Book the Third: THE FINDING

I

Weeks after John Hazel had sailed with a draft of leave-expired "Fenchurch Streets,"—to join the Division to which that gallant London regiment was attached—with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Forces at Salonika—and while brave British men in Palestine were cracking their teeth on that hard nut of Gaza—H.M. Transport Loyalty, (an ex-Austrian Lloyd Liner captured at the beginning of the War, and converted into a Mediterranean Hospital ship), sailed for Egypt,—and in the Photographic Puff of the week's issue appeared—under an enlarged snapshot of the pre-War departure of the ex-Austrian Lloyd from Southampton Docks—this announcement:

"POPULAR SOCIETY PEERESS, COMMANDANT OF L.L.W.S.L., SAILS FOR EASTERN THEATRE OF WAR."

Another periodical of the type that daily caters for readers of another order, published, under a portrait of Lady Wastwood in exiguous dinner dress:

"TRIXIE MAKES TRACKS FOR EGYPT TO FIND OUT WHY SPHINX SMILES."

While in the Daily Wire of a few days' later issue was published a brief paragraph to the effect that H.M. Transport Loyalty had been torpedoed on the fifth day of her voyage out to Alexandria; carrying some officers and men of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force returning from sick-leave; a detachment of Military Nurses and fourteen brand-new ambulance-cars; many War Hospital stores and comforts destined for our wounded, together with a complete unit of the British Red Cross.

"Miss Forbis, V.A.D., of Kerr's Arbour, N.B., is included in the list of the rescued, as also Trixie, Lady Wastwood, O.B.E., Commandant L.L.W.S.L., who was on her way to the East to employ her well-known powers of organisation in the establishment of a Hostel for Convalescent Officers (Auxiliary) in the neighbourhood of Alexandria." The famous motto of the Legion is, doubtless, familiar to our readers: "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick At Nothing, and Never Grouse."

The usual boat-drill had not been neglected, and when the alarm had once been sounded, everybody had dutifully turned up at his or her allotted station in overcoat and cork lifebelt, to be not at all astonished by the intelligence that the scare was simply a dud.... No attack upon the part of enemy submarines had been anticipated.... The Loyalty, with her three vast squares of green paint bounding a white-edged Red Cross (outlined at night by brilliant electric lights)—amidships on each side, ought to be regarded as sacrosanct by German submarines.... But of course people understood there were loose mines in the Mediterranean, though the minefields were all known.

Lady Wastwood had rather ruffled the good-humour of the Captain by constantly asking him how he could be Certain of this? But after he had personally conducted the Commandant, life-belt and all—for from this practical insurance Trixie never separated—to his chart-house on the Lower Bridge, and displayed before her green eyes a chart of the Mediterranean, ornamented with designs in coloured inks by the Navigating; Lieutenant—indicating areas strewn with floating mines by the Kaiser and the Sublime Porte, "G.M. at such-and-such a depth, and T.M. at such-and-such another," and illustrated the uses of the telephones between the Wireless Room and the chart-house, and the telegraphs linking the officer on the bridge with the engine-room, and the speaking-tubes communicating with the batteries of quick-firing guns fore and aft,—Trixie's anxieties were completely laid to rest. She thanked the Captain effusively, and with a gracious smile and bow to the Navigating Lieutenant, descended to the saloon-deck cabin,—which she shared with Miss Forbis—to renew her complexion for the 12.30 lunch.

To wash your hands, arrange your hair and refresh your complexion while arrayed in a life-belt being impossible, Trixie removed her practical insurance, hanging it on the cabin sofa-end while she monopolised the looking-glass.

"Of course I am a grouse—and a disgrace to the Legion, I know it too well!" she owned to Katharine, as she intensified her V-shaped Pierrot smile with a stick of scarlet paste, "and instead of playing rounders and quoits and clock-golf—which is exactly the same kind of thing as playing water polo in a wash-hand basin—what I really long to do is to huddle in a deck-chair, and look out for oily streaks and white breaks in the water. But I am the victim of a morbid imagination—that keeps telling me what happens to you when you get wrecked at sea. You go down and come up three times—and see all the events of your past life processioning before you. That must be horrible! And they say it always happens—the people, I mean, who have nearly been drowned—and were only just saved in time!"

