The just steward

V

"A Camp In The North Syrian Desert,
—th November—the Month of Asphodel.
"KATHARINE, MY SWEET WOMAN, MY DEAR LOST LOVE."

So wild a surge of memories came over her that her eyes were momentarily blinded. He dated from his camp in the Desert, as a pearler on some plunging lugger in the Indian Ocean may top his home-destined scribble: "The Open Sea...."

She dried her eyes, and the lines were clear again. Something that the folded sheet had contained had dropped out. A white flower scarcely yet withered, and a little string of beads of some sort. She thrust them in the envelope—and the envelope in her bosom—and went on to read.... And the page exhaled the wild strange odour of the acrid dust of the Desert, mingled with the scent of horses and camels, of saffron and resin, tobacco and thyme and myrrh....

"Twice I have seen your advertisements, my beloved. In a Greek gazette in a café at Constantinople. Again, in an issue of the Lisân-el-Arab, a vernacular paper published at Damascus; once again on a torn scrap of a captured Turkish news-sheet, on the floor of the maktab of the Governor of Akaba—the seaport at the head of the Gulf, where the Fleet of King Solomon unloaded their freights of ivory and ebony, gold and spices and apes and peacocks, close on three thousand years ago.

"How did I come there? do you ask me, Katharine. What was I doing in the hall where the Governor gives audience to the Bringers of News from the Desert—sitting on the Carpet of Interrogation, smoking the argili that aids thought? Because I was one of them—am one of them!—a petty chief of the Hejaz Bedwân, able to speak a little English—a spy set to supervise the doings of the spies.

"Well, I picked up the paper, as became a scrupulous Mohammedan. Who knew that it did not bear the letters of The Sacred Name! And I kissed it, and burned it on the charcoal of the brazier, under sharp eyes that had not glittered on the message it brought to me. Though the Governor of Akaba is one of those few men who share my secret. Had One great man not known it from the first, it would not have been possible to have vanished into thin air with such celerity.

"You never doubted for a single moment, sweet friend, dear comrade! that I had gone to look for Julian. Had I believed you would think otherwise, I would have managed to write to you.... But not to write was wiser—and the plan matured so suddenly.... When I took my last kiss from you, and went out of the chapel at Kerr's Arbour, I was uncertain what to do.

"Then through the jungle of my thoughts I saw a way blazed for me. I went to my room, and took from the press an old tweed shooting-suit, and hung the things on my arm, under my waterproof trench-coat. I took my stick, and shook hands with Whishaw, and said Good-bye to him. His old eyes were red with tears, and my grip thanked him for them. Then I climbed the private road, and turned at the brae-top to take my farewell look of Kerr's Arbour. And oddly enough, the refrain from 'Loch Lomond' kept droning in my head. You were taking the high-road of Duty and Honour—and I was taking the road of subterfuge and concealment. But not, God knew! for any base end of mine! He Whose Hand has torn us apart—two lovers married in heart and soul—if ever lovers were,—my Katharine!—He must be just to me! Harsh though I knew him,—yet even then I saw He had tempered His harshness with mercy. For you, O my dearest—you had believed in me!

"So I took initiative from that, and followed the plan I had thought of. I changed in the plantation opposite, but rather below, the gate of Kerr's Arbour private road. Then—seeing no one but a child—I came out of the plantation, having buried my khaki kit in a biggish badger's burrow. Cauldstanes people knew my face—so I struck across country for Stotts Junction, some twenty miles farther South, where—as of course you know—the Carlisle-bound trains stop. I got in at midnight—the time most favourable—as a troop-train of dingy second-class carriages and the usual string of cattle-trucks lumbered in.

"Troops were entraining, the —th Lowland Territorials, bound for Havre, Marseilles and the East. In the seething turmoil of my mind, some vague idea of enlisting as a ranker had been uppermost. I dismissed it as I sat waiting for the next Carlisle-bound train.

"My twenty-mile tramp to the Junction had cleared away the brainstorm. I realised that I had acted without reflection, like a savage, or a child. Stuffing away the khaki husk of Edward Yaill in a red-hot hurry,—changing into the old tweeds, and launching back into the world as an unobtrusive civilian, was, in a country in a state of War, and under Martial Law, about the crudest and riskiest mode of escape I could have chosen.

"But I got to London safely without being asked for papers, and slept at a coffee-house in the King's Cross Road. Next day, quite early, I saw Sir Arthur Ely, told him my plans (which he did not approve of), left in his care my keys and private papers; and by an ante-dated cheque which he passed through his bankers—obtained sufficient ready cash to carry on for a couple of years.

"And then I telegraphed in Code to a man I loved and honoured. You know him. He showed me much friendship when I was in the East. He wired back, appointing a place and an hour. The straight, piercing look of his full eyes under their thick lids—the grip of his hand, and the sound of his deep voice, rolled back the years—they always did—and made me a boy again. For I was little more when, eighteen years ago, I brought a despatch from my Colonel to his Headquarters at Fort Atbara. I was a lieutenant on his Staff when from the hill-top behind Kerreri—he—the Sirdar—swept Omdurman with his binoculars. A mud-walled Mohammedan city—I have been back there since I left you, Katharine!—with a great host of white-robed Darweeshes in battle-array before it—and the whitewashed dome of the Mahdi's tomb all gleaming in the sun.

"He is dead—and in him England has lost much more than a great War Minister. She has lost her truest friend. He heard my story out and believed me,—even as you believed, my true love! He was ready to help, upon condition that I followed up definite lines....

"Arab co-operation being essential for the crushing of the Red Crescent, and the liberation of Northern Palestine and Syria—a door lay open towards the East for a man such as I was—such as I am! who does not greatly fear peril, having no great use for existence. To whom hardship signifies little, comfort and pleasure not being for him. Who welcomes loneliness because denied the one companion with whom life would be Life indeed.

"So I got my Mission from my Chief of old,—he being willing that my six months of Home leave, and the indefinite period of Home duty destined to follow it,—should be merged, for an equally indefinite period, in a Mission connected with the Secret Intelligence Service of Great Britain in the East. Now you know why I was sitting in the audience-hall of the Governor of Akaba when I saw that torn fragment of the Turkish news-sheet lying, and picked it up and read, for the second time, your message to me.

