CHAPTER VI

Julian entered the drawing-room hurriedly a few minutes later. He glanced around quickly, conscious of a distinct feeling of disappointment. His mother, who was arranging a bridge table, called him over to her side.

“You have the air, my dear boy, of missing some one,” she remarked with a smile.

“I want particularly to speak to Miss Abbeway,” he confided.

Lady Maltenby smiled tolerantly.

“After nearly two hours of conversation at dinner! Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. She wanted a quiet place to write some letters, so I sent her into the boudoir.”

Julian hastened off, with a word of thanks. The boudoir was a small room opening from the suite which had been given to the Princess and her niece a quaint, almost circular apartment, hung with faded blue Chinese silk and furnished with fragments of the Louis Seize period,—a rosewood cabinet, in particular, which had come from Versailles, and which was always associated in Julian’s mind with the faint fragrance of two Sevres jars of dried rose leaves. The door opened almost noiselessly.

Catherine, who was seated before a small, ebony writing table, turned her head at his entrance.

“You?” she exclaimed.

Julian listened for a moment and then closed the door. She sat watching him, with the pen still in her fingers.

“Miss Abbeway,” he said, “have you heard any news this evening?”

The pen with which she had been tapping the table was suddenly motionless. She turned a little farther around.

“News?” she repeated. “No! Is there any?”

“A man was caught upon the marshes this morning and shot an hour ago. They say that he was a spy.”

She sat as though turned to stone.

“Well?”

“The military police are still hunting for his companion. They are now searching the garage here to see if they can find a small, grey, coupe car.”

This time she remained speechless, but all those ill-defined fears which had gathered in his heart seemed suddenly to come to a head. Her appearance had changed curiously during the last hour. There was a hunted, almost a desperate gleam in her eyes, a drawn look about her mouth as she sat looking at him.

“How do you know this?” she asked.

“The Colonel of the regiment stationed here has just arrived. He is down in the garage now with my father.”

“Shot!” she murmured. “Most Dieu!”

“I want to help you,” he continued.

Her eyes questioned him almost fiercely.

“You are sure?”

“I am sure.”

“You know what it means?”

“I do.”

“How did you guess the truth?”

“I remembered your mouth,” he told her. “I saw your car last night, and I traced it up the avenue this morning.”

“A mouth isn’t much to go by,” she observed, with a very wan smile.

“It happens to be your mouth,” he replied.

She rose to her feet and stood for a moment as though listening. Then she thrust her hand down into the bosom of her gown and produced a small roll of paper wrapped in a sheet of oilskin. He took it from her at once and slipped it into the breast pocket of his coat.

“You understand what you are doing?” she persisted.

“Perfectly;” he replied.

She crossed the room towards the hearthrug and stood there for a moment, leaning against the mantelpiece.

“Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.

She turned around. There was a wonderful change in her face.

“No one saw me,” she said. “I do not think that there is any one but you who could positively identify the car. Neither my aunt nor the maid who is with us has any idea that I left my room last night.”

“Your clothes?”

“Absolutely destroyed,” she assured him with a smile. “Some day I hope I’ll find courage to ask you whether you thought them becoming.”

“Some day,” he retorted, a little grimly, “I am going to have a very serious talk with you, Miss Abbeway.”

“Shall you be very stern?”

He made no response to her lighter mood. The appeal in her eyes left him colder than ever.

“I wish to save your life,” he declared, “and I mean to do it. At the same time, I cannot forget your crime or my complicity in it.”

“If you feel like that, then,” she said a little defiantly, “tell the truth. I knew the risk I was running. I am not afraid, even now. You can give me back those papers, if you like. I can assure you that the person on whom they are found will undoubtedly be shot.”

“Then I shall certainly retain possession of them,” he decided.

“You are very chivalrous, sir,” she ventured, smiling.

“I happen to be only selfish,” Julian replied. “I even despise myself for what I am doing. I am turning traitor myself, simply because I could not bear the thought of what might happen to you if you were discovered.”

“You like me, then, a little, Mr. Orden?” she asked.

