“I feel I want to put my feet on the piano,” he said, with a vague remembrance of a popular picture, “like thebochesat Versailles in ’seventy! To infect our hostess’s curtains with cigar-smoke is a poor compromise, but it is something!Allons, messieurs!—let us indulge in hideousreprisals! Thebochehas devastated our homes—let us avenge ourselves by spoiling his curtains!”
The battalion-commander looked smilingly across to the doctor.
“Mon cher Delassus, are you for this policy of reprisals?”
The doctor looked up as though startled out of a train of thought.
“Mon commandant, it is a subject on which I dare not let myself think.”
There was something so harsh in his tone that neither of his companions could continue their banter. Both looked at the doctor. They knew little or nothing of his private life, for he had joined the battalion only just prior to the armistice, but evidently it contained a tragedy the memory of which they had unwittingly revived. Both maintained a respectful silence for a few moments. Then the adjutant rose and went out of the room. He called out to them from the Salon that a splendid fire awaited them, and the others rose from the table also.
The battalion-commander laid his hand affectionately upon the doctor’s shoulder.
“Mon cher,” he said, “forgive me if I have unconsciously wounded sacred sentiments.”
The doctor pressed the hand that was extended to him. They went together across the hall into the Salon.
A blazing wood fire fitfully lit up a large room still without other means of illumination. Jordan explained that he had sent an orderly for some candles, as Madame had no petroleum for the lamps. The battalion-commander and the doctor threw themselves luxuriously into deep armchairs on either side of the fireplace and lit their cigars. In a few minutes the orderly arrived with the candles. Jordan fitted them into two large candelabra on the mantelpiece and lit them.
The eyes of all three officers roved around the apartment. It was, like the dining-room, rather overfurnished and was particularly rich in bric-à-brac of all kinds. It was, in fact, overcrowded with porcelain figures, smallmirrors, pictures of moderate size, all sorts of valuable objects that in almost every case were ofeasily portable dimensions. This last attribute leaped simultaneously to the minds of two of them.
“Mon commandant,” began Jordan, in a humorously affected judicial tone, “I am penetrated by an unworthy suspicion——!”
“French!Nom d’un nom!” cried the battalion-commander. “Everything here!—The collection of the burglarbocheofficer!—Doctor! You speak German!—Ask that woman——!”
Both were suddenly arrested by the attitude of the doctor. He was staring in a fixed fascination at a small Buhl clock upon the mantelpiece. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, snatched down the clock, and gazed eagerly at the back of it.
“Mon Dieu!” he cried. “This is mine!—it comes from my house!—Look!”
He showed them an inscription on the back:
[1]“A Jules, pour marquer les heures d’un amour qui ne cessera pas quand le temps même cessera, de sa Marcelle.”
He stared at them like a lunatic.
“My wife!” he cried. “My wife!—Oh, Marcelle, Marcelle, where are you? Where are you?”
The others also had risen to their feet. A tense silence followed upon the wild cry.
The battalion-commander touched the doctor’s arm.
“Mon ami,” he said gently, “—can we help you——?”
The erstwhile sombre eyes of the doctor blazed down upon him, as though searching for a mortal enemy even in this friend. Then, with a distinctly apparent effort of will, the anguished man mastered himself.
“Listen!” he said. “This clock was a present to me from my wife. It was a love-marriage, ours—we loved, she and I——” he broke off, his eyes blazing again. Then, with a gesture of the hand as though he put that from him,he continued: “Before the war I was in practice at Cambrai. We lived out of the town—in a country house such as this. In August, 1914, I was mobilized. They sent me to Lorraine. I left my wife at home, believing her to be safe. You know what happened. The enemy swept over that part of the country. Trench-warfare began and my home, all I cared for in the world—my wife—was in the German lines. I never saw her again. I could never get any news. I waited four desperate years—and then, when we advanced, I went to find my home. It simply did not exist—it was a heap of bricks with a trench through it. My wife—no hint!” He pressed a hand over his eyes, then stared once more at the clock. “And now—I find this—here!”
Again there was a tense silence. The battalion-commander broke it at last.
“Interrogate the woman,” he said, briefly. “She must know something.”
“It is a pity her husband is dead,” said the captain, with grim humour. “We could have the pleasure of condemning him by court-martial, after he had confessed—whatever there is to confess.”
The doctor’s face set hard. He replaced the clock on the mantelpiece and wrote a few words on a page of his notebook.
“I am going to have the truth,” he said, tearing out the page and folding it up. “Ring the bell, my dear Jordan.”
An orderly appeared.
“Take this to Madame,” said the doctor, “at once.”
The orderly departed. The three men waited, two of them tingling with the excitement of this unexpected drama, the third standing with compressed lips and eyes that seemed to be frowning into a world which transcended this. He was certainly oblivious of his companions in the fixity of his thought. At last his lips moved.
“Marcelle! Marcelle!” he murmured. “My love! I am going to know—and, if need be, to avenge!”
At that moment the door opened and the frail little figure of the German woman appeared upon the threshold.
“Meine Herren?” she said, in timid enquiry.
The doctor looked up. His companions marvelled to see the expression of his face change to a smiling courtesy. But there was a glitter in the usually sombre eyes which spurred their hardly repressed excitement.
“Will you have the kindness to enter,gnädige Frau?” said the doctor. His voice was suave, but there was a note in it which his companions, although they did not understand the words, recognized as compelling.
The German woman glanced at him apprehensively, and obeyed. The doctor drew up an armchair for her, close to the fire.
“Will you not seat yourself,gnädige Frau?” he asked still in the suave voice with the undertone of command.
She inclined her head speechlessly and sat down. They noticed that her hands were trembling. The doctor motioned his companions to resume their seats. He himself remained standing, his back to the fireplace, his form hiding the clock on the mantelpiece from the eyes of the woman had she looked up. He smiled at her in a reassuring manner, as she waited dumbly for him to state the reason for his summons.
“We are very much interested in your collection of porcelain,gnädige Frau,” he said, smoothly. “It is French, is it not?”
A sudden expression of alarm flitted into her eyes, was banished. She nodded her head.
“Ja—ja, mein Herr,” she answered hesitatingly. She moistened her lips. Her hands gripped each other tightly upon her lap.
The battalion-commander and the captain observed her with a quickened interest. Despite their ignorance of German, the word “Porzelän” gave them the clue to their comrade’s opening question.
