As I fell I heard Hyde shouting: "Oh, my God! he 's done for! They'll fine him a million bucks for that."

Although somewhat shaken by my rapid flight and cut up by broken glass, I was not really injured; but I decided that the thing to do was to appear unconscious. So I rolled to the floor and made myself comfortable in the debris.

In an instant Gwendolyn, who had arisen with a little cry of sympathetic horror, which made my heart beat faster with keen delight, was on her knees and bending over me. Mama Wigleigh was on her feet calling loudly for menials. But the baron never moved.

I heard him say, in his tone:

without any interest

"Is the beggar dead?"
Gwendolyn murmured:
"Poor Smithy! He's all cut up."

I felt her soft, warm hands on my head, and her handkerchief at my temple. I trembled.

"He's moving! He's alive!" she said with evident relief and thanksgiving. I could feel her breath, and a stray lock of her intoxicating hair tickled my neck. I had an almost irresistible impulse to come to and kiss her, but I mastered it and remained supine, with eyes closed.

Mama was giving orders in stentorian tones to have me and the rest of the "frightful mess" removed to the lower regions of the establishment. Papa said:

"Leave the bounder to the servants, Gwendolyn. Another cup of coffee, Rogers. There's ground glass in this."

Then I was lifted up by two men, who started to carry me out. I opened my eyes and I looked for Gwendolyn, to whom I appealed mutely. She smiled at me encouragingly.

"Take him to the blue room and send for our doctor." My carriers paused.

"The blue room? Don't be ridiculous, Gwendolyn!" said her horrified mama. "Take him to the servants' quarters."

"Send him to the public hospital," interposed the baron, "and place him under arrest."

"O Papa, don't be cruel! Please let me attend to him!"

"Gwendolyn!" shrieked mama.

Papa merely stirred his fresh cup of coffee, adjusted his monocle, and said: "Phoebe, your daughter appears to be more and more of a catastrophic reversion to type each day."

"Well, it is n't my fault," bellowed the baroness.

"Thank goodness, there 's one member of this family with decent human feelings!" said Gwendolyn, hotly.

The baron sipped his coffee.

"Don't raise your voice, my dear. Your feelings are distressingly atavistic."

At this juncture a flunky entered, and bowed low to the baron.

"Hexcuse me, your Lordship, a person is houtside. 'E says as 'ow this person dropped hout of 'is hairplane, an' 'e 'll take 'im awye."

Papa Wigleigh waved a hand wearily, indicating that I be removed forthwith. And thus ended my little visit to Gwendolyn and her family.

The baron had not recognized me; he had scarcely looked at me. To do so would have been to evince some interest in my existence. From first to last I had been merely an annoyance, an unpleasant disturbance. If Hyde had n't sent for me, Gwendolyn might have won her point, and then I might have enjoyed the exquisite bliss of several hours of her company. I could have murdered Hyde.

When I was stowed away in the machine, and we were flying back to the Hohenzollern, I began to laugh. Hyde thought I was delirious and told Auguste to hurry.

"Some of the scrambled glass got mixed up with the baron's breakfast," I explained to him. "That was your fault," I added.

"My fault!" Hyde looked pained.

"Yes. If you had n't pulled my leg, I'd have made the couch. I was aiming for it."

"You did n't jump on purpose?" he demanded, with growing horror.

"Certainly. How else could I see the inside of an Aristokian's house? If you had n't come for me, they were going to take me to the blue room. And she was going to nurse me. Now I must continue my search for my jewel."

"You'd better not talk, old man. We'll be at the hotel in a moment. Does your head ache very much?”

"No. There's a song of victory in my heart."

Hyde shook his head sadly, patted me on the hand, and murmured little, soothing things to me.

When we reached the hotel, they carried me to my room, put me to bed, and called a doctor, with whom Hyde had a mysterious consultation in whispers. The doctor dressed my scratches, for that's all they were, and said I would be as well "as ever" by the next day.

Hyde did not want to leave me, so I pretended to fall asleep, and then he tiptoed out of the room.