“Twenty-four hours ago,” he sighed, “I had hoped to answer that question before it was asked.”

“This is very tantalising,” she murmured. “You are going to save my life, then, and afterwards treat me as though I were a leper?”

“I shall hope,” he said, “that you may have explanations—that I may find—”

She held out her hand and stopped him. Once more, for a moment, her eyes were distended, her form was tense. She was listening intently.

“There is some one coming,” she whispered—“two or three men, I think. What fools we have been! We ought to have decided—about the car.”

Her teeth came together for a moment. It was her supreme effort at self-control. Then she laughed almost naturally, lit a cigarette, and seated herself upon the arm of an easy-chair.

“You are interfering shockingly with my correspondence,” she declared, “and I am sure that they want you for bridge. Here comes Lord Maltenby to tell you so,” she added, glancing towards the door.

Lord Maltenby was very pompous, very stiff, and yet apologetic. He considered the whole affair in which he had become involved ridiculous.

“Miss Abbeway,” he said, “I beg to present to you Colonel Henderson. An unfortunate occurrence took place here last night, which it has become the duty of—er—Colonel Henderson to clear up. He wishes to ask you a question concerning—er—a motor-car.”

Colonel Henderson frowned. He stepped a little forward with the air of wishing to exclude the Earl from further speech.

“May I ask, Miss Abbeway,” he began, “whether the small coupe car, standing about a hundred yards down the back avenue, is yours?”

“It is,” she assented, with a little sigh. “It won’t go.”

“It won’t go?” the Colonel repeated.

“I thought you might know something about cars,” she explained. “They tell me that two of the sparking plugs are cracked. I am thinking of replacing them tomorrow morning, if I can get Mr. Orden to help me.”

“How long has the car been there in its present condition, then?” the Colonel enquired.

“Since about five o’clock yesterday afternoon,” she replied.

“You don’t think it possible that it could have been out on the road anywhere last night, then?”

“Out on the road!” she laughed. “Why, I couldn’t get it up to the garage! You go and look at it, Colonel, if you understand cars. Fellowes, the chauffeur here, had a look at the plugs when I brought it in, and you’ll find that they haven’t been touched.”

“I trust,” the Earl intervened, “that my chauffeur offered to do what was necessary?”

“Certainly he did, Lord Maltenby,” she assured him. “I am trying hard to be my own mechanic, though, and I have set my mind on changing those plugs myself to-morrow morning.”

“You are your own chauffeur, then, Miss Abbeway?” her inquisitor asked.

“Absolutely.”

“You can change a wheel, perhaps?”

“Theoretically I can, but as a matter of fact I have never had to do it.’”

“Your tyres,” Colonel Henderson continued, “are of somewhat unusual pattern.”

“They are Russian,” she told him. “I bought them for that reason. As a matter of fact, they are very good tyres.”

“Miss Abbeway,” the Colonel said, “I don’t know whether you are aware that my police are in search of a spy who is reported to have escaped from the marshes last night in a small motor-car which was left at a certain spot in the Salthouse road. I do not believe that there are two tyres such as yours in Norfolk. How do you account for their imprint being clearly visible along the road to a certain spot near Salthouse? My police have taken tracings of them this morning.”

Catherine remained perfectly speechless. A slow smile of triumph dawned upon her accuser’s lips. Lord Maltenby’s eyebrows were upraised as though in horror.

“Perhaps,” Julian interposed, “I can explain the tyre marks upon the road. Miss Abbeway drove me down to Furley’s cottage, where I spent the night, late in the afternoon. The marks were still there when I returned this morning, because I noticed them.”

“The same marks?” the Colonel asked, frowning.

“Without a doubt the same marks,” Julian replied. “In one place, where we skidded a little, I recognized them.”

Colonel Henderson smiled a little more naturally.

“I begin to have hopes,” he acknowledged frankly, “that I have been drawn into another mare’s nest. Nevertheless, I am bound to ask you this question, Miss Abbeway. Did you leave your room at all during last night?”