“It is the result of many years’ gradual acquisition, I presume?” he pursued, in a casual tone.
She shot an upward glance at him from under her eyebrows ere she replied.
“Ja—mein Herr.”
“It is well chosen,” said the doctor. “I congratulate you on your knowledge and good taste. Perhaps you would explain some of the pieces to us—pieces I do not recognize?”
She looked up at him with wide and innocent eyes.
“I cannot,mein Herr. I know nothing about porcelain. It was my husband’s collection. I keep it in memory of him.”
There was an accent of sincerity in the last phrase which drew a sharp glance from the doctor.
“Ah,” he said quietly. “He was killed, was he not?”
Her eyes filled with tears, her mouth twitched.
“Killed in one of the very last battles,mein Herr.” She drew a long sobbing breath and looked wildly at him. “Ach Gott!do not remind me! do not remind me!” she cried. “He was all I had in the world—everything—everything! You do not know how good and kind and loving he was! And now he is gone—he will never come back—never—never! And I loved him so!” She broke down into sobs, hiding her face in her hands.
The doctor waited until the crisis had subsided. A diagnosis of hysteria formed itself in his professional mind.
“So you have no real interest in this collection?” he enquired. “Would you sell it?”
“Ach, nein—nein!” she answered. “I keep it in memory of him, my Heinrich, who loved it so.—I feel him here when I dust it and care for it.” She looked wildly round the room. “I feel him here now!”
The doctor nodded his head in courteous assent to a possibility.
“Did he inherit it?” he asked casually, as though merely pursuing a conversation which could not, in politeness, be allowed to cease on a note of distress.
She shook her head.
“Ah, he bought it?”
She moistened her lips nervously ere she replied.
“Yes.”
“Before the war?”
Her face hardened as she answered again.
“Yes.”
There was a moment of silence and then the doctor changed his position slightly before the mantelpiece.
“And this pretty clock?” he asked, pointing to it. “Did he buy that also?”
She stared at it and then nodded her head.
“Ja, mein Herr.”
“So!—that is curious. I am particularly interested in that clock,gnädige Frau. Can you remember where it was bought?”
She hesitated, ventured a scared glance at him, and obviously forced herself to speech. The two officers involuntarily bent forward in their interest.
“No,mein Herr.”
She glanced round as though seeking an opportunity for escape.
The doctor repeated his question in a level tone of authority, his eyes fixed on her.
“You are sure you cannot remember where that clock was bought,gnädige Frau?”
“Quite sure.” Her breast was heaving. She half rose from her seat. “Why do you ask me all these questions? Let me go!—Let me go! You have no right to question me like this! I—I tell you it was bought—it was all bought!”
The doctor stepped forward with a quick movement, seized her wrist, and forced her back into her seat.
“I beg of you!” he said in a voice that compelled obedience.
She subsided, trembling in every limb. Her eyes followed his every movement with the fascinated attention of a frightened animal.
The doctor came close to her, and from her point ofview glanced up to the mantelpiece. Then, stepping back, he arranged the candles so that the face of the clock, seen from her position, was a disc of bright reflection.
Without a word but with a deliberation which awed even the watching officers by its inflexible though mysterious purpose, he turned to her once more, and, with the gently firm touch of a medical man, posed her head so that she looked straight before her. Paralyzed under his masterful dominance, she submitted plastically. She was too frightened to utter a sound. Only her eyes widened as she saw him produce a heavy revolver.
“Now,gnädige Frau!” he said, and his voice, though passionless, was intense in its expression of level will-power, “do not move your head! Look up—under your eyebrows. You see that clock? Look at it—continue to look at it!—If you take your eyes off it for one fraction of a second I shall shoot you dead! You are looking at it? It marks a quarter to eight. When it strikes eight you will tell me quite truthfully how you came by it!”
He ceased. The young woman, her face white with terror, her mouth twitching, her nostrils distended, sat motionless, staring up under her eyebrows at the face of the clock.
There was a dead silence in the room. The minutes passed. The young woman did not move a muscle. Her wide-open eyes fixed on the clock, she seemed to stiffen into a cataleptic rigidity.
The doctor put aside his revolver. He approached her, took one of her wrists and lifted her hand from her lap. It lay limply in his.
“You are feeling sleepy,” he said in his level, positive voice. “You are going to sleep. My voice is sounding muffled and far away—but you will still hear it. You are losing the sense of your surroundings—but you still see that clock face. You cannot help but see it. And when it strikes eight you are going to tell the truth.” He dropped the hand which fell lifelessly again upon her lap.
The young woman sat motionless as a statue. Herbreathing changed to the deep respirations of sleep, although her eyes remained wide open.
The clock struck eight. At the last of its thin, silvery notes the young woman shuddered. Her lips moved.
“My husband sent it to me,” she said in a toneless, dreamy voice.
“When?” asked the doctor.
“In 1915.”
“From whence?”
“From the front.”
“Do you know the place?”
“No.”
“You are quite sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“And all these other things?”
“My husband sent them to me.”
“From France?”
“Yes.”
“How did he become possessed of them?”
“He took them out of houses.”
There was a pause in which the young woman did not move in the slightest. She appeared like some oracular statue waiting for the next question.
“Why did you lie to me?” asked the doctor in his level voice.
“Because you would have thought my husband a thief, and I am so proud of him.”
“Can you be proud of him, knowing that he was a thief?”
“Yes,” came the dreamy answer. “It was not his crime. He sent these things to me because I asked him for them and he loved me.”
“You asked him to send you these things? Why?”
“Because all the other officers’ wives were having things sent to them.”
“So!Your husband would not have taken them if you had not asked for them?”
“No. He only took them to give me pleasure. Henever thought of anybody but me. That is why I love him so—why I shall always love him.”
The doctor bit his lip, and hesitated for a moment.
“You do not think your husband would have offered violence to a woman in the house where he got this clock?”
“No. He loved me too much. He never thought of any woman but me. I am sure of it. He was an ideal man, my Heinrich—always gentle, always loving, always faithful.” She paused a moment before continuing. “It is cruel of you to make me realize how much I love him!”
The doctor stood over her, contemplating her, his brows wrinkled in a puzzled frown. His comrades looked at him enquiringly. He ignored them. The young woman, having ceased to speak, remained motionless and upright on her chair. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock.
Suddenly the doctor’s brows cleared in an evident decision. He lifted the young woman’s hand again as he spoke in his level, positive voice. His face was very grave.
