaries attached. His eye wandered from the paper to the vista of the Mall, where the products of efficiency were ranged in quadruple lines of ugliness, the stark witnesses of human ineptitude. He saw the children playing about those extraordinarily unlovely guns, their muzzles split and dribbling with rust, their wheels splayed outward like mechanical paralytics, and he fell to wondering if he could not find his way out of his spiritual difficulties sooner if he did what his friend suggested. He would have to do something. A few hundred pounds was all he had. And the chances of a sea job were not immediately promising. He recalled his visit the other day to the office of the owners of the Tanganyika, and the impression he had gained was that their enthusiasm had cooled. They had done a big business with Bremen before the war, and they would be doing a big business again soon. Their attitude had contrasted oddly with the roll-of-honor tablet in the office where, printed in gold, he had seen the names of the officers of the Tanganyika "murdered by the enemy." All save his own. Somehow that word "murdered" to him who had been there did not ring true. It was like the nice schoolboy's "rotten" and "putrid"; it signified a mood, now gone no one knew where. It was like Lietherthal's "Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten", a gesture which meant nothing to the millions of Hindoos, Mongolians, Arabs, Africans, and Latins in the world. "A

family squabble," that sharp young man had called it, a mere curtain-raiser to a gigantic struggle for existence between the races.

He rose and turned to his friend.

"It's the very thing for me," he said. "I don't feel any particular fancy for staying on in England."

As soon as I saw you waiting in that corridor," said his friend, "I thought of it. Now you go and see him. You know the Colonial Office. He's a fine old boy and a thorough gentleman. There are prospects too, I may tell you. It's a sugar-cane country and citrus fruits, and I believe you'll have some very nice company in the plantations all round. And I believe there's a pension after twenty years. Well . . . not that you'll need to bother about it by that time. As I say, it's a jumping-off place. Fine country, you know. But what about a little drink? I know a place in Chandos Street-they know me there. And now about coming down to to Chingford. . . ."

Mr. Spokesly accompanied his friend through the great Arch of Victoria into the Square, and as they made their way round by the National Gallery he reached a decision. He would go. His elderly friend, toddling beside him, added details which only confirmed the decision. That gentleman knew a good thing. He himself, however, having more by luck than judgment held on to his shipping shares, was now in a position of comfortable independence. He had served his country and sacrificed his sons and now he was going to enjoy himself for the rest of his life. After drawing enormous interest and bonuses, he had sold at the top of the market and was buying bonds "which would go up" a stockbroking friend had told him. "A safe six hundred a year-what do I want with more?" he wheezed as they entered the place in Chandos Street. "My dear wife, she's so nervous of these shipping shares; and there's no doubt they are a risk. Mine's a large port."

Yes, he would go, and it interested

Mr. Spokesly to see how little appeal this tender and beautiful picture of two old people "going down the hill together" had for him. With a sudden cleavage in the dull mistiness which had possessed his heart for so long, he saw that there was something in life which they had missed. He saw that if a man sets so low a mark, and attains it by the aid of a craven rectitude and animal cunning, he will miss the real glory and crown of life, which by no means implies victory. He was prepared to admit he had not done a great deal with his own life so far. But he was laying a new course. The night he received his instructions to depart he walked down to the river and along the embankment to his hotel with a novel exaltation of spirit. The taste of life was coming back. He saw, in imagination, that new place to which he was bound, a tiny settlement concealed within the secure recesses of a huge tropical harbor. He saw the jetty, with its two red lights by the pipe-line and the verandahed houses behind the groves of Indian laurel. He saw the mountains beyond the clear water purple and black against the sunset or rising clear in the crystal atmosphere of the dawn. He saw the wide clean space of matted floors and the hammock where he would lie and watch the incandescent insects moving through the night air. He saw himself there, an integral part of an orderly and reasonable existence.

He had no intention of wasting his life, but he saw that he must have time and quiet to find his bearings and make those necessary affiliations with society without which a man is rootless driftage. less driftage. He saw that the lines which had hitherto held him to the shore had been spurious and rotten and had parted at the first tension.

There was time yet. What was it the elderly lieutenant had called her? “A millstone round your neck all your life." No, he could not take that view yet. He did not regret that supreme experience of his life. He recalled the swift derisive gesture she had once flung at him as she

spurned his reiterated fidelity. "You learn from me . . . to go back to an Englishwoman." Even now he delighted in the splendid memory of her charm, her delicious languors and moments of melting tenderness, her anger and sometimes smoldering rage. No, he did not regret. It was something achieved, something that would be part of him for ever. He could go forward now into the future, armed with knowledge and the austere prudence that is the heritage of an emotional defeat. He looked out across the river and saw the quick glow of an opened cupola in a foundry on the Surrey shore. There was a faint smile on his face, an expression of resolution, as though in imagination he were already in his island home, watching the glow of a cane fire in a distant valley.