“Not unless I walked in my sleep,” she answered, “but you had better make enquiries of my aunt, and Parkins, our maid. They sleep one on either side of me.”

“You would not object,” the Colonel continued, more cheerfully still, “if my people thought well to have your things searched?”

“Not in the least,” Catherine replied coolly, “only if you unpack my trunks, I beg that you will allow my maid to fold and unfold my clothes.”

“I do not think,” Colonel Henderson said to Lord Maltenby, “that I have any more questions to ask Miss Abbeway at present.”

“In which case we will return to the drawing-room,” the Earl suggested a little stiffly. “Miss Abbeway, you will, I trust, accept my apologies for our intrusion upon you. I regret that any guest of mine should have been subjected to a suspicion so outrageous.”

Catherine laughed softly.

“Not outrageous really, dear Lord Maltenby,” she said. “I do not quite know of what I have been suspected, but I am sure Colonel Henderson would not have asked me these questions if it had not been his duty.”

“If you had not been a guest in this house, Miss Abbeway,” the Colonel assured her, with some dignity, “I should have had you arrested first and questioned afterwards.”

“You come of a race of men, Colonel Henderson, who win wars,” she declared graciously. “You know your own mind.”

“You will be joining us presently, I hope?” Lord Maltenby enquired from the door.

“In a very few minutes,” she promised.

The door closed behind them. Catherine waited for a moment, then she sank a little hysterically into a chair.

“I cannot avoid a touch of melodrama, you see,” she confessed. “It goes with my character and nationality. But seriously, now that that is over, I do not consider myself in the slightest danger. The poor fellow who was shot this morning belongs to a different order of people. He has been a spy over here since the beginning of the war.”

“And what are you?” he asked bluntly.

She laughed up in his face.

“A quite attractive young woman,” she declared,—“at least I feel sure you will think so when you know me better.”

It was about half-past ten on the following morning when Julian, obeying a stentorian invitation to enter, walked into Miles Furley’s sitting room. Furley was stretched upon the couch, smoking a pipe and reading the paper.

“Good man!” was his hearty greeting. “I hoped you’d look me up this morning.”

Julian dragged up the other dilapidated-looking easy-chair to the log fire and commenced to fill his pipe from the open jar.

“How’s the leg?” he enquired.

“Pretty nearly all right again,” Furley answered cheerfully. “Seems to me I was frightened before I was hurt. What about your head?”

“No inconvenience at all,” Julian declared, stretching himself out. “I suppose I must have a pretty tough skull.”

“Any news?”

“News enough, of a sort, if you haven’t heard it. They caught the man who sandbagged me, and who I presume sawed your plank through, and shot him last night.”

“The devil they did!” Furley exclaimed, taking his pipe from his mouth. “Shot him? Who the mischief was he, then?”

“It appears,” Julian replied, “that he was a German hairdresser, who escaped from an internment camp two years ago and has been at large ever since, keeping in touch, somehow or other, with his friends on the other side. He must have known the game was up as soon as he was caught. He didn’t even attempt any defence.”

“Shot, eh?” Furley repeated, relighting his pipe. “Serves him damned well right!”

“You think so, do you?” Julian remarked pensively.

“Who wouldn’t? I hate espionage. So does every Englishman. That’s why we are such duffers at the game, I suppose.”

Julian watched his friend with a slight frown.

“How in thunder did you get mixed up with this affair, Furley?” he asked quietly.

Furley’s bewilderment was too natural to be assumed. He removed his pipe from his teeth and stared at his friend.

“What the devil are you driving at, Julian?” he demanded. “I can assure you that I went out, the night before last, simply to make one of the rounds which falls to my lot when I am in this part of the world and nominated for duty. There are eleven of us between here and Sheringham, special constables of a humble branch of the secret service, if you like to put it so. We are a well-known institution amongst the initiated. I’ve plodded these marshes sometimes from midnight till daybreak, and although one’s always hearing rumours, until last night I have never seen or heard of a single unusual incident.”