"Twice then I have seen your message, and once I have seen You. You were driving a Red Cross Daimler car, full of Hospital convalescents, six weeks ago near the ruins of Canopus, by Aboukir. I was not an Arab of the Hejaz on that never-to-be-forgotten morning. Perhaps I was that coffee-coloured Copt—in the blue cotton galabiyeh of the Egyptian Labour Corps—squatting on a sandheap near a gang of others busy at excavation.... Or I may have been the Australian Dinkum who leaned against a Ptolemaic pillar smoking a cigarette.... You remember that his felt hat was slouched so as to hide his eyes!

"I do not smile, though I write cheerfully. Imagine what it would feel like to have a farrier thrust his steel pincers into your breast and twist your live heart round? Well, that is what I felt that day when I saw you at Aboukir. And yet I did not yield to the desire to speak to you—or try to see you, or communicate with you in any way. For to do that might have balked me of reaching my end,—prevented me from doing what I am more than ever bent on.... Had not Hazel recognised me that day near Sheria, I swear to you I would have resisted—until the finish. Perhaps I have drunk in a belief in Destiny from the Arabs. But I feel that man John Hazel is linked up with my Fate!

"So I write: and this will be conveyed to him through the officer representing —th Division, British Secret Intelligence, who firmly believed me,—until I disillusioned him—to be the Emir Fadl Anga, a pigeon-fancying petty Arab chief of the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the Sherif of Mecca. Fortunately for my peace of mind! For the time is ripe.... I have traced a leakage of information from Headquarters in Egypt to its source in a native officer who holds the confidence of the British Government—and now move to the centre where the spy's activities are manifested. On the completeness of disguise—not only the garb of the outer man,—and the technical proprieties of speech and bearing—but the mentality distinguishing an Arab nomad from a city-inhabiting European—hang the two issues:—that a traitor should meet the fate he richly merits,—and that out of the barren desert of my life I may gather a joy for Katharine.

"For Julian is alive!—sweet friend, lost sweetheart! He sends you the Rosary that comes with this. He has been shifted four times since the Turks took him prisoner on the Scimitar. From Gallipoli to a War Hospital staffed by German surgeons, and Bulgarian and German nurses of the Red Crescent, at Constantinople. From Hospital to a filthy Prison Camp near Smyrna. From Smyrna to Belemeki, a small and even filthier station in the Taurus Mountains—the headquarters for labour-gangs of prisoners working on the uncompleted tunnels of the Adana and Constantinople rail. From thence to Beersheba and Shechem. He is now at Shechem. In such misery and under such privations that to describe them would harrow you uselessly.... I do not mean to try.... But this you may know: that the starved and vermin-ridden mob of tatterdemalions,—British Yeomanry, Regulars, Australians, Indians, Jews, Frenchmen and Roumanians—who swelter and starve and toil at Shechem under the loaded Turkish hide-whips would be in infinitely worse case, but for the self-effacing tenderness of the priest whom even the Turkish guards have learned to respect. Recent negotiations between the Allied Governments and the Porte have brought about a movement towards the release or exchange of many of these prisoners.... But for some reason,—the name of Father Julian Forbis has been omitted from the official lists of those selected for exchange. His physical sufferings, I have learned, would have been lessened if he would have consented to be removed from the mud barrack-prison, and quartered in the huts of the Wired Enclosure east of the town with the officers,—who receive less villainous treatment—and are more decently housed than the men.... It was like the Julian whom we know, not to desert his charges; knowing his presence to be some check upon the inhumanity of Turkish officials, and the brutality of Turkish guards. Pray for your living brother, my beloved,—for it may be God will hear you! and for me who am no better than dead though living,—being cut off hopelessly from you.... If in dreams I kiss your eyes, and your sweet mouth,—and the soft little place under your chin, you cannot be angry.... For I have nothing left on earth but my one hope of rescuing Julian, and my dreams!—and they come every night, Katharine!—such cruelly-sweet,—vivid dreams of you and you, and You.... E.A.Y."

There was a postscript above a rough ink outline that suggested something familiar to Katharine:

"I picked the flower I enclose with the Rosary a day or so back at your Tower of Kir Saba, little thinking how soon I should be sending it to you! The Turks holding Jaffa have fortified the Tower on the E. and S.:—fixed an aërial for Wireless on the top of it—driven their trenches through the gardens and vineyards—cut down the olive-groves covering the hillside N,—and used the vaults as dumps for the storage of cartridges, H.E. shell, bombs and hand-grenades.... There is something of Kerr's Arbour about the place, despite the second, smaller Tower to the W, the round bastion at the middle of the eastward wall, and the absence of the buildings later reared against the keep.... So there, my Katharine, stands your ancient heritage, its feet deep in blossoming asphodel, and tapestries of grape-vines—now laden with ripe fruit—draping its Time-worn stone...."

The withered flower the envelope had contained was the snapped-off top of a slender green stem, bearing white blossoms in branching clusters; lily-shaped, and exhaling a delicate fragrance, recalling the scent of freesia to Katharine.

The Rosary was a hempen string, with brown-black shiny seeds of the oval type of canna Indica, arranged in the familiar decades—with black lupin-beans for Paternosters—ending in a Crucifix rudely hacked from palm-wood—fruit of hours of secret labour with the prisoner's pocket-knife....

Katharine knew that Julian must have blessed it, before sending it to Edward. Thenceforth in daily prayers to the Mother of Consolation, for her dear ones living and dead, she would use instead of her own Rosary this:—made even more sacred by the sorrow of the sender and the maker's martyrdom.

VI

In search of Lady Wastwood, temporarily busy in that Department, Katharine later on betook herself to the cool and pleasant quarters on the Palace second floor, devoted to Secretarial Work and Accounts.

"Be good enough to explain why you cut the Staff lunch to-day?" Miss Forbis said with severity, as Trixie's white triangular face and bright green eyes came out of a big parchment ledger to smile a tired welcome at her friend.

"Because of the food!" said Lady Wastwood briefly.

"The food is ripping!" pronounced Miss Forbis.

"I admit that! It's seeing you other people eat it that I mind!"

"So you avoid meals, and live on eggs and coffee, and fresh dates, and figs and bananas and grapes and custard-apples. You'll be in for Gippy Tummy if you don't take care!"

"Precious Person, I will take care. But fruit is so simply gorgeous here!—and it reminds me of Old Diplomatic Service days at Constantinople and Calcutta, when I and Wastwood used to eat figs and mangoes and fresh-picked oranges one against the other, for bets in gloves. And neither of us died—though I suppose we ought to have. Don't go, my dinkie! I'm nearly done!"

