W

HATEVER it was she had heard from Germany, Nan presently unpacked her trunk and installed herself in a flat in Westminster, with a servant, two aged Belgian refugee women, and the grandson of one of them, a little boy of five. Despite the intimate friendship Madge had set up with Miss Greta's "little friend," for the most of that bewildering, tormenting autumn Napier had only fleeting glimpses of her. The first of these after Miss Greta's departure was the occasion of Julian's last appearance in that house in Lowndes Square where the McIntyres had made him welcome. Ten minutes after the older people had sat down to luncheon, Madge came in, bringing Julian and Nan Ellis. The girls wore that look of happy responsibility that had begun to shine on young faces in England.

"I've joined the Emergency Corps," Madge announced.

"Your new excuse for being late for meals," Sir William exclaimed, with a brusquerie intended to strike a few enlivening sparks out of Wildfire. And she actually let it pass.

Lady McIntyre, in her fashionable mourning more shrunken and piteous than ever, went on addressing to Julian her polite inanities, couched for the most part in that form of acknowledged intellectual poverty, the question. Did Julian think there was any chance of a Zeppelin raid on London?

"All that talk in the papers," Sir William hurriedly forestalled any agitating admission on the part of the guest,— "all that is a concession to panic. Like

the nonsense about what the submarines might do. Nothing could suit Germany's book better."

"Except, I suppose, sinking our ships." For the first time Julian took some interest in the conversation.

"Sinking our ships!" quavered Lady McIntyre.

"I should have thought the loss of the Aboukir and Cressy, those awful casualtylists, might have made people a little less ready to talk about our invulnerable navy."

"So"-Sir William laid down his knife and fork and fell to seal-rattling under the table-"so you 've come now to doubt the power of the British Navy!"

"I've come," said Julian, "to see the danger of not doubting it."

The seals joined the general silence. "I wonder," Sir William remarked dryly, "what your father would say to your views."

"I could tell you, sir, if it mattered." "If it mattered! God bless my soul!" Sir William looked at Julian for the first time with cold dislike.

As they came out from luncheon, Napier said to Nan:

"I never see you now. Are you still too devoured by the Belgian locusts to have anything left for your older-friends?"

"Locusts! How can you? I am not at all devoured. Or, if I am, it 's by something quite different." She said it with. her air of new importance. "But in the midst of it all"-she lowered her voice, and spoke now as one positively beset by weighty affairs-"I keep worrying about Julian. Just because"-she glanced back at him as he stood talking "Emergency Corps" with Madge-"just because he

does n't in the least worry about himself. Have you heard about the way his relations are behaving? And some of his friends, too. They cold-shoulder him in private and in public; they cut him!" Her eyes gleamed with anger. "If they think that 's the way to discourage Julian, they know very little. Even his father-to go and

cut down Julian's income!"

Napier had n't heard that, but he expressed himself "not surprised."

Nan was looking at him with that postGreta look.

"You take it as a matter of course!" "Another, upon my word!" An envelop fluttered from Lady McIntyre's hand to the waste-paper basket. She held an open paper in her hand.

"Another what, Mum?" Madge left Julian to lean over her mother's shoulder. "Oh." One glance was enough for Madge; she turned away. But one glance did n't suffice for Lady McIntyre.

"It 's too, too much! Look at this, William." The two elders stood talking in lowered voices.

Nan's inquiring look met Madge's offhand explanation:

"Another of Greta's bills. That makes a hundred and sixty pounds just for furs." "Oh,"-Nan's movement toward Lady Napier was arrested in an access of shy-"ask your mother to let me have

ness,it."

"No good." Wildfire shook her mane. "She won't. She thinks you 've had enough of 'em sent direct to you."

"Your mother does n't understand. It 's all right. I'm taking care of these things for Greta."

"Well, of course.' Nan crossed the room and stood a moment in front of Lady McIntyre with hand extended and speaking in an undertone.

"You may take it from me"- Sir William did n't moderate his tone-"Miss von Schwarzenberg won't pay the money back." His voice rose higher over the low protest. "For one thing, she can't." "You think she has n't got it?" Nan inquired.

"Oh, I have n't much doubt she 's got it; but even if she wanted to repay you, she won't be allowed to send money out of Germany."

"Surely she 'll be allowed to pay her debts?"

"Miss Greta would tell you, "No trading allowed with the enemy.' Sir William dismissed the matter with decision. "You hear that, Julian? Not allowed to pay her debts!"