A little later a man came up and put wire netting in all the windows. As he passed the bed he gave me a funny look. I winked at him, and he fled.

In the evening I dined in my room. Hyde came in. He seemed very troubled. He said he had had a wireless calling him back to America. He did n't like to leave me, and wanted to know if I did not think I had had enough of Aristokia. He would be glad to take me back to my people.

Poor fellow! He was a real pal with a big heart. I was conscience-stricken, and tried to reassure him as to my mental condition. I don't think I succeeded, however, for he said good-by sorrowfully, with many unspoken misgivings. I vowed then and there that on my return to America I would in some way try to show my appreciation for his great kindness to me. I thought of the baron. After all, there was something to be said for the brotherhood of man.

CHAPTER V

AT about nine o'clock, shortly after Hyde had left me, there was a knock at my door. I opened it, and there stood Fräulein, the chaperon. My heart jumped.

"Is she with you?" I cried. "Ach, nein! Lady Gwendolyn she cannot come to hotels."

I asked her to come in, and closed the door. She handed me a very lovely bouquet of flowers and a note.

"Smithy dear, it was a mad, wonderful thing to do. You frightened me terribly. I am in disgrace with papa and mama for showing any interest in you. But I convinced papa that it would be an awful bore to try to convict you for upsetting his breakfast. Now I know you really want to see me. If you are well enough, come to the little iron gate at the east end of our garden to-morrow night at moonrise, Fräulein will let you in. I do hope you are n't badly hurt, Jack. Now do you see how useful the lady in black is?

GWENDOLYN."

I could have kissed the lady in black for bringing me this note. While I wrote an answer to it, Fräulein found a vase, filled it with water, and arranged my bouquet for me.

I do not know how I lived between then and the rising of the moon the following night. I cannot remember anything I did; and yet at the same time the twenty-four hours seemed an eternity in passing.

But at last the endless waiting was over, the little iron gate had closed, and I was standing with Gwendolyn in the garden. She led me around by a narrow pathway to a bench on the opposite side of the lake. There we sat and watched the moon come up and touch the world with silver and drip molten silver across the lake.

We spoke in whispers; why, I do not know. The wind rustled softly in the trees, and the garden was filled with ghostly fragrance. Occasionally the murmuring silence was broken by the whirring purr of a motor as man on his wings rushed across the face of the moon. She was dressed in shimmering white and sat close to me. On the other side of her, on guard, alert, was the faithful chaperon, an angel in black, absorbed by the night.

Gwendolyn touched the scratch on my forehead. I held her hand and I kissed it. That was all. We did not speak of love, but of a thousand things which we two beings from different worlds found we had in common.

In the silence I caught myself thinking, was this I, Capsule Smith? Could this be the end of the twentieth century? How remote the age's turmoil

and materialistic achievements seemed to me in this old terraced garden of mysteries!

Perhaps I could have induced Gwendolyn to fly with me to America. How quickly I would have agreed had she even intimated her willingness to adopt such a course! I might have kissed her and made ardent love to her, or she might have taken such steps herself. But if we had, what a lot of romance, adventure, and supreme happiness we Iwould have missed! How much less would be our store of memories now!

Our modern speed is a curse; our modern sexual relations are a curse. Life for us has lost the unutterable beauty of unfoldment. Our present-day standards have robbed most women of the charm that was Gwendolyn's. never yielded except what was asked, and then not always. She was coy. It is a word we do not understand any

more.

She

This night was only the beginning. We had many more such meetings, some by moonlight, some in the blazing sunlight of noon, at twilight, in rain and wind, and on black nights under goldbesprinkled skies.

In all this time we did not speak of love except in the abstract. Instead we talked of life and of men and the ways of men in her world and in mine. We came to know each other with that subtle understanding which makes for real companionship.

At first we had flirted consciously, but that stage passed quickly. One does not flirt except casually, and we could no longer be casual. Each became interested in the other as the symbol of an antipodal idea. She was Aristokia; I was the Universal Proletarian Republic. From discussions in the abstract and descriptions and criticisms of our respective worlds it was only a step, and a very natural one, to set forth and propound our ambitions.