And Trixie, coming out of the big ledger with a sheaf of pencilled extracts, arranged a huge sheet of foolscap on the blotter and began to write, while Katharine waited, looking out of the window across the lawns and the elaborately-cultivated shrubberies to the line where the blue sea,—traversed by innumerable Allied steamers,—and the bluer sky, threaded by French and British aircraft—met and mingled beyond a wide expanse of light brown sand-dunes, and a belt of casuarina-trees, and tall, waving palms:

"Report On The Working of the Red Cross Motor-Ambulance and Cars For the Month of October, 1917.

"During October our 11 Cars used for General Administrative Work and for the Conveyance of Convalescents, ran 9576 miles on 636 gallons of petrol, making an average of 15.05 miles to the gallon.

"159 Convalescent Patients were taken out for Drives, and nearly all of them given tea at the Nouzah Gardens—"

"I wonder," Katharine began, after watching the long thin hand move over the paper for a minute or so, "whether you ought to be doing that?"

Lady Wastwood's incredibly arched, impossibly-black eyebrows moved nearer her green-golden hair.

"Because my heart goes biff after a ducking, I resolutely decline to be treated as an invalid. Isn't it bad enough to know that another woman is doing my work of organisation at the Convalescent Officers' Hostel at El Naza—and doing it on rottenly unimaginative lines! A woman more than a dozen years younger,—who learned from me in the days of flapperdom how to camouflage a shiny nose? No, you mustn't try to take my work from me. It helps me to forget my unrealised visions of green lawns of rabbia shaded with palms and dotted with snow white sleeping tents, and golden haired English nurses in pale blue linen overalls, ministering to hundreds of weary War-worn men."

"But the nurses mightn't all have been golden-haired," objected Katharine.

"Peroxide," said Lady Wastwood, brainily, "is fairly cheap in Egypt. And I know a Contractor who would have supplied it in seven gallon glass jars." Her small triangular face regained its old vivacity, and her green eyes their brilliancy as she pursued: "Then, I meant, to have a restaurant built far out on the sea shore, where the surf ran up under the tables as the patients sat at lunch, or tea. Rowing, riding and fishing, camel-rides and picnics would have been part of the treatment under my régime. And now—" Trixie's voice wobbled a little and she cautiously dabbed with a minute lawn handkerchief at the corners of her bright green eyes—"when I think of all those Convalescent Officers and what they have lost through Me, I get pippy. To have pulled the thing through and made a success of it would have got back my credit with Wastwood and the boys."

"My dear!" Katharine began, and hesitated: "You don't believe really—"

Trixie dabbed her eyes again,—and dabbed her nose as an afterthought, and resolutely put away the handkerchief.

"I don't quite think Wastwood—my husband—would judge me hardly. He took me three times round the world with him, and though I was a jelly of terror all the time at sea, I somehow managed to camouflage my cowardice. It's only when I remember how I groused on that ship that I imagine I can hear my Jerry saying to his brother: 'Old Man, I don't half like to say it, but the Mums is rather letting us down ... What?' And Wastwood—"

"If Wastwood or Jerry said anything so unjust," Katharine broke out, "they ought to—to be thoroughly well spanked—both of them!" She went on as Trixie reluctantly yielded to laughter, "I don't know whether you've found it out yet,—but Nurse-Superintendent Bulleyne is in charge of No. 2 Ground Floor Ward at the Harem. And she has told Lady Donnithorpe and every one else here how—when the Incendiary Bomb from the Zeppelin dropped through the roof of No. 100, West Central Square—where you used to have your Red Cross Work Rooms,—and killed two poor orderlies, and dear Alicia Macintosh!—you went into action with sand-boxes and water-buckets, and fire-extinguishers,—and saved the place from being burned out! ..."

"That was nothing to brag about," declared Trixie. "Things that go off with a bang and a piff never much frighten me, and anyone with an iota of sense knows what to do in a fire. But shipwreck"—she shuddered "and drowning—"

Katharine saw the look on the white triangular face, and came to Trixie's side protectingly. Ever since the sinking of the Hospital Transport Loyalty, the terrible experience had been renewed in Lady Wastwood's nightly dreams. She looked frailer and more startlingly attenuated than ever, as she sat among the ledgers heading a fresh sheet of foolscap:

MONTANA WAR LIBRARY—AUGUST, 1917

Lent to Patients, Montana, and Auxiliary Canvas
Convalescent Camps, Boulboul and Osra

GIFTS OF BOOKS FOR THE MONTH

The Kiss That Changed The World—By Massy
    B. M'Dudgeon ............................. 1 copy

Pond and Pink Powder—By Gertie Stumps ... 1 copy

Sermons For War Time—By the Bishop of
    Bayswater ............................. 100 copies

"Come now, you really have done enough. Stop at the Bishop."

"I wish he would pay the freightage on his stupid sermons. Forty piastres to pay on the parcel. And he expects to be thanked for it. Well, I'll knock off if you'll come and laze with me for a bit in the garden.... Do I shine? I feel like it!"

Trixie gathered up her long thin limbs, stood up and produced a vanity-case.

"Here and there.... But every one does.... I'm beginning to get used to it. No! I'm not coming to smoke your new Macedonian cigarettes, and have iced-tea with lemon in the garden this afternoon. You are coming to tea with me, in the house of a great friend of mine."

"Who is your friend?" asked Trixie, intent on the little circular mirror.

"A Jew."

"I rather like Jews. Where does your friend live?"

"Numero VII., Rue el Farad, Alexandria. His house," Katharine went on, quoting John Hazel, "is one of the few relics extant of the ancient city, a wonderfully-preserved example of the Roman-Egyptian Domestic Style."

"'I guess I shall admire to come,' as that American Nursing-Sister said when you asked her to drive to the Antoniadis Gardens. And is your friend like his house—a wonderfully preserved example of the ancient what-do-you-call-it style?"

Katharine answered promptly and warmly:

"He certainly is a wonderfully-preserved example of unspoiled Faith, and unstained Honour, and old-world Loyalty."

"How nice!" said Lady Wastwood, sweetly. But she said to herself: "I would never have believed it—Kathy Forbis being Kathy Forbis. But—if she is able to forget poor Edward Yaill, even for a wonderfully-preserved example of all the old-world virtues, with shiny jet-black curls and a curly profile—it would be—for her, poor girl—rather a good thing."

VII

He was not in the waiting car before the guarded entrance to the Hospital, as Katharine and Lady Wastwood gave the pass to the sentry, and stepped forth upon the dusty metalled road.