“You had no idea, then,” Julian persisted, “what it was that you were on the look-out for the night before last? You had no idea, say, from any source whatever, that there was going to be an attempt on the part of the enemy to communicate with friends on this side?”

“Good God, no! Even to have known it would have been treason.”

“You admit that?”

Furley drew himself stiffly up in his chair. His mass of brown hair seemed more unkempt than usual, his hard face sterner than ever by reason of its disfiguring frown.

“What the hell do you mean, Julian?”

“I mean,” Julian replied, “that I have reason to suspect you, Furley, of holding or attempting to hold secret communication with an enemy country.”

The pipestem which he was holding snapped in Furley’s fingers. His eyes were filled with fury.

“Damn you, Julian!” he exclaimed. “If I could stand on two legs, I’d break your head. How dare you come here and talk such rubbish.”

“Isn’t there some truth in what I have just said?” Julian asked sternly.

“Not a word.”

Julian was silent for a moment. Furley was sitting upright upon the sofa, his keen eyes aglint with anger.

“I am waiting for an explanation, Julian,” he announced.

“You shall have it,” was the prompt reply. “The companion of the man who was shot, for whom the police are searching at this moment, is a guest in my father’s house. I have had to go to the extent of lying to save her from detection.”

“Her?” Furley gasped.

“Yes! The youth in fisherman’s oilskins, into whose hands that message passed last night, is Miss Catherine Abbeway. The young lady has referred me to you for some explanation as to its being in her possession.”

Furley remained absolutely speechless for several moments. His first expression was one of dazed bewilderment. Then the light broke in upon him. He began to understand. When he spoke, all the vigour had left his tone.

“You’ll have to let me think about this for a moment, Julian,” he said.

“Take your own time. I only want an explanation.”

Furley recovered himself slowly. He stretched out his hand towards the pipe rack, filled another pipe and lit it. Then he began.

“Julian,” he said, “every word that I have spoken to you about the night before last is the truth. There is a further confession, however, which under the circumstances I have to make. I belong to a body of men who are in touch with a similar association in Germany, but I have no share in any of the practical doings—the machinery, I might call it—of our organisation. I have known that communications have passed back and forth, but I imagined that this was done through neutral countries. I went out the night before last as an ordinary British citizen, to do my duty. I had not the faintest idea that there was to be any attempt to land a communication here, referring to the matters in which I am interested. I should imagine that the proof, of my words lies in the fact that efforts were made to prevent my reaching my beat, and that you, my substitute, whom I deliberately sent to take my place, were attacked.”

“I accept your word so far,” Julian said. “Please go on.”

“I am an Englishman and a patriot,” Furley continued, “just as much as you are, although you are a son of the Earl of Maltenby, and you fought in the war. You must listen to me without prejudice. There are thoughtful men in England, patriots to the backbone, trying to grope their way to the truth about this bloody sacrifice. There are thoughtful men in Germany on the same tack. If, for the betterment of the world, we should seek to come into touch with one another, I do not consider that treason, or communicating with an enemy country in the ordinary sense of the word.”

“I see,” Julian muttered. “What you are prepared to plead guilty to is holding communication with members of the Labour and Socialist Party in Germany.”

“I plead guilty to nothing,” Furley answered, with a touch of his old fierceness. “Don’t talk like your father and his class, Julian. Get away from it. Be yourself. Your Ministers can’t end the war. Your Government can’t. They opened their mouth too wide at first. They made too many commitments. Ask Stenson. He’ll tell you that I’m speaking the truth. So it goes on, and day by day it costs the world a few hundred or a few thousand human lives, and God knows how much of man’s labour and brains, annihilated, wasted, blown into the air! Somehow or other the war has got to stop, Julian. If the politicians won’t do it, the people must.”

“The people,” Julian repeated a little sadly. “Rienzi once trusted in the people.”

“There’s a difference,” Furley protested. “Today the people are all right, but the Rienzi isn’t here—My God!”

He broke off suddenly, pursuing another train of thought. He leaned forward.

“Look here,” he said, “we’ll talk about the fate of that communication later. What about Miss Abbeway?”