"But nobody who has been quite drowned has ever given an account of it," said Katharine, with her wholesome, heartening laugh.

Sea and sunshine had done much for Miss Forbis. Private Abrahams would have recognised her for the bright-eyed, smiling woman he had met that day on the Menin Road.... We cannot always mourn the dead, or bewail the lost that are living; though often her heart cried out in anguish for her dear ones; and waking of nights upon the shallow pillow of the upper bunk in the suffocating cabin, she would feel for a silver whistle she carried in her bosom—and kiss it—and cry herself to sleep again.... Or lie sleepless amidst the creakings, the overhead tramplings and shoutings; the snorting of electrically-driven ventilators; the occasional thump! of a bigger sea than usual upon the bows of the Loyalty, and the dismal sounds emitted by sufferers from the malady of the sea....

"How sensibly you look at things, Kathy dear," said Lady Wastwood, putting the final touch to her Pierrot smile....

Friendly and even affectionate as were the relations between these two women,—no reference had ever been made by one or the other to that February day of Trixie's encounter with Edward Yaill on board the Scotch Express. But the subject was in the air, and both felt it,—and possibly because of this, their conversation was elaborately casual....

Trixie added, as she intensified the eyebrows that resembled musical slurs, with a black pencil: "But really, my stupid nerves are quieting down! The skipper has cheered me wonderfully. There's something so refreshingly bluff and reassuring about a big smiling sailor man with white ducks and an Irish accent,—of the northern kind that one doesn't associate with dynamite and revolvers and masks. He has quite put my idiotic fears to bed. I shall never—AH!"—

A hot, violet-yellow light seemed to fill the cabin, as the terrible detonation shook the Loyalty. The air seemed flame.... Dust filled their lungs and nostrils, and the shattering crash of descending tons of water, mingled with the great cry blended of innumerable voices, that goes up to Heaven from a mined or torpedoed ship.... Then the shrieks and cries ceased, as Discipline asserted itself. Through the deafening roar of escaping steam—and the racket of shattered engines—the bugle sounded the alarm—in deadly earnest now....

"Come!" said Katharine Forbis. She wrenched open the cabin door, letting in a rush of water, seized both their life-belts and gripped hold of Lady Wastwood, who, half-swooning, wavered as though about to fall. Somehow Miss Forbis dragged her charge through a jam of white-faced men and women—along the broad gangway, oddly tilted forwards—ankle-deep in water—up the main companion—tilted too, at that queer forward angle—down which the sea was rushing in a heavy waterfall. Drenched and gasping, to reach the promenade-deck—emerging into the radiant beauty of a Mediterranean day with the shout:

"All passengers on deck with life-belts on! All passengers on deck with life-belts on!" ringing in her ears....

Sun and sea, sea and sun,—and Death at its ugliest—an uncanny combination.... There was no panic after the first outcry and the headlong scrimmage for the upper deck. The deafening boom of escaping steam made it necessary to shout so as to be heard by those who stood nearest.... The forward tilt of the smooth white planks increased momentarily. The Loyalty's bow-plates and forward compartments had been stove in by the explosion. She was settling down by the nose, into the mirror-clear water—while the Military Nurses in their grey cloaks,, and the men and women of the Red Cross stood to attention on her tilting decks—and her officers went to and fro....

There never had been panic, there was even a little laughter.... No fear of horrors of thirst and starvation attending on shipwreck in the crowded Mediterranean Sea.... The low grey hulls of the Loyalty's two attendant Destroyers were visible on her starboard a long way ahead.... They were getting steam up.... "Coming to look after us!" shouted somebody to somebody. Of course they had been apprised by Wireless of what had occurred....

"Great invention, Wireless!" shouted somebody else to Katharine....

Katharine nodded back. She hardly felt depressed.

"B'mm. Hm'm! Oom'm m! ..."

A seaplane came droning out of the bright distance from where the low grey hulls of Destroyers showed, shepherding a stately procession of camouflaged troopers and battleships,—and hovered in narrowing circles over the Loyalty. Her pilot shut off—and his observer shouted something through a megaphone. What he said could not be heard through the roar of the escaping steam. Then he dropped a weighted note and flew away southwards, and the Second Officer grabbed the note and hurried off to take it to the Captain on the bridge.... Katharine never saw him again.... But inside the space of twenty seconds every soul on board the doomed vessel was in possession of the ugly fact....