The car proved a large, white-enamelled Clement-Talbot of some 22 h.p., luxuriously appointed and finished exquisitely as a gun. The chauffeur was a mahogany-skinned, almond-eyed Egyptian, in a crimson felt tarbûsh and snow-white silver-braided native livery. The attendant, a grave, middle-aged man, with long curling side-locks and olive aquiline features,—who stood by the car door, imperturbably waiting the arrival of the ladies, wore the plain black kaftan and high black felt cap distinctive of many middle-class Jews in the East.

The machine ran like oil along the seventeen miles of dusty metalled roads lying between the green foliage and verdure of Montana and the great fortified Egyptian seaport,—in its environs of palm-groves and fig-gardens, tennis-lawns and golf-grounds; its streets (roaring with motor-lorries; grid-ironed with tram-lines; rattling with hack-gharis and arabâyis full of English, French or Italians, their drivers kept from running people over by the red-fezzed mahogany-hued Military Police)—traversed by swinging processions of laden camels, strings of tiny overladen donkeys, Arab hawkers, stately veiled women with clashing silver anklets, Anglo-Egyptian ladies in last season's Paris fashions; soldiers of the Egyptian Army, sherbet and sweetmeat and coffee-sellers; gangs of blue-uniformed Turkish prisoners; working-parties of the indefatigable little men of the Egyptian Labour Corps; portly native stockbrokers or merchants in the red tarbûsh and single-breasted blue frock-coat; saisis, vendors of antiques made yesterday, Dagoes and Bedwân chiefs; verminous and crazy beggars; impish native youths and urchins pressing copies of the Alexandrian Post, and the Egyptian Mail, John Bull, La Bourse, the Messagéro, the Sydney Bulletin and the Palestine Gazette, upon tall Australians in slouched felt hats, New Zealanders in red-banded smashers, lean, bearded Indian Lancers, little Ghurka Riflemen, and newly-arrived Tommies with comparatively pink-and-white faces; respectfully lavish of drinks and sticky native sweetmeats to veterans bronzed to the colour of their own khaki by the suns and dust-winds of the Desert and Palestine....

A huge, endless, living screen-picture, various and polyglot, backed and reinforced by an infinite variety of smells.... Colours of all imaginable hues; scents and reeks, stinks and fragrances. The hiss and purr, the nasal whine of Oriental tongues, mingled with the Western click and rattle, and the clang and ring of the dominating North.... Pierced by the all-pervading yell, for backsheesh, Backsheesh, BACKSHEESH!—the never-ceasing slogan of the dominated East.

Beyond the crossing where the Road of the Rosetta Gate debouches into the Rue Sherif Pasha,—whither Trixie's inward being yearned because of the cream-puffs, pink-melon ices, and Persian tea to be had at Groppi's Restaurant,—the big white car swirled into the Rue el Farad, past the beautiful tree-adorned and well-kept grounds of the Armenian Church and School.

The thoroughfare occupies the ancient site of the Street of the Four Winds, south of where used to be the quadruple marble gate, the Tetrapylon, turning off the ancient Street of the Moon. No asphalte was here, but pavement of huge blocks of ancient flagstone, not all cemented together, on which the traffic of the city, the motor-lorries, hack-gharis, country-carts and trains of laden small-hoofed donkeys, made an atrocious sound.... Tall palms, overtopping the roofs of the houses set at intervals on either side of the thoroughfare, spoke of garden-grounds behind them.... Here and there, built into a courtyard-wall, some chipped and broken column, or capital of Græco-Roman carving, some incised stele of yellowish limestone-marble, black basalt or the red granite of Assouan, incised with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the symbols of the Sun, and Moon Mother, spoke to the remoteness of the city's antiquity....

Midway of a courtyard-wall, forbiddingly high and thickly whitewashed, before a high closed portico having a deep square depression on the right-hand as though a sculptured slab or plaque had been removed from beside the entrance, the Clement-Talbot stopped. The heavy, green-painted door bore, in its central compartment of white, red Hebrew lettering instead of an Arabic inscription; the Roman numerals VII. were on a small brass plate above the heavy metal ring surmounting the huge clumsy lock, a lock straight out of The Arabian Nights....

The grave attendant got down and opened the car. Alighting, Katharine and her companion passed in, over a square of ancient mosaic, representing a black dog spotted with white, secured by a chain attached to a scarlet collar, and displaying a formidable mouthful of teeth.

The vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was of yellowish Numidian marble, yet stained a faded red in places, and showing traces of having been divided into panels by a slender incised ornament, partly obliterated, but recognisable as a black caduceus wreathed with a black vine.

And the vestibule guarded by the mosaic dog was long rather than wide, and ventilated by horizontal apertures below the roof, filled in with metal lattice-work. Through a similar but larger opening overhead poured the golden sunshine of the November noonday,—making a thick black strip of shadow beneath the long wooden bench that ran along the right-hand wall. The air of the place was cool and sweet,—in spite of an array of native shoes,—of all grades and descriptions from jaunty red morocco with pointed turned-up toes, and heels with sharp rims of brass or steel for the killing of snakes and scorpions,—to venerable footgear of soiled buff or yellow leather,—and the clumsy hide sandals commonly worn by peasants,—ranged along the left-hand wall. Even as she observed the rows of shoes, Katharine's keen ears were greeted by a curious deep-toned humming—as though innumerable, invisible bees, of Brobdingnagian proportions—were gathering honey from conjectural flowers in the near neighbourhood....

The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to the ladies; displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard the car snort and move away as the metal bolts scrooped in their ancient grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the imperturbable attendant in the black kaftan waved them forward to where another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume, waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal repoussée, with an oval piece of glass inset—something like a human eye. And the big invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"Bz'zz'z! .... Bzz'z! ... Bzz m' m'm! ..."

Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,—though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had opened doors,—the rows of shoes along the wall, the figure of Trixie at her side—the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black tarbûshes and kaftans had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked big.... He was there,—beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish secretary—on the farther side of the torrent of boiling amber sunshine pouring through a central opening in the roof of the inner hall that succeeded the vestibule of the mosaic Cerberus. An atrium some forty feet in length, paved with squares of black and yellow marble, with an oblong pool in the midst of it—upon whose still, crystal surface pink and crimson petals of roses had been strewn in patterns,—and in the centre of which a triple-jetted fountain played....

"Bzz' zz m'm! ..."