“You are asleep. But you are going into a very much deeper sleep—a sleep so profound that it takes you far out of this time and place. Nevertheless you will remain in touch with me and you will hear my voice. But everything else is going from you. You are now released from the limitations of this body. You are on a plane from which you can enter into any time and place that I shall command.”
He dropped her hand and, with his finger-tips, closed the lids over her eyes. Her body still remained upright in its trancelike rigidity.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Nothing,” came the dreamy answer.
“Where are you?”
“I do not know—I—I am nowhere, I think,” she said with hesitation. “I—I—oh, do not keep me like this!” There was a new note of anxiety in her voice.
“Wait a moment,” said the doctor. He turned to the mantelpiece, took down the clock, placed it on her lap, and clasped her hands about it.
“Now,” he said in his quiet, tense tones, “you are in touch with that clock. I want you to go into the time and place when that clock had another owner—before your husband had it. Focus yourself upon it. Go into the room where it stands.”
The young woman’s eyelids twitched flickeringly but otherwise her rigid attitude was unmodified.
“Yes,” she said, in a slow and doubtful tone, “yes——”
“What do you see?” asked the doctor. His lips compressed themselves firmly after the words, the muscles of his lean jaw stood out, in the intense effort of his will to keep emotion under control, to avoid an unconscious suggestion of ideas.
“I see asalon,” said the young woman dreamily, “asalonwith French windows opening on to a lawn. There is a grand piano in it—and a young woman seated at the piano. She is dark—young—oh, she is very beautiful! She keeps on looking at the clock—the clock is on the mantelpiece between two bronze statuettes. She is expecting somebody——”
“Yes?” said the doctor, crouching over her, his fists clenched in a spasm of supremely willed self-control, his breath coming in the quick gasps enforced by that tumultuous beating of the heart he could not command.
“Yes?—Go on!”
“She hears a footstep—she jumps up from the piano. A man comes into the room—a civilian. She throws her arms about him and kisses him. She leads him across to the mantelpiece and takes up the clock. She puts it into his hands—she is showing him something on the back of it, something written! They kiss again. They are in love these two—how she loves him! I can feel that—I can feel her love vibrating in me!” She paused dreamily. “I know what real love is—and she loves him like that——”
“The man?” asked the doctor, his eyes wild. “The man?—describe him!”
“His back is turned to me—I cannot see his face. Ah, he turns round. The man is—you!”
The doctor looked as though he were going to collapse. His companions watched him, fascinated, completely mystified, trying to guess at the drama their ignorance of the language hid from them. He mastered himself with a mighty effort.
“Yes,” he said. “You have the place right—but not the time. Go on a year—more than a year! Go on to the time when this clock passed out of that woman’s possession!”
“More than a year!” she repeated dreamily. “I—I must sleep—I cannot——” She was silent for a few moments. “Yes—yes—I see the room again. The young woman is in it. She is seated at a little table—writing. She looks up—Oh, how sad and pale she is!—but she is still very beautiful. I am so sorry for her—she is so unhappy—and she is still in love, I can still feel it vibrating in me. She is picking up a photograph—she kisses it—it is yours!—she kisses it again and again. Why are you not with her? I feel that you are a great distance off—she does not know where you are. That worries her, because she loves you so.” She stopped.
“Go on,” said the doctor sternly. “What do you see next?”
“She puts away her writing hurriedly. She is frightened of something—someone is coming, I think—yes! The door opens—a soldier—no, a German officer! Oh, she is frightened of him, but she is brave! She stands up as he comes toward her. She draws back from him—he is between her and the door. He puts out his hands, tries to hold her—Ach!” her voice rose to a scream, “it is Heinrich!”
“Go on!” commanded the doctor. “Go on!What do you see?” His voice was terrible in its inexorability.
“Oh no, no!” she whispered. “No! Don’t makeme see! don’t make me see! I don’t want to—I don’t want to—Ach, Heinrich, Heinrich!” Her voice came on a note of anguish. “I cannot bear it!”
The doctor frowned at the rigid figure with closed eyes that began to sway slightly to and fro upon its chair. Her face was drawn with a suffering beyond expression.
“See!” he commanded. “And tell me what you see!”
“Oh!” she moaned, “you are cruel—cruel! I do not want to see! I do not want to look!”
“You must!”
“Oh!” Evidently she surrendered helplessly. She commenced in a fatigued, dreary voice: “They are there together—the two of them! That beautiful woman—oh, I hate her now, I hate her!—Ach, Heinrich, have you forgotten me?” It was as if she called to him. “He does not hear me. His eyes are fixed on the woman.” She continued in short panting sentences uttered with increasing horror. “She is retreating from him—further and further back. He is following her. Oh, something terrible is going to happen—it is in the air—I feel it—something horrible!—What?—Ah,he is trying to kiss her!My Heinrich! Oh, how dreadful, how dreadful!—Oh, don’t make me see any more—don’t make me see any more!—He has got her in his arms—she is struggling. Oh, I can’t look—I will not look!—Oh, Heinrich, and I loved you so!” Her voice fell from the scream of a nightmare to a plaintive moaning. “Oh, no more—no more! I can bear no more!”
“Look!—Look to the very end!”
The doctor’s comrades shuddered at his aspect as he crouched over her, seeming as though he were trying to peer with her eyes into some scene of horror they could not even imagine.
The young woman’s face was a mask of agony.
“Oh, you torture me,” she moaned, “you torture me—I see, and I do not want to see—oh, I do not want to see——”
“What do you see?”
“They are struggling together!—She fights desperately—what a wild cat she is! He is pinning her arms to her sides with his embrace—she throws her head back, back, to escape him. Ah! She has broken away! She runs to the table.What is she going to do?” The seer’s voice rose in acute alarm. “Ach, a revolver! Oh, no, no!” The ejaculation was a vehement and agonized protest. “Heinrich!Oh, leave her—leave her!—No, he laughs at her as he follows—and she is so desperate. Ah, he has got her up in a corner—he has seized her again—she is crying out—it is a name—she cries it again and again——”
“What name?”
“I hear it!Jules!—Jules!—that is it—Jules!Oh, what a tone of despair!”
The doctor closed his eyes and swayed. Then, mastering himself with a superhuman effort, he said hoarsely:
“Go on!—To the end!”