“Miss Abbeway,” Julian told him, “was in imminent danger last night of arrest as a spy. Against my principles and all my convictions, I have done my best to protect her against the consequences of her ridiculous and inexcusable conduct. I don’t know anything about your association, Furley, but I consider you a lot of rotters to allow a girl to take on a job like this.”

Furley’s eyes flashed in sympathy.

“It was a cowardly action, Julian,” he agreed. “I’m hot with shame when I think of it. But don’t, for heaven’s sake, think I had anything to do with the affair! We have a secret service branch which arranges for those things. It’s that skunk Fenn who’s responsible. Damn him!”

“Nicholas Fenn, the pacifist!” Julian exclaimed. “So you take vermin like that into your councils!”

“You can’t call him too hard a name for me at this moment,” Furley muttered.

“Nicholas Fenn,” Julian repeated, with a new light in his eyes. “Why, the cable I censored was to him! So he’s the arch traitor!”

“Nicholas Fenn is in it;” Furley admitted, “although I deny that there’s any treason whatever in the affair.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Julian replied. “What about your German hairdresser who was shot this morning?”

“It was a mistake to make use of him,” Furley confessed. “Fenn has deceived us all as to the method of our communications. But listen, Julian. You’ll be able to get Miss Abbeway out of this?”

“If I don’t,” Julian replied, “I shall be in it myself, for I’ve lied myself black in the face already.”

“You’re a man, for all the starch in you, Julian,” Furley declared. “If anything were to happen to that girl, I’d wring Fenn’s neck.”

“I think she’s safe for the present,” Julian pronounced. “You see, she isn’t in possession of the incriminating document. I took it from her when she was in danger of arrest.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“You can’t have much doubt about that,” was the composed reply. “I shall go to town to-morrow and hand it over to the proper authorities.”

Julian rose to his feet as he spoke. Furley looked at him helplessly.

“How in heaven’s name, man,” he groaned, “shall I be able to make you see the truth!”

A touch of the winter sunlight was upon Julian’s face which, curiously enough, at that moment resembled his father’s in its cold, patrician lines. The mention of Nicholas Fenn’s name seemed to have transformed him.

“If I were you, Furley,” he advised, “for the sake of our friendship, I wouldn’t try. There is no consideration in the world which would alter my intentions.”

There was the sound of the lifting of the outer latch, a knock at the door. The incoming visitors stood upon no ceremony. Mr. Stenson and Catherine showed themselves upon the threshold.

Mr. Stenson waved aside all ceremony and at once checked Furley’s attempt to rise to his feet.

“Pray don’t get up, Furley,” he begged, shaking hands with him. “I hope you’ll forgive such an informal visit. I met Miss Abbeway on my way down to the sea, and when she told me that she was coming to call on you, I asked leave to accompany her.”

“You’re very welcome, sir,” was the cordial response. “It’s an honour which I scarcely expected.”

Julian found chairs for every one, and Mr. Stenson, recognising intuitively a certain state of tension, continued his good-humoured remarks.

“Miss Abbeway and I,” he said, “have been having a most interesting conversation, or rather argument. I find that she is entirely of your way of thinking, Furley. You both belong to the order of what I call puffball politicians.”

Catherine laughed heartily at the simile.

“Mr. Stenson is a glaring example,” she pointed out, “of those who do not know their own friends. Mr. Furley and I both believe that some time or other our views will appeal to the whole of the intellectual and unselfish world.”

“It’s a terrible job to get people to think,” Furley observed. “They are nearly always busy doing something else.”

“And these aristocrats!” Catherine continued, smiling at Julian. “You spoil them so in England, you know. Eton and Oxford are simply terrible in their narrowing effect upon your young men. It’s like putting your raw material into a sausage machine.”

“Miss Abbeway is very severe this morning,” Stenson declared, with unabated good humour. “She has been attacking my policy and my principles during the whole of our walk. Bad luck about your accident, Furley. I suppose we should have met whilst I am down here, if you hadn’t developed too adventurous a spirit.”

Furley glanced at Julian and smiled.