The humming of the unseen bees came louder than ever, from a doorway in the wall upon Katharine's right hand.... A wall of black polished marble, decorated with an inlaid ornament in porphyry of yellow and red and pale green. The curtain of dyed and threaded reeds did not hide what lay beyond the doorway. You saw a long, high-pitched, whitewashed room, cooled by big wooden electric fans working under the ceiling, and traversed by avenues of creamy-white Chinese matting, running between rows of low native desks; before each of which squatted—on naked or cotton-sock-covered heels, or sat cross-legged upon a square native chintz cushion, a coffee-coloured, almond-eyed young Copt, in a black or blue cotton nightgown, topped with the tarbûsh of black felt or a dingy-white or olive-brown muslin turban; murmuring softly to himself as he made entries, from right to left, in a huge limp-covered ledger, or deftly fingered the balls of coloured clay strung on the wires of the abacus at his side.

"Oh! ... Wonderful! I'm so glad you brought me!"

Lady Wastwood's emphatic exclamation of pleasure in her surroundings brought cessation in the humming,—caused a swivelling of capped or turbaned heads all down the length of three avenues,—evoked a simultaneous flash of black Oriental eyes, and white teeth in dusky faces lifted or turned.... Then at the upper end of the long counting-house, where three wide glassless windows looked on a sanded palm-garden (and the leather-topped knee-hole tables, roll-top desks, copying ink presses, mahogany revolving-chairs, telephone installations, willow-paper baskets, pewter inkstands and Post Office Directories suggested Cornhill and Cheapside rather than the Orient)—one of the olive-faced Jewish head-clerks in kaftans and side-curls coughed,—and as though he had pulled a string controlling all the observant faces,—every tooth was hidden and every eye discreetly bent on the big limp ledgers again....

All the Coptic bees were humming sonorously in unison as Katharine went forward to a lofty doorway, framing brightness, where waited to receive her the master of the hive....

The light being behind him may have exaggerated his proportions, but he seemed to Trixie the biggest man she had ever seen, and nearly the ugliest. Close-curling coarse black hair capped his high-domed skull; and his stern, powerful, swarthy face, big-nosed and long-chinned,—with a humorous quirk at the corners of the heavy-lipped mouth that redeemed its sensuousness—was lighted by eyes of the intensest black, burning under heavy beetle-brows. His khaki uniform, though of fine material and admirable cut, was that of a common ranker, and a narrow strip of colours over the heart, and the fact of his left arm being bandaged and slung,—intimated to Lady Wastwood that Katharine's Jewish friend had already served with some degree of distinction,—and had been wounded in the War.

As he advanced to Miss Forbis, plainly unconscious of any presence save hers, Trixie's observant green eyes saw him bend his towering head, and sweep his right arm out and down, with slow Oriental stateliness, bringing back the supple hand to touch breast, lips and brow. Whether or not he had raised the hem of Katharine's skirt to his lips and kissed it, Lady Wastwood could not definitely determine. She was left with the impression that he had done this thing. And—as he rose up from the deep obeisance, there sounded in her ears these words of salutation spoken in English by a deep voice, with the timbre and volume of an Arab war-drum:

"Hail! Lady of the noble house of Philoremus Fabius. Be welcome to this dwelling, the cradle of your race. Mine to-day as my forefathers' through bygone centuries, since your footstep crossed the threshold, we are stewards, and you are Queen!"

VIII

He might have been quoting from some classical play, it occurred to Trixie,—perhaps he was an actor, this colossal khaki man.... Though Katharine had certainly said that he had offices and warehouses in the city. That was his counting-house, that populous hall, where rows and rows of Coptic clerks did sums in huge ledgers. And Katharine was presenting him as "Mr. John Hazel." And he was saying to Lady Wastwood, the usual civil nothings, in the voice that had the resonance of a Somali war-gong, the deep vibration of a Dervish battle-drum—and the clipped accent of the ordinary middle-class Londoner.

"Frightfully glad to meet you.... Miss Forbis said she'd bring you.... Won't you come inside? This is my room!"

"What a room!"

The exclamation came from Lady Wastwood, but the room's owner looked at Katharine. The stamp of her approval was evidently required.

"You like it? ..."

Katharine answered, with a long-drawn breath, in utter sincerity:

"—Much more than like it! It is—perfectly wonderful!"

It had probably once served as the triclinium of this ancient Roman house. Of spacious width, it might have been some sixty feet in length, and twenty feet from the mosaic floor to the frescoed ceiling, representing a sky of intense blue, with stars of rusty gold. Framed, the blue starry sky, in a square of trellised roses, their hues faded and dimmed by the passage of centuries, the yellowish marble showing in patches through the gesso groundwork—as through that of the deep frieze below the Attic cornice,—painted by some ancient master in the noon of Alexandria's heyday,—and representing in hues still fresh and brilliant the Battles of the Greeks and Amazons.

Below the frieze an ebony shelf supported a collection of Oriental pottery and porcelain, interspersed with antique vases and statuettes in ivory and bronze. Down one side of the long room were glass-doored book-cases, built in recesses,—and cabinets stored with objects of beauty and rarity. A wide divan strewn with silken cushions and covered with brocade of Damascus, ran along the opposite side and under the window at the upper end,—where the floor—raised some eight inches, made a kind of daïs, upon which Persian carpets of beauty and evident value were laid....

The window, glassless, and closed at need, with delicately-carved wooden lattices, ran across the upper end of the room, nearly from wall to wall. Where the window ended, a door between twisted pillars of red and green serpentine—such as were set between the frames of the window-lattices—led to an open loggia, supported by slender columns. From the window and through the door—across the cool blue belt of shadow made by the fluted tiled roof of the loggia—were the green lawns and springing fountains, the groves and alleys and shrubberies of a well-kept and spacious garden; over whose fruit-burdened vines and fig-trees hosts of finches and orioles and fig-birds kept up a perpetual chirping and twittering.

It was restful and cool in the wide, lofty room,—would have been so had no wooden fans, driven by electric power—kept the air in continual movement underneath the frescoed ceiling. The heavy door at the hall-end being shut, the hum of the busy Coptic bees of Hazaël & Co.'s counting-house could not penetrate, where after months of keen anticipation John Hazel welcomed his liege lady, with outward stolidity and grave, rather clumsy politeness—masking the shy rapture—say, of an Eton Fourth Form boy doing the honours of his study to the prettiest sister of his chum.

"Now, where'll you perch?" he said to Lady Wastwood, after carefully installing Miss Forbis in the divan's right-hand window-corner. He was hospitable in the extreme, Trixie decided, and any thing but well-bred. How odd that such a man should possess sufficient insight and discrimination to admire Katharine as profoundly as John Hazel evidently did....