Nan's instinctive turning to Julian for sympathy and understanding was no more lost on Napier than Julian's comment:

"There's no end to the little wickednesses of war as well as the great central one." He threw down the illustrated paper he 'd been glancing at and took up his hat. "Come along," he said to Nan under his breath. "They 'll be expecting

"No. I told you she 's nursing her father day and night. She has n't time. to; besides, it's understood."

"Why do some of the bills come to us and some to you?"

Nan stood nonplussed an instant and then said:

"It's all right, I tell you."

"You mean you think she 's going to pay you back?"

William and that to the O. T. C. with impatience at the length of time it takes to improvise an officer. He watched the gradual putting in khaki come over the male population of the United Kingdom; watched regiments marching gaily by day to the tune of "Tipperary"; marching by night very quietly, on each man's shoulder a long, white bundle, like a little canvas bolster-men on their way to entrain for the front, following in the wake of that

fourth of the Expeditionary Army that had already fallen. With as little publicity as possible hospitals multiplied. People began to look upon wounded soldiers in the streets without that shuddering first passion of pity, that mingled gratitude and anger at the price exacted of those maimed

men.

Napier was seeing nearly as little in these days of Julian as of Nan. They had had high words over the development and intensification of Julian's opposition to the war and in particular over his strictures on the Government. Napier had studiously avoided all reference to Nan Ellis, but by this side wind and that he gathered that Nan was being swept into the little. pacifico-philosophic group, and was as thick as thieves with certain men and women whose names were beginning to be anathema to the general public. Strangely to his own sense, with far more bitterness than he resented Julian's notorious antiwar work, Napier would, as he knew now, resent the harnessing of the airy spirit of the girl to that lumbering and ill-looked

on car.

More than ever he felt this, sitting opposite Nan at dinner in Lowndes Square the night following on the German Spy Debate in the House of Commons. The topic in the forefront of every mind was ignored by tacit consent. Conversation fell for a few memorable minutes on the appalling statement, just issued officially, that there had been 57,000 casualties in the British Expeditionary Force up to the end of October. How many had fallen since in the bloody struggle about Ypres, fiercest of the war, and how many on either side would survive the stark misery of the first little-prepared-for winter in the trenches no one present had heart to ask. But the question, urged in print and cried from platforms by Julian and his friends, was there in the girl's face.

Sir William seemed to answer by saying it stood to reason this sort of thing could n't go on. The one redeeming feature was that it was too awful to last. The Germans must see they have failed.

"Why?" the girl asked, with her candid

eyes on her host. "If the Government believed that, why was Lord Kitchener calling for a hundred thousand men?"

“Oh, that—that was to show the Germans what they had to expect if they did n't come to their senses."

While the dessert was going round, she got up, with a look at the clock and an apology. It was understood that she had an engagement.

"Always an emergency in these days," Sir William mocked pleasantly at the Women's Corps. "Gavan, see they get her a taxi, will you?"

The footman's whistle grew fainter as Napier helped her into her coat. They had n't been alone since those hurried moments on the platform after Greta had gone. Something now in her slight awkwardness as she struggled with her coat, her increased anxiety to be off ("I ought to have gone ten minutes ago. I can always find a cab quicker than a footman") gave Napier a feeling that he had misinterpreted her avoidance. Not the new Greta-born distrust of him, but distrust of herself. His heart rose at that quick conviction. Rogers would n't be long, he reassured her, and then:

"I wish he might, or, rather, I wish I had n't to go back to the House with Sir William. I'd take you wherever it is you are going. He stopped suddenly.

"Would you? Would you really? That's what I 've been longing to ask. You would n't sit dumb, helpless, like me, if once you 'd heard Julian-"

"I'm under the impression that I have heard Julian."

"No! no! not just arguing with you. I mean at one of the meetings."

"I see. Where I can't answer back."

"And now you 're looking like that!" She turned away with nervous abruptness, but he had interposed between her and the door-knob.

"And you-have you any idea how unhappy you are looking?"

"Well, why not? If it is, as Julian says, 'such a brute of a world.'"

"Julian ought n't to think so," Napier said bitterly. "Julian has you-"

"Oh, has he! Poor Julian!"

"Do

you mean he has n't?" They were both trembling.