“I am not so sure about that, sir,” he said. “Your host doesn’t approve of me very much.”

“Do political prejudices exist so far from their home?” Mr. Stenson asked.

“I am afraid my father is rather old-fashioned,” Julian confessed.

“You are all old-fashioned—and stiff with prejudice,” Furley declared. “Even Orden,” he went on, turning to Catherine, “only tolerates me because we ate dinners off the same board when we were both making up our minds to be Lord High Chancellor.”

“Our friend Furley,” Julian confided, as he leaned across the table and took a cigarette, “has no tact and many prejudices. He does write such rubbish about the aristocracy. I remember an article of his not very long ago, entitled ‘Out with our Peers!’ It’s all very well for a younger son like me to take it lying down, but you could scarcely expect my father to approve. Besides, I believe the fellow’s a renegade. I have an idea that he was born in the narrower circles himself.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, then,” Furley grunted with satisfaction. “My father was a boot manufacturer in a country village of Leicestershire. I went in for the Bar because he left me pots of money, most of which, by the bye, I seem to have dissipated.”

“Chiefly in Utopian schemes for the betterment of his betters,” Julian observed drily.

“I certainly had an idea,” Furley confessed, “of an asylum for incapable younger sons.”

“I call a truce,” Julian proposed. “It isn’t polite to spar before Miss Abbeway.”

“To me,” Mr. Stenson declared, “this is a veritable temple of peace. I arrived here literally on all fours. Miss Abbeway has proved to me quite conclusively that as a democratic leader I have missed my vocation.”

She looked at him reproachfully. Nevertheless, his words seemed to have brought back to her mind the thrill of their brief but stimulating conversation. A flash of genuine earnestness transformed her face, just as a gleam of wintry sunshine, which had found its way in through the open window, seemed to discover threads of gold in her tightly braided and luxuriant brown hair. Her eyes filled with an almost inspired light:

“Mr. Stenson is scarcely fair to me,” she complained. “I did not presume to criticise his statesmanship, only there are some things here which seem pitiful. England should be the ideal democracy of the world. Your laws admit of it, your Government admits of it. Neither birth nor money are indispensable to success. The way is open for the working man to pass even to the Cabinet. And you are nothing of the sort. The cause of the people is not in any country so shamefully and badly represented. You have a bourgeoisie which maintains itself in almost feudal luxury by means of the labour which it employs, and that labour is content to squeak and open its mouth for worms, when it should have the finest fruits of the world. And all this is for want of leadership. Up you come you David Sands, you Phineas Crosses, you Nicholas Fenns, you Thomas Evanses. You each think that you represent Labour, but you don’t. You represent trade—the workers at one trade. How they laugh at you, the men who like to keep the government of this country in their own possession! They stretch down a hand to the one who has climbed the highest, they pull him up into the Government, and after that Labour is well quit of him. He has found his place with the gods. Perhaps they will make him a ‘Sir’ and his wife a ‘Lady,’ but for him it is all over with the Cause. And so another ten years is wasted, while another man grows up to take his place.”

“She’s right enough,” Furley confessed gloomily. “There is something about the atmosphere of the inner life of politics which has proved fatal to every Labour man who has ever climbed. Paul Fiske wrote the same thing only a few weeks ago. He thought that it was the social atmosphere which we still preserve around our politics. We no sooner catch a clever man, born of the people, than we dress him up like a mummy and put him down at dinner parties and garden parties, to do things he’s not accustomed to, and expect him to hold his own amongst people who are not his people. There is something poisonous about it.”

“Aren’t you all rather assuming,” Stenson suggested drily, “that the Labour Party is the only party in politics worth considering?”

“If they knew their own strength,” Catherine declared, “they would be the predominant party. Should you like to go to the polls to-day and fight for your seats against them?”

“Heaven forbid!” Mr. Stenson exclaimed. “But then we’ve made up our mind to one thing—no general election during the war. Afterwards, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if Unionists and Liberals and even Radicals didn’t amalgamate and make one party.”

“To fight Labour,” Furley said grimly.