"By the way, Mr. Hazel," Katharine's fresh voice called to him, as he found a suitable resting-place for Lady Wastwood—and Trixie's observant green eyes saw him jump, and flush under his mahogany hide; "I've seen your name starred in to-day's paper. 'Commander-in-Chief's Despatches retelegraphed from Whitehall. Recommended for the Military Medal, Acting Company Sergeant John Benn Hazel—448th City of London (Fenchurch Street) Royal Fusiliers. Extraordinary valour displayed at Sheria.... Twelve Turks bayonetted, one after another....' Congratulations with all my heart!"

Her long arm swept out to John, and he took the hand, reddening, and promptly returned it, stammering: "Awfully obliged for what you say!—but as regards the M.M. there's no accounting for the way they have of ladling out these tin-and-gilt things. Mean well and one's obliged, but the men who earn 'em never get 'em!" He smote his giant palms together, evoking a terrific detonation. "Sorry if I made you jump." Nervous Trixie had done so. "But this is how we do in the East when we want 'em to bring tea!"

Two blue-shirted, white-gowned Egyptian boys and a bulky middle-aged negress, black as coal; with a high silk turban of rainbow hues, a skirted yellow over-robe, full striped trousers of orange and green, and clashing rows of bangles, responded to the summons, setting heavy silver trays, laden with good things, many and various, on inlaid ebony stool-tables before their master's guests.... The arrival of the trays heralded the entrance of an elderly lady, sad-faced, olive-skinned, black-eyed and white-haired, attired in an old-fashioned grey silk gown. As "My Aunt Esther," their big host referred to this lady, presenting her—against all the rules of precedence, first to Miss Forbis and inversely introducing Lady Wastwood.... With whom the sad-faced elderly lady shook hands cordially, though she had curtseyed ceremoniously and profoundly as she had taken the hand held out by to her by Katharine....

The tea poured out by the sad little grey lady, was Persian, and far superior to Groppi's, in Trixie's opinion,—as were the cream-tarts and pistachio-nut, and date-cakes,—the delicate Egyptian rolls and creamy curls of butter, the pink-melon ices and sherbet of fresh limes, and newly-gathered grapes, figs and oranges.... Indifferent to the possible result of an attack of Gippy Tummy, Trixie enjoyed herself, listening with amused interest to Mrs. Hazaël's gentle chatter, as the little lady's thin hands, loaded with magnificent rubies and emeralds, darted about amongst the cups....

In fluent English, spoken with a strong French accent,—both languages having been acquired in her girlhood, she explained—at a Maltese Convent boarding-school, where she had spent eight years,—she entertained her guest with arid recollections of the Early Eighties, mingled with more welcome details of the cost of housekeeping in the East.

It appeared that the negress,—whose name was Fatmeh, and who came from Upper Nubia,—was responsible for the making of the cream-tarts and the date-and-pistachio cakes.... But the crowning culinary achievement of Fatmeh was kunaféh, which could not be properly offered with tea, being a dinner-dish; made of sesame-flour, clarified butter and honey, with eggs and raisins, and fried in a pan.... If Miladi would honour the house by coming to dinner, the hostess added, the kunaféh should be forthcoming, made and fried in Fatmeh's finest style....

"You are quite too infinitely kind, Madame," Trixie responded, and as she abominated pancakes, the description of kunaféh left her chilly. "But though to dine with you would give me the greatest pleasure,—my acceptance of the invitation must naturally depend on the engagements of Her Majesty over there...."

And the Commandant's smiling nod indicated Miss Forbis, seated in the divan's opposite corner, drinking Persian tea out of exquisite porcelain, and revelling in the beauty of the gardens,—where palms tasselled with golden fruit, and laden fig-trees on spreading trellises, and sycamores draped with grapevines heavy with purple clusters, made islands of shadow and fruitful luxuriance,—while shrubberies of myrtle and rose and oleander invited the footsteps of stranger and habitué to explore the winding pathways that threaded them—under the hot blue sky of the November noon....

"You call her Queen? ..." The lustrous dark eyes of the white-haired lady studied the fine face, and dwelt on the superb lines of the gracious womanly figure for an instant before she said: "And you are right! C'est une physionomie très noble! I have seen Queens and Empresses in Europe—and here in Asia, who would have looked like peasants beside her! ... As for the arrangement of the date—that is not for me to make—or for my nephew. It is she who gives orders—in this house!"

"But I thought that like myself, Miss Forbis was a stranger! I understood from her," said Trixie munching her third cream-cake, "that though Mr. Hazel is a great friend and pal of hers in England, she has never visited this house before."

The reply was given with Eastern dignity:

"When I, who am fifty-eight, was a child, her father came to Alexandria. My grandfather, who was then living—entertained him as a King.... His daughter has never entered the house before,—and the house is the house of Hazaël. But the stones of it would call to her 'Mistress!' if the lips of Hazaël were dumb...."

The sudden fire that had lightened in the soft dark Eastern eyes died out of them, and the olive face resumed its sad tranquillity. But not before Lady Wastwood had realised a piquant, baffling strangeness, in the relations between Kathy Forbis and these Alexandrian Jews....

"One has one's own secrets wild horses wouldn't drag from one," was her quaint mental comment, "and so, of course, have others. But mysteries and Kathy Forbis don't seem to go together. Why—"

Trixie broke off, for at that particular juncture the huge left hand of the little Syrian lady's big black nephew was coolly drawn from its supporting sling, and stretched towards a dish of fruit upon a tray that stood near. And there came to the Commandant's ears the full, warm voice of Katharine:

"No, thanks! I learned to distrust green figs the first week I spent in Egypt. And—I think you were told yesterday at the Hospital not to use that wounded arm! ..."

"You see, I forget," said the big man, very humbly and apologetically. "It's only a flesh-cut, and doesn't hurt, as I told the Assassin-in-charge. And I'm left-handed—like the Hun who slashed me with his sword as he tried to pot me with his revolver. Has it been dressed since yesterday? ... Oh, yes, I had to report at the General Hospital this morning, and they looked to it all right. And I kiboshed the C.M.O. about my living at home. They're fearfully crowded for space at the General—and don't want well men blocking the wards—luckily for me...."

He laughed, and as he stuffed his bandaged arm back into the sling, the gleam of a ring on the third finger of his left hand,—a great antique ring in a pale greenish gold setting, attracted Trixie's eye. The eye gleamed,—for a similar signet was always worn by Katharine. Could it be,—Oh, really!—it couldn't—Couldn't be possible!—that Edward Yaill's successor would be this colossal Jew....

