death. He stood stock still, looking into his medicine chest, his back to Mr. Spokesly, his high shoulders raised higher. He was in a corner, for he had been betrayed already into the demonstration of nervous fear.

"He's nearly bit my thumb through," went on Mr. Spokesly, walking over to the washbowl.

Captain Ranney, the flask of friar's balsam in his hand, turned slowly from the cabinet and moved cautiously to the table. He set it down, went back and drew out a roll of bandage. In a few moments Mr. Spokesly's eyes, grown accustomed to the somber twilight of the blue curtains of the scuttles, would be wandering round the cabin, noting things Captain Ranney showed to no one. No one! The Captain grew fierce as he thought of his outraged privacy. He must get this man out of the room quickly. He slopped friar's balsam on some cotton wool, and fixing his pale, exasperated gaze upon Mr. Spokesly's thumb, began to bind it up. "We may have a passenger, I hear," said the oblivious Mr. Spokesly.

"Oh dear me, no!" retorted Captain Ranney, with a sort of despairing chuckle. "Quite impossible, quite. I shouldn't dream of allowing anything of the sort."

"Not if the boss wanted it?"

"Oh, no doubt, in that case, the master of the vessel would be the last to hear of it."

When Mr. Spokesly was gone, eager to go at the job and get rid of this dreadful grime on the unhappy old ship, the captain stood in front of the medicine chest, swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and covered his eyes with his hand. trembling violently.

He was

For he was a man who was at war with the world. He was so preoccupied with this tremendous conflict that the dis

turbance in Europe scarcely sounded in his ears. He was a man without faith and without desire of hope. In the years behind him lay the wreckage of honor, when he had gone out East to the China coast. Driven to devise a mode of existence, both unsocial and unintellectual, he had stumbled upon strange things in human life. He accumulated vast stocks of scandal about humanity, and delved into repositories of knowledge which most men avoid and forget. And there was the pipe, which led him into another life altogether, the life of irresponsible dreams, wherein a man's mind, released from the body, yet retaining the desires of the body, ranges forth into twilights of oblivion, clutching here and there at strange seductive shapes and thrilling to voices not heard before.

But as he sat now behind his locked door and heavy curtain, shading his eyes with his hand, he faced the immediate future with dread. The sight of Mr. Spokesly, bandaged and plastered, hurrying out to get on with the work, made him see, with painful clearness, where he himself had fallen, and how problematic was the task ahead.

XI

MRS. DAINOPOULOS, who was born Alice Thompson, lay on her sofa and with a Scotch plaid rug over her, looking out across the sunlit Gulf whenever she raised her eyes from her book. It is not extraordinary that she should have been fond of reading. Suffering actual pain only occasionally, she would have found time hang most heavily but for this divine opiate, whereby the gentle and gracious figures of sentimental fiction were gathered about her and lived out their brief lives in that deserted theater of the ancient gods, between the silent ravines of the Chalcidice and the distant summits of Thessaly.

For she, without having in any degree an original imagination, had a

very lively one. The people in books were quite as real to her as the people around her, for just as she followed the characters in a book while reading, so she only knew actual human beings while they were in the room with her. As she read her books, so she read people, with intense interest as to how it would end, and always longing for sequels. There was no doubt in her mind, of course, that you could not have a story without love, and this reacted naturally enough upon her judgments of people. She herself, she firmly believed, could not exist without love. Nobody could. It was a world of delicate and impalpable happiness where people always understood each other without speech, responding to a touch of a hand, a note of music, the sunlight on the snow-capped mountains, or the song of a bird. Released from the indurating business of daily chores and the calculations of housekeeping, and placidly secure in a miser's infatuation, she lived an almost effortless emotional existence. She had gone through many stages, of course, like most exiles, from petulance to indifference; but by this time, as she looked up from her book and watched the Kalkis swinging in the current and disappearing from time to time in billows of white steam from her winches, Mrs. Dainopoulos was almost fiercely sentimental. Beneath a manner compounded of suburban vulgarity and English reserve, she concealed an ardent and romantic temperament. People, in her imagination, behaved exactly as did the characters in the books she had been reading. She was the author, as it were, of innumerable unwritten romances, enthusiastic imitations of those Mr. Dainopoulos obediently ordered in boxes from London. She adored those books which, the publisher's advertisement said, made you forget; and she never took any notice at all of the advertisement, often on the opposing page, of the London School of Mnemonics which sought to sell books that made you remember. Yet, forget