“To keep England great,” Mr. Stenson replied. “You must remember that so far as any scheme or program which the Labour Party has yet disclosed, in this country or any other, they are preeminently selfish. England has mighty interests across the seas. A parish-council form of government would very soon bring disaster.”

Julian glanced at the clock and rose to his feet.

“I don’t want to hurry any one,” he said, “but my father is rather a martinet about luncheon.”

They all rose. Mr. Stenson turned to Julian.

“Will you go on with Miss Abbeway?” he begged. “I will catch up with you on the marshes. I want to have just a word with Furley.”

Julian and his companion crossed the country road and passed through the gate opposite on to the rude track which led down almost to the sea.

“You are very interested in English labour questions, Miss Abbeway,” he remarked, “considering that you are only half an Englishwoman.”

“It isn’t only the English labouring classes in whom I am interested,” she replied impatiently. “It is the cause of the people throughout the whole of the world which in my small way I preach.”

“Your own country,” he continued, a little diffidently, “is scarcely a good advertisement for the cause of social reform.”

Her tone trembled with indignation as she answered him.

“My own country,” she said, “has suffered for so many centuries from such terrible oppression that the reaction was bound, in its first stages, to produce nothing but chaos. Automatically, all that seems to you unreasonable, wicked even, in a way, horrible—will in the course of time disappear. Russia will find herself. In twenty years’ time her democracy will have solved the great problem, and Russia be the foremost republic of the world.”

“Meanwhile,” he remarked, “she is letting us down pretty badly.”

“But you are selfish, you English!” she exclaimed. “You see one of the greatest nations in the world going through its hour of agony, and you think nothing but how you yourselves will be affected! Every thinking person in Russia regrets that this thing should have come to pass at such a time. Yet it is best for you English to look the truth in the face. It wasn’t the Russian people who were pledged to you, with whom you were bound in alliance. It was that accursed trick all European politicians have of making secret treaties and secret understandings, building up buffer States, trying to whittle away a piece of the map for yourselves, trying all the time to be dishonest under the shadow of what is called diplomacy. That is what brought the war about. It was never the will of the people. It was the Hohenzollerns and the Romanoffs, the firebrands of the French Cabinet, and your own clumsy, thick-headed efforts to get the best of everybody and yet keep your Nonconformist conscience. The people did not make this war, but it is the people who are going to end it.”

They walked in silence for some minutes, he apparently pondering over her last words, she with the cloud passing from her face as, with her head a little thrown back and her eyes half-closed, she sniffed the strong, salty air with an almost voluptuous expression of content. She was perfectly dressed for the country, from her square-toed shoes, which still seemed to maintain some distinction of shape, the perfectly tailored coat and skirt, to the smart little felt hat with its single quill. She walked with the free grace of an athlete, unembarrassed with the difficulties of the way or the gusts which swept across the marshy places, yet not even the strengthening breeze, which as they reached the sea line became almost a gale, seemed to have power to bring even the faintest flush of colour to her cheeks. They reached the long headland and stood looking out at the sea before she spoke again.

“You were very kind to me last night, Mr. Orden,” she said, a little abruptly.

“I paid a debt,” he reminded her.

“I suppose there is something in that,” she admitted. “I really believe that that exceedingly unpleasant person with whom I was brought into temporary association would have killed you if I had allowed it.”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” he assented. “I saw him very hazily, but a more criminal type of countenance I never beheld.”

“So that we are quits,” she ventured.

“With a little debt on my side still to be paid.”

“Well, there is no telling what demands I may make upon our acquaintance.”

“Acquaintance?” he protested.

“Would you like to call it friendship?”

“A very short time ago;” he said deliberately, “even friendship would not have satisfied me.”

“And now?”

“I dislike mysteries.”

“Poor me!” she sighed. “However, you can rid yourself of the shadow of one as soon as you like after luncheon. It would be quite safe now, I think, for me to take back that packet.”

“Yes,” he assented slowly, “I suppose that it would.”

She looked up into his face. Something that she saw there brought her own delicate eyebrows together in a slight frown.