"Of course, being a woman myself," Trixie reflected, "I ought to be used to women having—even before the War came to effect a fusion between the classes—such astonishing, Extraordinary, INCOMPREHENSIBLE tastes in men! And naturally, after being engaged to Yaill all those years—an officer of the old Conservative type,—thoroughbred to the backbone, conversant with Society, high-tempered, rather irritable, affectionate, gentle, tinged with Celtic melancholy; this man—what is he?—must be a complete change. Dressed as a Territorial Tommy, living as an Alexandrian Jew merchant, talking in the shibboleth and with the accent of the modern City Nut,—the young man of the Theatrical Syndicate and the West End Supper Club—dashed with something out of the Book of Kings! Dear me! I'd like to shriek with laughter—if I didn't feel nearer shedding tears of vexation at the idea of my splendid Kathy caring for the kind of person who says to a woman 'Where'll you perch?' when he wants her to sit down."

Preoccupied with the absorbing theme, Trixie returned but absent replies to Mrs. Hazaël's mild observations; and conversation languished between the pair. Until the Commandant's languid attention was prodded to wakeful keenness by a chance observation on the part of her host's aunt....

"I do not know, Miladi...." This in reply to some reference to the wearer of the ring similar to Katharine's. "My nephew John Hazaël was educated in England. He has been in business in the City of London—he never was in Egypt until he came here with the English soldiers, to fight the Turk who has driven us from our homes in Palestine!" The sad dark eyes lightened fiercely, the drooping figure straightened, the toneless voice vibrated with passion as Mrs. Hazaël went on: "Before then I had not seen my brother's son. Indeed, knowing him to be Epikouros,—I had thought of him but little! Imagine what for me it meant to find John Ben Hazaël the image of his grandfather! ... For they are alike, Miladi—as citron resembles citron,—though the years of one were a hundred, and the other is but thirty-five. True, he has not learnt to observe our ancient customs, nor has he been reared according to the Law. He is blind to the beauty and splendour of the glorious Hebrew religion. But even as a myrtle in the midst of the Desert remains a myrtle,—John Hazaël, the eldest son of John, the son of Eli Ben Hazaël,—will live the life and die the death of a good, believing Jew!"

"To know that," Trixie returned, conscious of feeling her way amidst unseen pitfalls, "must be a great pleasure to you, Madame...."

"I do not look for pleasure," came the sad-toned answer. "And comfort there is none for me, whom the Turk has stripped of all. When this terrible War broke out in Palestine, Miladi, I had a husband,—and two sons,—and a daughter!"—A convulsion rippled under the olive skin of the withered face as the waters of a lonely forest-pool will stir on a windless day.... "My son Jacob they took first,—to labour with the road-gangs between Sailed and Tiberias.... My daughter—my Esther, my darling and my treasure—the golden joy of her father's heart—"

"Pray, pray, do not tell me!" Lady Wastwood whispered entreatingly, for the speaker's dark eyes were bloodshot and her mouth had twisted in the involuntary grimace of weeping with difficulty restrained, "I can guess something terrible.... Please believe that I deeply feel for you!—I who have lost husband and children too! ..."

"'Husband and children! ...' Achi nebbich! ..."

The little grey woman bowed her lace-draped head, and folded her jewelled hands in her grey silk lap as she continued:

"But such deaths were those of my loved ones, Miladi, that nothing that you could imagine could approach the terror of the truth! Yet it might have been worse—oh, infinitely!—had not Jacob possessed the courage of a lion. He shot his sister, Miladi, in the room of her destroyer,—and turned the pistol on himself and died also! ..." There was a clang of pride in the dull tear-soaked voice. "Then Reuben Ben Ephraim—who was with Jacob in the den of the hyena—Hamid Bey Effendi—Commander of the Turkish soldiers at Nazareth"—there followed some rapid guttural words in a tongue unknown to Trixie, probably a bitter Hebrew curse upon the hated name.... "then Reuben, seeing both dead, escaped by the Mercy, and sent word to us, me and my husband—in our house near Jaffa—of what had befallen the children of our love! ... And hearing that the vengeance of Hamid was to be wreaked upon us, my husband Isaac, the uncle of John Hazaël! ... may Peace be upon him! as it is our custom to say—Isaac escaped to Beirut with our last child, Benjamin. Miladi—the fierce wolves seized them. They both died in prison at Beirut—under the Turkish rods! ... The young child first, Miladi—under the eyes of his father.... Then the father!—Peace be upon them both! ... And the shock of the news killed Eli Ben Hazaël, for he was close upon a hundred.... Thus am I widow, and childless, and fatherless in this house that has sheltered my people for more than sixteen centuries. Ah, Miladi!—I have made you weep! ... I have no tears—they were all shed long ago!" She rose, a little tragic figure in her old-fashioned silk gown, and held out to Trixie a withered, jewelled hand. "My nephew is looking at me.... He wishes me to show you the garden, while he speaks of business with Mademoiselle Forbis...." A slight cry escaped her as her eyes went to the window, and a faint gleam of pleasure lightened in their hopelessness as she lifted the wasted, glittering hand: "See! O see! Look, Miladi! ... Look, my children! ... Once again, the swallows have come! ..."

There had been no swallows a moment previously. Summer in the North, warmer that year of 1917 than in the three preceding, had delayed their autumn journey overseas. Now the deep blue sky above the tamarisk and acacia Nilotica,—the vine-draped sycamore figs, the tall imperial palm-trees, the orange and lemon groves, and the myrtle and rose-thickets behind the house in the Rue el Farad, were crossed and recrossed by innumerable downy black-and-white bodies, borne upon darting, quivering pinions, and the continuous twitterings of the fig-birds were drowned by their shrill squeaks....

From the eaves of the round-tiled roof of the loggia, where some old nests were yet remaining, a rope of swallows swayed and dangled; clinging one to the tail of another—the weight of the whole rope sustained by the first usurper of the disputed nest.... A moment more and the feathered rope resolved into its original atoms. They rose in a cloud,—squealing, wheeling, hovering and poising, and launched themselves in joyous chase of the flies and mosquitoes, whose deadliest enemies they are....

And then one of the darting things—possibly a new-fledged stranger—keen on the capture of some gauze-winged morsel, flew in at the window, and hawked about the room....