me-nots were her favorite flowers. To her, as to Goethe, art was called art because it is not nature. The phantasmagoria of Balkan life, the tides of that extraordinary and sinister sea which beat almost up against her windows, left her untroubled. For her there was no romance without love, and, of course, marriage.

For Evanthia she cherished a clear, boyish admiration, blended with a rather terrified interest in her volcanic emotional outbreaks. Mrs. Dainopoulos quite comprehended that Evanthia could do things impossible for an English girl. But she saw no reason why Evanthia should not "find happiness,' as she phrased it, fading out with a baby in her arms, so to speak. She did not realize that girls like Evanthia never fade out. They are not that kind. They progress as Evanthia progressed, borne on the crests of aboriginal impulses, riding easily amid storms and currents which would wreck the tidy coasting craft of domestic life. They are, in short, destined to command, and nothing can sate their appetite for spiritual conflict.

But Mrs. Dainopoulos did not know this. She lay there looking out at the ineffable beauty of the Gulf, a novel open on her lap, dreaming of Evanthia and Mr. Spokesly. How nice if they really and truly liked each other! And perhaps, when the war was over, they could all go to England together and see the Tower and Westminster Abbey! This was the way her thoughts ran. She never spoke this way, however. Her speech was curt and matter-of-fact, for she was very shy of revealing herself even to her husband. Her sharp, small intelligence never led her into the mistake of interfering with other people. Instead, she imagined them as characters in a story and thought how nice it would be if they only would behave that way.

And then, suddenly, in upon this idyllic scene burst Evanthia, excited and breathless.

"Oh!" she exclaimed. “What shall I do?"

"Why, whatever is the matter, Evanthia? Your eyes shine like stars. Do tell me."

Evanthia came striding in like an angry prima donna, her hand stretched in front of her as though about to loose a thunderbolt or a stiletto. She flung herself down a trick of hers, for she never seemed to hurt herself on the rug beside the bed and leaned her head against her friend's hand. It was another trick of hers to exclaim, "What shall I do? Mon Dieu! que ferai-je?" when she was in no doubt about what she was going to do. She was going after her lover. She was going on board the Kalkis before she sailed, on some pretense, and she was going to the Piræus, whence she could get to Athens in a brisk walk if necessary, and when she got there God would look after her. She had convinced herself, by stray hints, picked up from the domestics of the departed consuls, that her lover would go to Athens. There was as much truth in this as in the possibility of the Kalkis going to Piræus. It was conjecture, but Evanthia wanted to believe it. She had never been in a ship, and she could have no conception of the myriad changes of fortune which might befall a ship in a few weeks. She might lie for months in Phyros. With Evanthia, however, this carried no weight. God would take care of her. It was rather disconcerting to reflect that God did. Evanthia, all her life, never thought of anybody but herself, and all things worked together to bring her happiness and to cast her lines in pleasant places.

Just at this time she was concentrating upon an adventure of which the chief act was getting on board that little ship out there. Everything, even to the clothes she was to wear, was prepared. She had gone about it with. a leisurely, silent, implacable efficiency. And now she relieved her feelings in a burst of hysterical affection for her dear

friend who had been so kind to her and whom she must leave. She could do this because of the extreme simplicity of her personality. She was afflicted with none of the complex psychology which makes the Western woman's life a farrago of intricate inhibitions. Love was an evanescent glamour which came and passed like a cigarette, a strain of music, a wave of furious anger. Evanthia remembered the hours, forgetting the persons. But for that gay and spirited young man with the little blond mustache and laughing blue eyes, who she believed was now in Athens flirting with the girls, her feeling was different. He had won from her a sort of allegiance. She thought him the maddest, wittiest, and most splendid youth in the world. She did not despise Mr. Spokesly because he was not at all like Fridthiof. She could not conceive, in that stark and simple imagination of hers, two youths like Fridthiof. His very name was a bizarre caress to her Southern ears. How gay he was! How clever, how vital, how amusingly irreligious, how careless whether he hurt her or not! It was a fantastic feature of her attitude toward him that she liked to think of herself as possessed by him, yet at liberty to go where she wished. She was experimenting crudely with emotions, trying them and flinging them away.