“You will give it me after lunch?” she proposed.

“I think not,” was the quiet reply.

“You were only entrusted with it for a time,” she reminded him, with ominous calm. “It belongs to me.”

“A document received in this surreptitious fashion,” he pronounced, “is presumably a treasonable document. I have no intention of returning it to you.”

She walked by his side for a few moments in silence. Glancing down into her face, Julian was almost startled. There were none of the ordinary signs of anger there, but an intense white passion, the control of which was obviously costing her a prodigious effort. She touched his fingers with her ungloved hand as she stepped over a stile, and he found them icy cold. All the joy of that unexpectedly sunny morning seemed to have passed.

“I am sorry, Miss Abbeway,” he said almost humbly, “that you take my decision so hardly. I ask you to remember that I am just an ordinary, typical Englishman, and that I have already lied for your sake. Will you put yourself in my place?”

They had climbed the little ridge of grass-grown sand and stood looking out seaward. Suddenly all the anger seemed to pass from her face. She lifted her head, her soft brown eyes flashed into his, the little curl of her lips seemed to transform her whole expression. She was no longer the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman, furious at the prospect of failure. She was suddenly wholly feminine, seductive, a coquette.

“If you were just an ordinary, stupid, stolid Englishman,” she whispered, “why did you risk your honour and your safety for my sake? Will you tell me that, dear man of steel?”

Julian leaned even closer over her. She was smiling now frankly into his face, refusing the warning of his burning eyes. Then suddenly, silently, he held her to him and kissed her, unresisting, upon the lips. She made no protest. He even fancied afterwards, when he tried to rebuild in his mind that queer, passionate interlude, that her lips had returned what his had given. It was he who released her—not she who struggled. Yet he understood. He knew that this was a tragedy.

Stenson’s voice reached them from the other side of the ridge.

“Come and show me the way across this wretched bit of marsh, Orden. I don’t like these deceptive green grasses.”

“‘Pitfalls for the Politician’ or ‘Look before you leap’.” Julian muttered aimlessly. “Quite right to avoid that spot, sir. Just follow where I am pointing.”

Stenson made his laborious way to their side.

“This may be a short cut back to the Hall,” he exclaimed, “but except for the view of the sea and this gorgeous air, I think I should have preferred the main road! Help me up, Orden. Isn’t it somewhere near here that that little affair happened the other night?”

“This very spot,” Julian assented. “Miss Abbeway and I were just speaking of it.”

They both glanced towards her. She was standing with her back to them, looking out seawards. She did not move even at the mention of her name.

“A dreary spot at night, I dare say,” the Prime Minister remarked, without overmuch interest. “How do we get home from here, Orden? I haven’t forgotten your warning about luncheon, and this air is giving me a most lively appetite.”

“Straight along the top of this ridge for about three quarters of a mile, sir, to the entrance of the harbour there.”

“And then?”

“I have a petrol launch,” Julian explained, “and I shall land you practically in the dining room in another ten minutes.”

“Let us proceed,” Mr. Stenson suggested briskly. “What a queer fellow Miles Furley is! Quite a friend of yours, isn’t he, Miss Abbeway?”

“I have seen a good deal of him lately,” she answered, walking on and making room for Stenson to fall into step by her side, but still keeping her face a little averted. “A man of many but confused ideas; a man, I should think, who stands an evil chance of muddling his career away.”

“We offered him a post in the Government,” Stenson ruminated.

“He had just sense enough to refuse that, I suppose,” she observed, moving slowly to the right and thereby preventing Julian from taking a place by her side. “Yet,” she went on, “I find in him the fault of so many Englishmen, the fault that prevents their becoming great statesmen, great soldiers, or even,” she added coolly, “successful lovers.”

“And what is that?” Julian demanded.

She remained silent. It was as though she had heard nothing. She caught Mr. Stenson’s arm and pointed to a huge white seagull, drifting down the wind above their heads.

“To think,” she said, “with that model, we intellectuals have waited nearly two thousand years for the aeroplane!”

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