"I mean whether he has or has n't, we are n't rid of the miserableness. Once you are started wrong, you can't get right, it seems. Not without-" Suddenly her eyes filled. A shower of words tumbled out in a shaken whisper: "At first-oh, for long, I thought you hardly knew I was there, at Kirklamont, in the world! Then, when you began to notice me, it was only to criticize me. Oh, I used to see you laughing; not with your mouth, with your eyes. You laughed at Julian for thinking I was all right." She broke in upon his protest, which was none the less horrified for being self-convicted.

"Yes, yes; you tried to prevent Julian from caring. I could have forgiven you that," she said, with her look of indignant candor; "yes, I could easily have forgiven you if you 'd done it from any nice reason, like jealousy. You did n't do it from a nice reason." Still under her breath she hurled at him.

"Hush! They might-" he glanced at the dining-room door.

"You thought I should n't 'do.' Julian -well, maybe you know what he thought. So I let him try to make up to me. He could n't, but I let him try. And what 's come out of it all is that Julian—' "Yes, yes; I know, I know."

"I 've made him care! I've made him build on me! And can't you see❞— she seemed to arraign Napier's own loyalty as she stood there under the hall light, vehement, unhappy-"can't you see Julian needs his friends now as he never did before?" In the little pause her excitement mounted. "And besides that, Julian 's right about the war. And you are wrong. Oh, why are you!" she cried out of the aching that comes of conflict between love of a person and hate of his creed.

They heard a taxi stop. She caught up her gloves. "Do you know what I kept thinking at dinner? It's what I always think when people talk like Sir William, about letting the war go on for Kitchener's three mortal years. I kept thinking that

Julian won't ever come here again. And what a pity it was! Unless you-do come and hear him, Gavan, with me! Tomorrow afternoon. Please!"

"I'd do most things for you," he said; "not that."

And then he went and did it. At least, he went alone.

Had the authorities not believed that outside the narrow-so narrow as to be negligible-limits of the League for a Negotiated Peace no general notice would be taken of so unpopular an enterprise, the open-air meeting would have been interdicted. The authorities had not reflected that unpopularity, if only it is great enough, is as sure a draw as its opposite.

Napier left the taxi and let himself be carried along in the human current to a place opposite that part of the improvised platform where a speaker stood facing the people. The thick-set figure of the exmember of Parliament stood in a storm of booing, of derisive shouts and groans that ultimately drowned his appeal.

No sooner had they howled him down than a much younger man stood up there facing the crowd. It was Julian. He spoke for a good twenty minutes. His boyishness, and that something that compelled you to listen to Julian, held the people quiet through the earlier minutes, and held them muttering and threatening up to the bursting of the storm.

His voice reached Napier tired and hoarse:

You don't believe the Germans were encircled in a band of iron? You don't believe they had n't sufficient outlet for their immense capacities? Oh, no; the commercial greed of other nations did n't hem them in! Tell me, then, what 's behind this vast discovery of German activity in lands not their own? What about the difficulty even in England of combing them out of commerce, out of clubs, even out of Parliament? What about the hold they have in Sweden and Holland; in Genoa; in South America, not to speak of the United States? Now, notice. No other nation has so disseminated itself

Above the increasing disorder Napier caught fragments from the platform:

Waste places of the earth, crying out for labor and development. Yes, in bitter need of something the German could give, wanted to give

But pandemonium had broken loose, and reigned irresistible for some moments. As the wave of sound ebbed, those high, fife-like notes, conquering hoarseness for a moment, soared above the din and over the bobbing heads of the multitude:

Waste places! Yet we grudged even the waste places to that supremely hard-working people. Why?

A hail of answers, every one a stone of

scorn.

As you don't seem to know why it was we grudged these places to the Germans, you'd better let me tell you. We grudged them to an industrious people because the people were n't British people. What happened? No! no! no! Listen! The Germans-the Germans

Cries of "Belgium!" mixed with booing and cursing, drowned the voice again and again till the moment when it rose with "they" in lieu of the word intolerable:

They have done what you say. I'm not here to deny it. They 've turned the most fertile lands of Europe into wastes. Why? Because we refused them the places that were already waste. Energy must go somewhere. Energy that could have helped to save the world has gone to the devastation of Belgium, to the ruin of France. Gone to the torture and death of tens of thousands of British men. Whose fault? Ours, ours, I tell you!

A roar went up as the crowd surged forward. Napier, carried with it, saw men near the foot of the platform gesticulating wildly with clenched fists above their heads: "Liar! Pro-German!"

And still the penny-whistle voice