The blue sky frescoed on the ceiling by the ancient artist, framed in its trellis of dimmed and faded roses, must have deceived the eager bird. Its upward flight ended in the tiniest thud possible.... Vitality quitted its infinitesimal being.... It dropped, a mere puff of black and white feathers, at Katharine Forbis's feet....

"Again.... Each year, the same thing happens! A bird is killed—just in this way. It is sad, but there's no help for it...." sighed Mrs. Hazaël. "Throw it away, dear Mademoiselle, it is only a dead bird! ..."

But Mademoiselle, who had picked up the tiny body to cherish and croon over, did not follow her hostess's advice. To sense the divine quality of maternity inherent in Katharine's beauty, you had to see her petting an invalid, or a child. Or as now, with some helpless, injured creature,—looking at it under drooped eyelids of soft solicitude, cherishing it with compassionate touches of deft, womanly hands....

Those kind hands had touched John Hazel, yesterday, in helping the Hospital surgeon and Sister with the dressing of his wounded arm.... It was not until their contact had sent shocks of keen, scarce bearable delight thrilling through nerve and tissue, that John Hazel had discovered—what you have guessed ere now....

All the night through he had lain awake, living those moments over, and over!—cursing himself for a fool thrice soaked in folly, a bally idiot, and a presumptuous cad.... But daylight had found him no whit more wise, nor one iota less besotted; even more gnawed with desperate hunger to feel her cool breath fanning his bared shoulder, and know the rapture of her touch again....

Now the soft, compassionate eyes, the tender touch and the sweet solicitude were given to a bird, while the man hungered. John Hazel, one is compelled to own—was keenly jealous of the stunned swallow—as the thorn-like beak opened and shut, and the sealed eyelids quivered apart—and Katharine's cry of womanly joy greeted these signs of life....

"It isn't dead, dear Madame!" she cried gaily to the Syrian lady, as she dipped a finger-tip in a flower-vase that stood near, dropped some water in the open beak, and wetted the velvety head.... The swallow quivered in her palm, gasped convulsively and swallowed the water; swallowed another drop given in the same way, and regaining strength, struggled to free itself from the protecting hand....

"Kiss it, Trixie, and give it a message for its little brothers! ... Now you shall go, my dear," said Katharine, when, Lady Wastwood having dutifully kissed the top of the bird's head, she touched the featherless, velvet crown with her own lips. Then, still cherishing the struggling bird in her cupped palms, she passed through the door at the head of the divan, stepped out upon the loggia, and with a sweep of her long arm, sent the captive, squeaking with rapture, to rejoin its long-winged comrades in the playgrounds of the air.

"How's that, Umpire?" she called to John Hazel, following with attentive eyes the rocket-like upward rush. "It rather sets one thinking"—she broke off in the middle of the sentence as John stooped beneath the lintel of the doorway, and joined her on the loggia.

"Thinking of what?" he asked, for her face was grave and troubled.

"Of prisoners and captives," Katharine answered, "and what they must feel when their fetters are broken and their dungeons lie behind them, and the free sky is over them and the free earth underfoot.... Talking of earth, I rather think you promised to show me your garden, or if you didn't I should like you to.... Your aunt has spirited Lady Wastwood away—" She nodded at Trixie's tall, thin retreating shape, upright and workmanlike in its badged, light-weight smasher hat and short-skirted khaki cotton-drill uniform; as side by side with Mrs. Hazaël's black lace mantilla and old-fashioned trailing grey silk gown, it turned the corner of a myrtle-hedge, and was lost in the shrubbery. "And I rather want to consult you.... There's a seat under that moss-cup oak—it is a moss-cup, isn't it?—it's getting beautifully cool, and the tree looks nice and shady. And you could smoke—or I could—and talk comfortably there...."

He got her green-lined sun-umbrella and insisted on holding it over her, as they crossed the verdant, well-watered lawn to the patriarchal moss-cup oak of Miss Forbis's desire. A curve-backed, scroll-ended seat of red granite stood under its wide-spreading branches. Near the seat was a great bed of balsam and heliotrope.

"Oh, sweet, sweet!" He had gathered a huge handful of the fragrant-flowered, nettle-leaved plant and laid it on Katharine's knee as she seated herself, and her sentences were broken with rapturous sniffs. "How I—do—love—the smell of heliotrope! ... I thought it heavenly in England,—but it was nothing to this! ... And the view of the house from where I sit! ... Who would have dreamed that behind the hideous whitewashed wall of your courtyard, so much of the wonderful lost city of Alexander the Great, and of the Ptolemies, in whose Museum Euclid and Aristophanes, and Hypatia were Professors,—lay snugly tucked away!" She went on wistfully:

"Tell me why I feel as though my heartstrings were tangled up in the foundations of this dear, dear house of yours, and there were memories and voices in the stones of the walls! ... Why don't you smoke? ..."

"I will if I may.... It'll keep off the mosquitoes. May I offer you one?" He produced a case.

"No, thanks! I'll smoke mine. Yours look good, but too large and solid for feminine creatures to appreciate. Though when I worked at the Front in France, I've been glad to fall back on Army Gaspers. Or ten sou packets of the rank Régie beloved by the Poilu."

"You used to smoke before the War?" He asked it as he gave her a light, and she answered, as the Turkish tobacco kindled, breathing out a delicate puff of the fragrant bluish vapour:

"After a luncheon or dinner-party, one smoked—just to keep other people in countenance. But afterwards—in France—and here, to quiet one's jangled nerves!"

"You don't look like a woman with jangled nerves," he said, considering her steadily.

"Perhaps not, but still they play up sometimes.... Look at the swallows—they've already begun to build! In the corner of the window of that big upper room with three large windows latticed up, and groups of columns between them—and a dome, rising behind the pediment—it is a pediment, isn't it? that long triangular stone? ..."

The deep voice said to her:

"No one ever uses that room where you see the swallows building. It is kept locked all through the year except on one day...." The great brown hand pointed to the three windows below the pediment, the deep voice so like and so unlike John Hazel's went on: "There is an altar in that room with a Christian shrine beneath it.... We strip the gardens bare each year to make the chapel beautiful,—we who have been Guardians of the Shrine for more than sixteen hundred years...."

"But—but this is a Jewish house! ..."

"That is quite true." The brown hand waved. "The house belongs to Jews indeed, but it was not theirs always.... Nor do we break the Jewish Law in honouring the dead. Should you, who are of his race and faith, desire to visit the chapel ... here is the key.... Whenever you will, I am ready to take you there."