Gwendolyn wanted to reform Aristokia. She purposed to retain all the beauty, culture, art, and fineness of that strangely esthetic and fastidious land, and to rid it of its obsolete customs, its arrant absurdities, anachronisms, and formalisms. She longed to free it from the inertia of accumulated tradition.

existing social order, with its iniquitous tyranny of labor. Gwendolyn always maintained that she would achieve some measure of success, but that I was doomed to failure.

One evening we stood by the lake in her garden. The reflected fires of the setting sun smiled up at us. We were tossing small pebbles into the water, watching the picture shatter in a sudden splash of color like a broken stained-glass window, then undulate and reform.

"How many years was capital up and labor down?" asked Gwendolyn.

I started to answer this with facile levity to the effect that until the Great Revolution labor had always been down; then I thought an instant: Gwendolyn

was thinking of capital and labor in the industrial phase. Men had been slaves and serfs for centuries, but capital and labor in the modern sense were the twin offspring of the union of coal and iron.

"One hundred years," I said. "From the Napoleonic wars to the Great War." Gwendolyn looked up at me with one of her sudden smiles.

"Then, Jackie, you will be eighty years old before you realize your ambition. You have fifty years to wait."

Would the tyranny of labor last one hundred years, I wondered. I threw a pebble into the lake and watched the chaos of color gradually through successive rhythms give place to the ordered, symmetrical quiet of a reflection identical to the one we had seen before I threw the stone.

"After each great war in the world's history that has happened," I said, pointing at the swirl of color: "everything has gone into the crucible, and it has seemed as if something better must form afterward. But mankind has slipped back just as that reflection is slipping back, slowly, rhythmically. 1919-20-what an opportunity they had! But man was lymphatic, and the gods played a joke on him. They threw more pebbles." I dashed a handful of gravel into the lake.

We were both silent for several minutes; then Gwendolyn suggested that her world and mine might have to be thrown together and fused again in some mightier cataclysm.

In such interchange of ideas and opinions we spent our time together. All discussion of our present and future personal relationship was, by an unspoken understanding, taboo. I think we both felt instinctively that once love and passion entered into our relations, they would preclude all other emotions.

Slowly at the time, and with uncanny rapidity in retrospect, the summer passed.

Of course all was not smooth sailing. Two people could not meet clandestinely in a country where such meetings were illegal without running obvious risks and encountering hair-breadth escapes. We had many such, one of which was especially noteworthy and un

forgetable. As a result of it I became at first an involuntary, and then an all too willing, inmate of Wigleigh Hall.

We were in the garden one evening at the end of an excessively hot day. An uncanny stillness enveloped us. The air was torpid. Every now and then the leaves on the trees about us shivered in anticipation of the storm which was slowly approaching, with long, ponderous reverberations of distant thunder and fitful flashes of lightning. We sat and watched the tempest's almost measured tread toward us. Steadily the thunder grew louder, the lightning more brilliant. It was like the coming of a vast Juggernaut with rolling drums.

We had caught the spell of the drowsing garden, and were unusually silent. Something had been said about the advisability of my taking my departure before the storm broke, but nothing had been done about the matter.

For nearly two hours we sat in fascinated contemplation of the storm's relentless oncoming, until it seemed to us that so it must continue, like some titanic treadmill, approaching always and arriving never. Gwendolyn gave expression to that thought, but the literalminded chaperon said something to the effect that storms which kept coming eventually came.

No sooner had she spoken than nature proved her a prophet. A few big drops fell like hot tears from some giant, a sudden gust of wind, a wild splash, and then the deluge.

We ran frantically up the path and entered Wigleigh Hall. As we stood in a group and talked about our escape from drowning, a puddle formed on the floor.

From the very first Gwendolyn and I had agreed to observe the reasonable caution of meetings always in the garden and never in the house. So this was the first time that I had set foot under the baron's roof since my airplane visit.

As I was already in the house, Gwendolyn decided that I might as well stay there until the storm had passed, for mama and papa were at a dinner party at Prince Romanoff's, from which Gwendolyn had excused herself by