“I cannot see plainly—they are struggling still.Ach!the revolver!She has fired!I see the thin smoke in the air.—What has happened? He has her in his arms—he stumbles with her.—Ach, she is dead!She has shot herself. He stretches her out on the floor—he is bending over her—Ach,Heinrich,Heinrich, you have broken my heart!” She wailed as if from the depths of a wretchedness beyond all solace. “You have killed my love for ever! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you as long as I live—I hate myself for having loved you!Faithless, despicable brute!”
She finished in a tone of fierce vindictiveness, a resentment, at once horrified and implacable, of unforgivable wrong.
But the doctor no longer heeded her. Hands to his brow, eyes closed, he reeled away from her.
“Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” he groaned. “Marcelle, Marcelle! How shall I avenge you?”
He glanced at the now silent and still rigid figure of the young woman. Tears were trickling down her cheeks from the closed eyes. Her trance was unbroken. She sat still nursing the clock.
Then, with a deep breath, he drew himself erect. The jaw that expressed his powerful will set hard again. His two companions looked with horror upon the dreadful pallor of that face from which two fierce eyes blazed. A little laugh from him. It was a sickening mockery of mirth.
“Mes amis!” he said. “You asked me a little time ago what I thought of the policy of reprisals. I ask you that question now. That young woman, in a hypnotic trance, has just described to me, as though she had seen it acted before her eyes, the suicide of my wife. She killed herself rather than be outraged by that woman’s husband. In her waking life the young woman is, of course, totally ignorant of the event. In her waking life she adores the memory of her dead husband as of a perfect and faithful lover. Now, in her hypnotic state, she loathes him—her love has turned to bitter jealous hatred. She despises him. In fact, she feels toward him just as she would have felt had she witnessed the scene that destroyed my life’s happiness. It rests with me to call her back to waking life, totally ignorant of her husband’s crime, adoring him as before—or to leave her in an agony of shattered love. Virtually, her husband murdered my wife. Her memory of him is the only thing that I can touch. Shall I leave it sacred? Or shall I, justly, kill it?—What do you say?—It is a pretty little problem in reprisals for you!”
His comrades stared at him in horrified astonishment.
“But,” cried the battalion-commander, “are you sure——”
“Look at her!” replied the doctor.
The young woman still sat rigidly upright. Her face was drawn with anguish. Heavy tears rolled ceaselesslyfrom under the closed eyelids. She sobbed quietly in a far-off kind of way that was nevertheless eloquent of an immense despair.
“She sees what happened——?” queried the captain in an incredulous and puzzled tone.
“Three years ago. She is looking at it now,” asserted the doctor. “She sees her husband bending over my dead wife.—Come,messieurs, let me have your verdict!” He seemed to be experiencing a grim, unhuman enjoyment at their evident recoil from the terrible problem he offered them. “I must wake her soon!”
“And if she wakes—knowing——?” faltered the captain.
“She will probably kill herself. She has been living in an intense love for the idealized memory of her husband. The revulsion will be overwhelming.”
The battalion-commander interposed.
“But,mon cher—a suicide—that goes beyond——”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“Her husband drovemywife to suicide——”
“It is terribly logical,” murmured the young captain, “but,” he glanced at the unconscious figure in its mysterious and awful grief, “one needs to be God to indulge in logic to that point.”
“And yet we are but men,” said the doctor, “and the problem is there before us—must be solved at once! In my place, what would you do?”
The battalion-commander rose. He went up to his comrade and looked him in the eyes.
“Mon cher,” he said solemnly, “God forbid that I should ever be in your place! I do not know.”
The doctor turned to the young man. There was a terrible smile on his lips.
“And you,mon cher Jordan?”
The captain rose also. He also read the hell in the doctor’s eyes. He shook his head and shuddered.
“Mon ami,” he replied, “I should go mad.”
The doctor nodded grimly.
“The terrible thing is that I cannot go mad,” he said. “I am still sane.—So you both decline the problem?”
The two officers shook their heads, not trusting themselves to speech.
The doctor turned away from them and covered his face with both hands. He reeled to the mantelpiece, leaned against it. They saw his body shake in the intensity of the nervous crisis which swept over him.
“Marcelle!” he cried. “Marcelle!—if you are a living spirit, counsel me! Shall I avenge?”
The watchers turned to the entranced woman as though involuntarily expecting a reply through her from that mysterious region where her soul was in touch with the long-past tragedy she had revealed. She still wept silently in that awful sleep which was no sleep. But no word passed her lips. Only the clock she held upon her lap struck one silvery note, marking the half-hour.
At the sound the doctor turned from the fireplace and took up the clock. He gazed, with a passionate intensity, upon the inscription on the back.
“Marcelle!” he murmured. “Our love ceases not when time itself shall cease! Though you are dead, that still lives—thatwas not murdered!—I understand,ma bien-aimée, I understand!”
He put the clock gently upon the mantelpiece and turned once more to the rigid, waiting figure. His comrades watched him, spell-bound, keying themselves to deduce his decision from the tone of his voice when he should speak. His stern face was set in an unfaltering resolve they could not penetrate. He lifted her hand.
“Gnädige Frau,” he said, and the level, passionless voice gave no hint to those ignorant of the language of the purport of the German words which followed, “when you wake from this sleep you will entirely forget the hideous dream through which you have passed. You will never remember it, waking or asleep. You will think of your husband as you have always thought of him—faithful and loving. You will completely resume your normallife. You will not even be aware that you have slept. It will seem to you as if you had only just sat down in this chair. But when you wake you will present me with the clock upon the mantelpiece. You will feel an overmastering impulse to do this, and you will obey it.—Now,” he wiped the tears from her face and blew sharply upon her closed eyelids, “wake!”
The two officers watched her, fascinated. Would she shriek? What terrible paroxysm would be the expression of a heart-broken despair? Or had he——? They held their breath.
Her eyelids flickered for a moment, and then, with one deep sigh, her eyes opened. She smiled round on them.
“Meine Herren?” she said in her voice of timid enquiry. Then, fixing her eyes on the doctor, “You sent for me?”
The doctor looked at her gravely.
“The Commandant desired me to assure you,gnädige Frau, that you need be under no apprehensions during our stay here. We consider ourselves the guests of a charming lady and we hope to leave only a pleasant memory behind us.”
His companions marvelled at the strength of will which could enforce so complete a normality of voice and feature.
The German woman smiled up at him, a pathetic little smile.