And eastward, some five thousand miles, in the costly Villa Dainopoulos on the shores of an ancient sea, Evanthia Solaris pursued the mysterious yet indomitable course of her destiny. She had arrived back from "Europe," as has been hinted earlier, in some disarray, alighting from a crowded train of frowsty refugees, silent, enraged, yet reflective after her odyssey. At her feet followed the young Jew, who incontinently dropped upon his knees in the road and pressed his lips, in agonized thankfulness, to his native earth. "Je déteste les hommes!" was all she had said, and Mr. Dainopoulos had spared a moment in the midst of his many affairs to utter a hoarse croak of laughter.

Her story of Captain Ranney's sudden escape from the problems of living struck him for a moment, for he had of course utilized his commander's record and peculiarities in explaining the disappearance of the Kalkis. But the event itself seemed to perplex him not at all. He said, briefly, to his wife in adequate idiom, "He got a scare. He was afraid of himself. In wars plenty of men do that. He think and think, and there is nothing. And that scare a man stiff, when there is nothing." Crude psychol

ogy no doubt, yet adequate to Captain Ranney's unsuccessful skirmish with life.

But Mrs. Dainopoulos was not so callous. She suspected, under Evanthia's hard exterior, a heart lacerated by the bitterness of disillusion. Who would have believed, either, that Mr. Spokesly, an Englishman, would have deserted her like that? Mrs. Dainopoulos was gently annoyed with Mr. Spokesly. He had not behaved as she had arranged it in her storybook fashion. Evanthia must stay with them, she said, stroking the girl's dark head.

As she did. Seemingly, she forgot both the base Englishman and the Alleman Giaour who had so infatuated her. She remained always with the invalid lady, looking out at the Gulf, watching the transports come and go. And when at last it came to Mr. Dainopoulos to journey south, when the sea lines were once again open and a hundred and one guns announced the end, she went with them to the fairy villa out at San Stefano that you reach by the Boulevard Ramleh in Alexandria. It was there that Mr. Dainopoulos emerged in a new role, of the man whose dreams come true. His rich and sumptuous oriental mind expanded in grandiose visions of splendor for the being he adored. He built pleasaunces of fine marbles set in green shrubberies and laved by the blue sea, for her diversion.

He had automobiles, as he had reresolved, of matchless cream-colored coachwork, with scarlet wheels and orange silk upholstery. He imported a yacht that floated in the harbor like a great moth with folded wings. Far out on the breakwater he had an enormous bungalow built of hard woods upon a square lighter, with chambers for music and slumber in the cool Mediterranean breeze, while the thud and wash of the waves against the outer wall lulled the sleeper to antique dreams. He did all this, and sat each day in the portico of the great marble Bourse, planning fresh acquisitions of money.

THR

HREE solemn Germans journeyed G jou d from Leipsig to Berlin one day a few months ago and went into solemn conference, in a room at a Berlin hotel, with three Americans who tried hard to imbue themselves for the occasion with something approaching the solemnity of the Teutons. The three Germans represented the Leipsig publishing house which had secured from the ex-German Emperor, William II, the publication rights, for the entire world, of the book of memoirs which he had just completed. The three Americans represented a group of American newspaper and book publishers desirous of purchasing from the Germans the rights to publish the ex-Kaiser's book in America and all lands outside of Germany and Austria.

It was indeed a solemn occasion. All those present looked very grave. Now and then one of them would cough a very serious little cough-the kind of dry, short little cough which comes to those who feel that they are making history. Nobody smiled. Everybody was painfully polite. And, just as the atmosphere was becoming positively oppressive, one of the Germans, the solemnest of the three, suddenly pointed excitedly at something in front of him, and exclaimed:

husband spoke severely to the Pekingese, led it away in disgrace, and locked it up in the adjoining bathroom.

But the dog had succeeded, for the time being at least, in breaking up the solemnity of the conference. Everybody was smiling-even the solemnest of the three Teutons, he who had first spied the Pekingese. It was a considerable time before the conference could get back to the note of portentousness on which it had opened.

Finally, however, one of the Germans struck that note a resounding blow by inquiring the exact intentions of the Americans with regard to the Kaiser book.

The Americans made cautious diplomatic answers.

German number two talked darkly of other groups of Americans who were keenly interested.

The three Americans hinted vaguely that they, too, were not only interested but prepared to act.

German number three exclaimed: "Noch ein Hund!”

Another dog-a big black chow this time-had crawled out from under a bed and was frisking about, cordially greeting everybody, enthusiastically wagging its tail, showing plainly that conferences were just in its line. Business was suspended while all present patted the intruder and informed it, in English and German, that it was a nice dog, as it was. Then the chow, too, was locked up in the bathroom.

For a minute or so the solemnity of the occasion hung in the balance. Then all three Germans frowned simultaneously. All three Americans coughed simultaneously. Solemnity was restored.