She had at the back of her mind the vague notion that if she could only get to Fridthiof he would take her away into Central Europe, to Prague and Vienna and Munich, dream cities where she could savor the life she saw in the moving pictures great houses, huge motor cars, gems, and gallimaufry. She dreamed of the silken sheets and the milk baths of sultanas, servants in dazzling liveries, and courtyards with fountains and string music in the shadows behind the palms. Without history or geography to guide her, she imagined Central Europe as a sort of glorified Jardin de la Tour Blanche, where money grew upon trees or flowered

Nevertheless, there certainly was a lamentable black blob on the end of his nose, and it had to be painfully pumicestoned away before he was allowed to go home.

At home, too, of course, Nora spared him nothing. She held him up to ridicule over the incident with all the feeble force of her childish vocabulary. His father looked at him thoughtfully, but said nothing (he so seldom said much); his mother laughed at him and applauded Nora's sallies.

"Well, it has got a nice smell," he defended himself, stubbornly. Then tears overwhelmed him. Why wouldn't they understand?

His father lifted him on to his knee. "Never mind, old chap," he suggested, peaceably. "There's no harm in your liking the smell of ink, you know, if you want to."

He was grateful to his father-grateful, but unsatisfied. For it was evident that even his father didn't understand. "Yes, but," he wailed, with that wearisome iteration of small children struggling in vain against limited powers of expression, "it has got such a nice "

"Now, John, that will do," closured his mother, sharply. "You're just being silly and talking nonsense. Nora was only joking, but you never can take a joke.'

Against the accumulated injustices of this speech John could not defend himself at all; he could only turn round, his small body heaving, and bury his head in a warm, comforting corner of his father's vast person.

John's second word was a much grander one than ink-but then at least two years had gone by. He and Nora were playing in the attic, and the attic had the tremendous advantage over most attics, that the whole of one of its sides was glass. Outside this spacious window the skies always went by like a pageant; and on this particular spring morning the spectacle of a single dazzlingly white cloud being swept by a

blustering wind across the leagues of intense blue was striking enough to divert the attention of both children for a minute or two from their game.

"Oo! Look at that cloud!" said Nora, and sprang on to the long, low window seat.

John took up his position at the other end of it, and his gaze, too, followed the fleeting, filmy thing that was so conspicuous against the illimitable blue, so airy and shining, so utterly fairylike in fragile, sunlit loveliness.

He hoped Nora wouldn't say anything about the cloud, and she didn't. (Their mother was away, and he was beginning to notice how much nicer Nora rapidly became whenever that happened.)

"Come on and play," was all she said, when the cloud had raced finally out of their sight, and John returned with zest to the game. Nevertheless, something about that cloud continued to live in his mind, to ask it some question, to tease it and be unsatisfied about something: What sort of a cloud had it been? It was no good asking anybody, only to be told "cirrus" or something like that; that was not what John (and the cloud) wanted to know. It was something different, something intimate betwe tween them. It was as if the cloud kept saying to John: "You know what I was. Nobody else does. Tell me." And John wanted and struggled to tell. "White," he tried. "Shining

lighted," he tried. But they were no good. "Soft and glowing and oh, just lovely!" But the cloud wasn't satisfied with the mere gush of that, either. Wistfully it seemed to go on floating over his head-waiting, waiting. John made a tremendous effort. "Glistening!" he shouted (in his heart), and felt a throb of triumph. All that day he kept repeating the word to himself with extraordinary satisfaction; it seemed to him perfect.

But the next morning in church (for it was Sunday) a funny thing happened. He wasn't listening, of course; he never