“You are very kind, Herr Doctor—please convey my thanks to the Commandant.” She made a little movement which drew attention to her black dress. “My—my husband in heaven, if he can see you, will—will bless you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Please excuse me!” she said with a pretty little gesture of apology, “his memory is all I have—I cannot help bringing him into every act of my life.”
“Love need not cease with death,gnädige Frau,” replied the doctor. “One hopes that those we loved still watch over us—though we cannot see them.”
She smiled again.
“He had no thought but of me, Herr Doctor, and I have none but of him.—I see you understand,” she finished in a tone of involuntary sympathy. “You also have loved?”
“Ja, gnädige Frau,” he replied with a grave and enigmatic smile. “I also.”
Her eyes went past him to the mantelpiece, rested with a curiously fixed expression on the clock. Suddenly, as though moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she jumped up, took the clock from the mantelpiece and thrust it into the doctor’s hands.
“Please accept this!” she said appealingly.
The doctor fixed his grave eyes upon her.
“Why?” he asked.
She stammered, evidently at a loss for her reason.
“Because—because I want you to have it—because I feel, I do not know why, that you have protected me from something——” She stopped, puzzled by her own words. “That is absurd, I know!” she exclaimed. “But it belonged to two lovers, Herr Doctor—you, who understand love, will value it, I know. I—I feel yououghtto have it!”
She left him standing with it. Then she turned to the other officers with her appealing little smile and bowed slightly in farewell.
“Gute Nacht, meine Herren!” she said, and went out of the room.
The doctor stared after her, his face deathly white. Suddenly his body broke and crumpled. He sank down to his knees by one of the chairs, still clasping the clock in his hands.
“Marcelle!” he cried, his head bowed over his recovered love-token, his body shaking, “Marcelle! have I done right?—have I done right?”
The battalion-commander touched his subordinate on the shoulder. Both tip-toed silently out of the room.
[1]“To Jules, to mark the hours of a love which will not cease when Time itself shall cease, from his Marcelle.”
“But,Excellenz——!” The entreaty, from such a man, was oddly and strikingly sincere. About forty years of age, sprucely dressed in a well-cut lounge suit, spats over patent boots, he was the type to be seen any day gazing rather aimlessly into the shop-windows of Piccadilly or the Rue de la Paix, the type that haunts the hotels frequented by the best society and yet is not of that society, the type that drifts behind the chairs of every gambling casino in the world. A dark moustache, carefully trimmed, curled over lips whose fine curves were unpleasantly thin and clear-cut. His complexion was sallow; his dark eyes, fixed on his companion in an accentuation of his entreaty, implored now with an expression of genuine truthfulness which was certainly not habitual to them. He gesticulated with a white and exquisitely manicured hand.
“But rubbish!” The speaker was an oldish, thick-set man in evening dress. His round red face, barred with a clipped white moustache, with a pair of small gray eyes vivacious behind pince-nez, was set upon a short apoplectic neck which rucked into folds above his collar. The scalp showed pink through close-cropped white hair. He stood warming himself with his back to the fire—a very large fire for Berlin in the winter of early 1918—and glared angrily at the young man. He spoke with the irascibility of a brutal superior whose impunity is of long date and unquestioned.
“Are you mad, Kranz? Do you take me for an imbecile old woman? Am I feeble-minded—do Ilookfeeble-minded—that you should dare to—to play sucha trick upon me?” He was obviously working himself up into one of his official rages. “You—you tell me that you have an infallible means for obtaining secret information, no matter how hidden. You persuade me to come and test it—me!I give you credit for your impudence!—and this is what it is!” He almost choked with offended dignity. “Be careful, Kranz! You have traded this once upon your record with us—you will never do it again! To bring me—me!—to this absurdity!—to expect me to listen to the hypnotic ravings of that idiot girl! I wonder you didn’t offer me crystal-gazing!”
“But,Excellenz——!”
The old man waved a hand at him.
“My dear Kranz,” he said, dropping suddenly into a tone of tolerant contempt. “I forgive you this once. I daresay you have been the victim of a genuine hallucination. You would not have dared else.—You don’t drug, do you?” The question was asked with a disconcertingly sudden sharpness. The younger man made a gesture of emphatic denial, defying the piercing gray eyes that probed him. The old man grunted. “Keep your sanity, Kranz—or the Bureau will lose a valued servant. Drop this nonsense. I know what I am talking about—I studied psychology under Wundt of Jena. The whole thing is a hallucination—the raving of the dream-self released from control—dummes Zeug!—Give me my coat!”
“Excellenz, I implore you!”
The old man looked at him with a snarl of savage mockery.
“Don’t waste any more of my time, Kranz! Look at her—is it even probable that an imbecile creature like that can be of use in our business? Look at her, I say!”
He flung out a hand toward a young girl who stood with obvious reluctance in the centre of the luxuriously furnished apartment. She was perhaps eighteen but her youth had neither beauty nor charm. Her features were soft and heavy; the nose thick; the chin receding;the eyes weak and protuberant. Unmistakably, her personality was of the feeblest. Her face flooded scarlet with shame and her eyes swam with tears at this brutal insult. Yet evidently she did not dare to rush away. Only she looked beseechingly toward Kranz, like a dog who awaits a sign from its master.
His sallow face blanched. The thin lips under the dark moustache lost their curves, became a straight line.
“Agathe!” he said, and his voice of command was strangely in contrast with the tone in which he had entreated the old man. “Go into the next room and wait!”
The girl vanished without a word. Kranz waited until she had closed the door, and then he turned once more to his superior.
“I implore Your Excellency to listen!” he said with a desperate gesture. “I stake my reputation upon it——”
The old man grunted scornfully.
“Your reputation!”
The dark eyes flashed.
“My reputation with you,Excellenz,” he corrected in a gentle voice of complete cynicism.
The old man stared at him.
“Well, go on!” he said brutally, after a short pause which was eloquent of his appraisement. He cleaned his pince-nez to mark his contemptuous indifference to anything that might be said.
“You remember Karl Wertheimer,Excellenz?”
The old man swung round on him, replaced the pince-nez.
“Shot by the English.—You’ll never equal him, Kranz.”
Kranz shrugged his shoulders.