The Loyalty had got out of her course,—strayed miles from the guarded ocean highway, traversed in comparative safety by the shipping of the Allies, patrolled by British Fleet hydroplanes, submarines and Argus-eyed T.B.D.'s.... She was in the middle of a Turkish minefield, one of those fulminating enemy areas marked out on her charts with lines and letters in coloured inks, that had been displayed by her Captain to the anxious eyes of Lady Wastwood. The powerful magnetos of a German submarine,—hovering in her near vicinity, had caused deviation in the British transport's compasses. Or, there had been a blunder—the truth will never be known....

Of the boats that had got away from the ship,—the first were crowded with women only; the next were packed with women and a sprinkling of men.... They pulled away towards those grey shapes on the southern horizon—topped by columns of slanting smoke—and presently were mere specks upon the straining sight....

As Katharine and Lady Wastwood were helped over the rail into their boat, and it was lowered to the level of the water—something like a shudder went through the Loyalty.... Her stern-ports lifted at a greater angle, and her bows were submerged more deeply. Looking up at her huge grey bulk, it seemed to Katharine that some vast cetacean,—bombed and harpooned—lay dying in agony upon the smooth and glassy sea....

She saw the Captain on the bridge, binoculars in hand, speaking to one of the minor officers. Urged in some way, he shook his head as though in refusal, and as his subordinate quitted the bridge—resumed his interrupted scanning of the distant sea. Perhaps the binoculars had focussed the travelling top of a periscope, and the breaking of white water, miles away to the east....

When the double White Death Streak cleaved the blue sea, and one after another two torpedoes hit the Loyalty on her port side amidships—her bows plunged downwards, throwing most of the people remaining on her decks, into the water. Others clung to her rails and the roofs of her deck-structures, as with a thunderous rattle of scrapping iron, her bowels fell out of her mangled body,—and she dived and vanished in a whirlpool of her own. As her stern heaved up perpendicularly, lifting her huge triple screws sheer out of the swirling water, a Portuguese sailor scrambled up upon her counter, naked as in the hour of his birth,—and so stood poised; his rich brown body gleaming,—his wild eyes and bared teeth glittering in the sun:

"Mao riao parta o' diabo! ... (May the Thunderbolt split you, devil! ...")

He shook his dark clenched fist towards the east, shrieking out the imprecation—meant perhaps for the Kaiser or the Sultan or the Commander of the submarine,—and dived magnificently as the ship sank, dragging down with her the last boats....

And then, through suffocation, and roaring sounds of water in her ears—flashes of sunlight piercing her smarting eyes, wedges of blackness driving over mind and soul—lightning flashes of consciousness—gasped-out prayers to God, wild cries for help,—washed down her choking throat by volumes of bitter waters—Katharine Forbis came up out of the depths—to find herself floating in sunlight and strange silence, on a sea covered with a strange confusion of floating débris....

Not alone, for all the silence. In the company of a good many other people, pluckily bent on keeping their courage up, and other folks' as well. Military nurses and Red Cross V.A.D's, orderlies, officers, sailors, Tommies.... Some of the men on duty forward had been horribly injured by the explosion of the Turkish contact-mine. What could be done for them had been done before quitting the sinking Loyalty. But as the blood from their cruel wounds drained away into the waste of water.... It was not the first time that Katharine Forbis had seen brave men die.... Then a V.A.D. woman perched with two others on a gangway, called to her across a patch of water—a lagoon ringed-in with floating wreckage:

"Oh, do look at the Commandant!—I am afraid she is dying!"

Treading water, paddling with a wooden fruit-dish, horribly hampered by her cork panoply,—Katharine crossed the patch of sea. The thin bluish wedge of Trixie's face lay tilted upwards to the jeering sunshine, against the slab of cork outcropping at the back of her belt. Her green eyes, half-open, looked hard and glassy as enamel—the livid lips were parted, showing the set white teeth....