“Excellenz, I believe neither in God nor Devil—until the other day I believed that death finished us completely—but I assure you solemnly upon my—upon anything which you think will bind me—that the soul, or whatever you choose to call it, of Karl Wertheimer speaks through that girl!” There was a pause of silence in which theold man’s eyes probed him to the depths. He proffered no comment and Kranz continued, his voice intensely earnest. “The English shot Karl Wertheimer in London—but they did not kill him. His—his soul is here, in Berlin, in this room, alive as ever, as eager as ever to work for the Fatherland!”
“He always had patriotic notions,” murmured the old man, with a sly smile at the obviously cosmopolitan Kranz, “—that is why he was such an invaluable agent. Go on with your little romance.”
“It is no romance,Excellenz, I assure you—it is living fact. Karl Wertheimer was a useful agent while he lived upon this earth—but he is immeasurably more useful now that he is a—a spirit. There are no walls that can keep him out—there is nothing he cannot see if he chooses to—there is no conversation he cannot overhear——”
“H’m!” grunted the old man, “admitted that if he is a spirit he can do all this—how can he communicate it to us?”
“Through this girl!”
“Who is she, this girl?”
“The daughter of some shopkeeper or other. I followed her ankles one evening in the Park—it was night, and I could not see her face.” He smiled cynically. “I won’t trouble Your Excellency with the details. I brought her in here and no sooner had she sat down in that chair when she swooned off. I was just cursing my luck—I saw her face for the first time then!—and wondering how I was going to get rid of her,when Karl spoke to me. I confess,Excellenz, it gave me a pretty bad turn. It was so utterly unexpected—his voice coming from her lips. However, I pulled myself together—and we had a most interesting conversation——”
“He could answer your questions?” interjected the old man, sharply.
“Just as if he were himself sitting in the chair. So, naturally, I kept a tight hold on the girl. She has not been allowed out since.”
“H’m!” The old man grunted again and looked at his watch. “Well, I have missed my appointment,” he said with the factitious bad temper he owed to his dignity. “I may as well see her performance. Fetch her in!”
Kranz went to the door and called.
“Agathe!”
The girl entered, stood with her eyes fixed timorously on him. He pointed to a large armchair by the fireplace.
“Sit down!” he commanded. The girl obeyed dully, one little apprehensive glance at him the only sign of any mental life in her. She sat upright, her hands on her lap, staring stupidly into the fire. Two heavy tears collected themselves in her protuberant eyes rolled down her cheeks. They seemed but to emphasize her degradation. Her tyrant stood over her, his dark eyes hard.
“Lean back and go to sleep!”
She sank back among the cushions. Obviously, she had no will at all of her own. Her eyes closed. Her expressionless face twitched for a moment and then was as still as a mask. Her bosom heaved in the commencement of deep and heavy breathing which continued in the normality of slumber. The old man watched her, keenly and contemptuously alert for any sign of simulation.
Kranz pulled a little table across to the fireplace. A telephone instrument, incongruously utilitarian in this luxurious room, and writing materials were on it.
“You should note down what is said,Excellenz,” he said earnestly, in a low voice.
The old man ignored him, his eyes on the girl. Suddenly he shuddered in a rush of cold air. The paper on the table fluttered as in a draught. He turned to Kranz in savage irritation.
“Shut that window!”
Kranz shook his head.
“They are all shut,Excellenz!” His whisper was one of genuine awe. “Hush! It’s beginning!He’s come!”
The old man favoured him with a glance of inexpressible contempt. The scorn was still in his eyes when he jerked round to the girl again in an involuntary start of surprise at a sudden greeting.
“Good evening,Excellenz!” The words issued from that expressionless mask of the deeply breathing girl, but they were uttered in a tone of easy jocularity, followed by a little good-humoured laugh, which was uncanny in its contrast with her degraded personality. Despite the feminine vocal chords which had articulated the phrase, thetimbreand intonation were vividly those of a man of the world.
The old man stared speechlessly. His faculties seemed inhibited under the shock. The red faded out of his round face, left it ashen gray under the close-cropped white hair. Kranz, watching him narrowly, feared for his heart. He made a brusque little gesture as though seizing control of himself.
“Herr Gott!It’s—it’shisvoice!” he gasped.
His eyes turned to Kranz and there was fear in them, a primitive fear of the supernatural. Trembling, he reeled rather than walked to the chair by the table with the telephone, dropped heavily into it. Kranz broke the oppressive silence, posed himself as master of the situation.
“Good evening,Karl!” he said as though welcoming an everyday acquaintance into the room.
“Hallo, Kranz!” came the easy, jocular voice through the lips of the entranced girl. “Wie gehts?I am glad you persuaded His Excellency to come. Now we can start!”
The old man pulled himself together, moistened his lips for speech.
“Is—is that really you, Karl?” he asked, unevenly.
The merry little laugh, so uncanny from the only origin visible, preceded the answer.
“Really I,Excellenz—Karl Wertheimer, shot six months ago by the English in the Tower of London, andas alive in this room as ever I was.” The tone changed to that of a humorously bantering introduction. “Karl Wertheimer,Excellenz, the terror of the English counterespionage department, at your service—still!”
The old man fumblingly produced a handkerchief and mopped at the perspiration on his brow. He hesitated for an appropriate remark.
“Why——?” he asked falteringly, and stopped.
The merry little laugh rang out again in the silent room.
“Why,Excellenz? Because in my earth-life I had only one passion—and it is as strong as ever it was.Stronger, for I owe our enemies a grudge for that little early-morning shooting party in the Tower. You’ve no idea how I long for a really good cigar,Excellenz,” he finished in a tone of jesting complaint.
The old man stared into the empty air beyond the girl.
“And you can really obtain information and convey it?” He was recovering his poise. The question was asked in the brusque tone familiar to his subordinates.
“Test me,Excellenz!”
“I assure you,Excellenz——!” interjected Kranz, eagerly.
His superior waved him aside. The brow under the short white hair had recovered its normal ruddiness, was wrinkled in cogitation. He felt in his pocket and produced a letter in a sealed envelope.
“Tell me from whom this comes,” he said.
He proffered the letter as though expecting it to be taken out of his fingers. Then, as it was not, he dropped his hand with a gesture of hopeless bafflement. There was so real a feeling of the actual presence of Karl Wertheimer in the room that the quite normal fact of the letter remaining untouched emphasized suddenly the uncanny nature of this conversation.
“Permit me,Excellenz,” said Kranz, politely. He took the letter and laid it on the girl’s brow. Her lips moved at once.
“This purports to be from the firm of Wilson andStaunton, Boston, to the firm of Jensen and Auerstedt, Christiania, with reference to an overdue account.” The voice was still the chuckling voice of Karl Wertheimer. “Actually, it is a communication in code to you from Heinrich Biedermann at New York. Do you wish me to read the message? I still remember the old code,Excellenz!”
“No—no!” interposed the old man. “Never mind!”
“Perhaps you would like me to tell you what Heinrich Biedermann is doing at this moment,Excellenz?”
“But he is in New York! You can’t be here and there, too!”
Again came the merry little laugh.
“Time and Space are an illusion of matter,Excellenz. I half forget that you are still subject to it.—Well, Heinrich Biedermann is sitting with a young woman in a restaurant, having tea. They are both very cheerful, for he has just received a remittance from you, and he has bought her a new hat. The sun is setting and he is lost in admiration of the glow of her red hair against the background of the illuminated sky which he can perceive through the window. He is hopelessly in love with her, which is unfortunate, as the lady happens to be a spy, by name Desirée Rochefort, in the pay of the French Secret Service.”
“The devil——!” ejaculated the old man.
“But,” said Kranz in a puzzled tone. “Sunset?—It is nearly midnight!”
The old man turned on him.
“Fool! There is a difference of six hours in time between here and America. That proves it—if anything can be proof of such wild improbability!”
“Test me again!” said the amused and confident voice of Karl Wertheimer. “Something really difficult this time!”
The old man leaned back in his chair and pondered. Then the gleam of an idea came into his malicious gray eyes.
“Right!” he said, emphatically. “You know the library in my house?”
“Certainly,Excellenz!”
“Go into my library. Read me the fifteenth line of the ninety-first page of the sixth volume on the third shelf of the right-hand side, without opening the book. Can you do that?”
“You shall see,Excellenz,” replied the voice, cheerfully. “The sixth volume counting from the left, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“I will note that,” said Kranz, coming to the table. He wrote the particulars and looked up to his superior. “Do you know what the line is,Excellenz?” he asked.
“I don’t even know what the book is!” replied the old man, harshly. He wrinkled his brows in impatience at the silence, which prolonged itself through several seconds. The girl seemed quite normally asleep.
“Here you are,Excellenz!” It was again the mocking voice of Karl Wertheimer which issued from her lips. “The book is Shakespeare. The line is ‘England, bound in with the triumphant sea.’ Can you interpret the omen,Excellenz?”
“The U-boat war——” murmured Kranz, as if to himself.
“Write it down!” commanded the old man. Kranz wrote the line.
His Excellency took up the telephone receiver.
“Hallo! Hallo!” He gave a number and waited. “Hallo! Is Wolff there?—Tell him I want him at once! Yes—a thousand devils!—Wolff! my secretary! Are you all deaf?” he vociferated irascibly. “Hallo! Is that you, Wolff? Yes, of course it is I speaking! You ought to know my voice by this time!—Go into the library and get—” He hesitated. Kranz passed him the sheet of paper “—get the sixth volume from the left on the third shelf of the right-hand side. Bring it to the telephone. Hurry now!”
Again he waited. There was a tense silence in theroom, a silence which was emphasized by the heavy and regular breathing of the sleeping girl.
“Hallo! Are you there?—Is that you, Wolff? Be quiet! Answer my questions!—Have you got the book?—Right—What is it?—An English book?—Shakespeare—right!—Now turn up page—page ninety-one. Got it?—Count to the fifteenth line——” He turned from the telephone to Kranz. “Write down what I repeat!” Then again speaking into the telephone: “Yes? Read out the line!—what?—‘England, bound in with the triumphant sea’—a thousand devils!—Wolff! Wolff! wait a minute!—where did you find the book? On the shelf? Had it been touched? You are sure that it had not been touched—not opened? Oh, you have been in the library all the evening, working——”
“Tell him that the love-poem he has been writing to Fräulein Mimi in your library to-night is not only banal but it does not scan,” interjected the mocking voice of Karl Wertheimer. “The line ‘Unsere Herzen schlagen rhythmisch’ is particularly bad.”
The old man glanced toward the vacant air over the girl and grinned. He repeated the message into the telephone. He waited a moment—and then burst into chuckling laughter.
“Famos!—He’s smashed the receiver. Scared out of his life!—I heard him yell.” He put down the instrument and turned again to the chair. “Karl Wertheimer, I believe in your reality—I believe in your powers.” His voice was solemn. “The Fatherland has work for you to do.”
“That is why I am here,Excellenz.” The voice came jauntily through the expressionless lips of the unconscious girl.
The old man pursed his mouth under the clipped white moustache and pondered. Kranz watched him with acute interest.
“Listen!” said the old man, looking up in a sudden decision. “At the present time the Allied MilitaryMissions in Washington are negotiating with the United States Government with regard to the despatch of the American Army to Europe, for the coming campaign. We know this—we know that any day now they may come to an agreement. It is of the utmost importance to us that we should know,immediately, the numbers promised and the schedule of sailings. The fate of the world depends upon it. The secret will be most jealously guarded—triply locked out of reach of any ordinary agent. Can you read it, as you read the line in that closed book?”
“I can,Excellenz—if you can give me some indication where to look,” replied the voice. “We must, so to speak,focusourselves—I can’t now explain the conditions with us, but you will understand what I mean—spirit pervades——” For the first time in the colloquy the voice spoke with hesitation, as though despairing of explaining the inexplicable. “Direction—definite direction—is essential——”
“H’m,” the old man grunted. “Well, I suggest Forsdyke—you know, the permanent Chief of Department—as the man most likely to prepare the schedule. You know where he lives?”
“The very house in Washington!” replied the voice triumphantly. “Good enough! I will do my best,Excellenz.”
“To-day is the 21st of February,” said the old man. “Wemustknow by the end of the month. Vast issues depend on it. Can you do it?”
“I will try.” The voice came feebly and as from far away. “I must go now,Excellenz—the power—the power is failing—fast. Good-bye—good-bye, Kranz—take—take care of the girl—she—she is the—only means—of—communication——” The last words came in a whisper, ceased. The girl appeared to be in normal slumber.
The old man turned to Kranz, spoke out of preoccupation which otherwise ignored him.
“Give me my hat and coat!”
A sudden anxiety paled the sallow face.
“Your Excellency remembers what Karl said,” he murmured as he assisted his chief into the heavy fur-lined garment.—“The girl is the only means of communication. I need not remind Your Excellency that the girl is my——”
“You need not remind me of anything, Kranz,” interrupted the old man, harshly. “You will not be forgotten. Good-night!”
Kranz accompanied him obsequiously to the door.
* * * * *
On that evening of the 21st of February a cheerful little party was assembled around the dinner-table of Henry Forsdyke, Chief of a certain department in the United States Administration. The large room, which had been built by a Southern magnate who led Washington society in pre-Civil War days, was illumined only by the shaded lights of the table, and beyond the dazzling shirt-fronts of the men it lapsed into a gloom that was intensified by the dark curtains over the long windows and was scarcely relieved by the glinting gilt frames of the pictures spaced on the walls hung in a dull tint. In that half-light the servants moved, scarcely real. Only the party within the illuminated oval of white napery, sparkling glass, and gleaming silver was vividly actual, plucked out of shadow. It was a fad of the host’s, this concentration of the light upon the table. He alleged that it emphasized the personalities of his guests. His daughter, who was irreverent, accused him of an atavistic tendency that craved for the candle-light of his ancestors.
Within the magic oval the party exchanged light-hearted talk that effervesced every now and then into merry laughter where a young girl’s voice predominated. All were in evident good spirits. The host himself, a man of between fifty and sixty years, with shrewd gray eyes looking out of a face characterized by a pointed and neatly clipped iron-gray beard, set the tone. He smileddown the table with a contentment that seemed to spring from a secret satisfaction, the contentment of a man who has completed an anxious and difficult task and can now relax. He was in his best vein of sententious humour.
The same undertone of relief could have been discerned by the acute in the gaiety of young Jimmy Lomax, Forsdyke’s private secretary, although one alone of the little glances between him and his host’s daughter, if intercepted, might have seemed sufficient reason.
Captain Sergeantson, Jimmy Lomax’s chum, had obvious cause for cheerfulness. Attached to a Special Service Department, he had just returned from Europe, where he had fulfilled an extremely difficult mission with conspicuous success. His home-coming had provided the excuse for this little dinner-party.
As for Professor Lomax, Jimmy’s father, no one had ever seen him other than in high spirits. The author—after a lifetime of profound and exact scientific research that had earned him a world-wide reputation—of an enquiry into the possible survival of human personality, which was the controversial topic of that winter and which threatened to deprive him of that reputation, he was in striking contrast with the idea of him propagated by the sensational Press. There was nothing of the visionary about those clear-cut features. A stranger would have diagnosed him as a lawyer—a lawyer whose judicial perception of evidence was clarified by a sense of humour. The mobile mouth, even in silence, hinted at this latter quality. The eyes twinkled, eminently sane, under a well-balanced brow. He joked like a schoolboy with his host’s daughter, exciting—for the secretly selfish pleasure of hearing it—her gay young laugh. Occasionally he glanced across to his son, approbation in his eyes.
Hetty Forsdyke, the only woman of the party, was a typical specimen of self-reliant, college-bred American girl. Good to look upon, her beauty hinted at a race which had been proud of its exclusiveness long after Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the States. Her vivacityand charm had roots, perhaps, in the same stock, but the cool, level-headed understanding of life, which she expressed in a slang that provoked her father to vain rebuke, and the genuineness of which was vouched for by her clear gray eyes, was an attribute of the Forsdykes and the North.
The dinner was nearly at an end. Forsdyke, launched on a story of a Presidential campaign in the Middle West a generation ago, had arrived at the stage where the chuckles of his hearers were on the point of culminating in the final burst of laughter. Hetty, her glass between her fingers, half-way to her mouth, was looking at him with a smile that pretended the story was quite new to her. Suddenly her expression changed. She stared, as if spell-bound, at the dark curtains from which her father’s oval face detached itself in the illumination of the table. The glass slipped from her fingers, smashed.
Forsdyke’s story ceased abruptly. Four pairs of alarmed eyes focussed themselves upon his daughter. Jimmy, involuntarily, had half risen from his chair. The movement seemed to recall the girl to her surroundings. She shuddered and then, with an evident effort of will, brought back her gaze to the table. Her smile routed the momentary anxiety of her companions.
“How careless of me!” she said easily, quelling, with quiet self-control, her confusion ere it could well be remarked. “I don’t know what I was thinking of!—Do go on, Poppa! It was just getting interesting.”
She signed composedly to a servant to pick up the broken glass, and settled herself, all attention, to the familiar story.
“What a hostess she is!” thought her father. “Just like——” He did not finish the complementary clause and stifled another which began: “I wonder what I shall do when——” He picked up his story again and was rewarded by his meed of laughter. But his eyes rested uneasily on his daughter and he promised himself a later enquiry into this abnormality.
The party withdrew into the drawing-room, where, since Forsdyke was a widower of many years’ masculine supremacy, the men lit their cigars. Hetty, at a request from her father, seated herself at the grand piano in the far corner, and commenced the soft chords of a Chopin prelude. Jimmy Lomax stood over her. There was already something proprietary in his air. But the girl, after one glance up at him, seemed to forget his presence in the spell of the music. Her position commanded a full view of the room and she looked dreamily across to where the three men were gathered by the white marble fireplace.
Suddenly the music stopped on a crashing discord. The girl had jumped to her feet, was trembling violently. Young Lomax clutched at her.
“Hetty! What——?”
She broke away from him, came swiftly across the room to his father.
“Professor!” she said. “You were once in practice as a doctor, weren’t you?”
The twinkling eyes went grave as they met hers. There was unmistakable seriousness in her question.
“Yes, my dear——”
“Then I want you to examine me right here, Professor!” she said. “Tell me if I’ve got fever!”
She met the amazed eyes of the other men with a look which announced that she knew her own business.
Without a word the Professor lifted up her wrist and felt her pulse. “Now show me your tongue!” She obeyed. He nodded his head, and placed his hand upon her brow. His eyes plunged into hers for one second of searching scrutiny and then he nodded his head again, satisfied. “My dear,” he said, “I haven’t a thermometer here, but I should say you are absolutely normal in every way. Your pulse is a shade rapid, perhaps.”
The girl took a long breath.
“Thank you, Professor,” she said, simply. She turnedto the others. “You heard what the Professor said? There’s no fever aboutme. Now—listen! I want to tell you something. I’ve been waiting to tell you ever since we sat down to dinner—and now Imusttell you! And you mustn’t laugh!—Poppa, this is serious!”