"Oh try to live!" begged Katharine. "See—there are ships in the distance!" She pointed to some grey shapes moving on the southern horizon under their slanting columns of grey smoke. "The boats that have left us will be picked up—they will be sent back for us! ..."

"No ship commanded by a sane man will stick her nose into the middle of a charted Turkish minefield!" came from a man who hung on to a deck-seat and a wooden hen-coop next them, and had overheard. "When the contact stove in our forward plates I sent out the S.O.S. and got through to the Commander of one of those Destroyers...." He jerked his chin angrily towards some slanting streaks of smoke to the southward. "All he could do was to send that hydro from the nearest Battle Cruiser to have a look at us; explain what kind of a mess we were in—in case we hadn't guessed it already!—and tell us to wait for the boats! ..."

And the speaker, who had been the Wireless Operator on board the Loyalty, whose head was swathed in a bloody towel and whose right arm hung broken by his side,—grinned a forlorn grin, and tightened with his teeth the buckle of the leather waist-strap that supported him on his improvised raft, as Trixie's head fell limply back, and a faint moan fluttered from her lips, that were getting ashen grey....

"Please, please, don't give up!" said Katharine, mustering all her forces. She splashed water on the grey, peaked face and shook the thin shoulder. "Listen to me.... Do you hear? Don't you dare to die! ..."

But not Katharine's utmost efforts could have kept the dwindling life in Trixie, as the hours dragged on, and the blazing sun beat on their misery.... But that her good Angel, or Trixie's, reminded her that the little courier-bag slung about her shoulders, containing her money and papers, accommodated a tiny brandy-flask.

A sickness of sheer despair came over her as she realised that, environed by the unwieldy cork slabs of her life-belt, she could not possibly get at the bag.... Then she remembered, when there had been a moment or two of delay in readying the ship's boat—she had taken the flask out of the bag, and thrust it in the breast-pocket of her serge jacket. With a rush of thankfulness she felt for it, and found it there still.

It seemed long to Katharine before she could unscrew the flask-cap, and force a few drops of Cognac between the other's tightly-clenched teeth. When Trixie sighed, and opened her green eyes,—between her dazed vision and the marvel of a Mediterranean sunset, leaned the even greater wonder of a compassionate human face....

The glory of the sunset culminated to its utmost splendour. Floods of blazing wine of rubies poured into the sapphire bowl of the sea.... The water was calm as a mill-pond,—the air was balmy sweetness—as the evening star kindled, under the round breast of Asia's radiant moon.... And of all the innumerable ships that passed and repassed along the crowded sea-road on the southern horizon, not one altered her course for the castaway passengers of the luckless Loyalty....

They had been so brave, talking and cracking jokes—singing even,—asking riddles, and attempting recitations, "being British" some of them would have called it—up to the last volt of strength.... Towards morning they began to die,—the Wireless Operator leading the way, slipping off quite easily.... A baby went next, the only child on shipboard, and its desperate mother,—the English wife of a native official at Malta—shrieking—cast loose the rope that lashed her to some floating deck-fittings and, clutching the tiny body to her—leaped into the sea. And others died of exhaustion, and yet others; until quavering voices bravely raised in familiar strains of well-loved hymns, were dumb for sheer despair.... But, after all, though not until Dawn had risen over the unseen Desert of Syria—the boats that had pulled away, came back for yet another freight....

"Are we dead, you and I?" asked Lady Wastwood dreamily, waking out of an exhausted sleep, in a cabin of the trooper that had taken the rescued ones on board....

"Not yet," said Katharine Forbis gently, stooping over her. "It seems that God has yet some work in this world for you and me to do!"

"It is a lonely world," said Trixie faintly, and turned her peaked face to the bulkhead, "I had done with it! And—though it sounds horribly ungrateful, dear! I am sorry that you have brought me back!"

"But I am glad you aren't dead," said Katharine, kissing her, "because I love you, and you know that you are fond of me!"

"You saved my life.... I can never forget that," said Lady Wastwood. "My dear! there ought to have been somebody to photograph you doing it! What a success it would have made on the screens! ..." She returned Katharine's kiss with warmth. "It's quite true," she said. "I always have been fond of you,—you dear thing! That is why I was so frightfully down on poor Edward Yaill!"

"Do not—do not let us go back to that!" begged the other, wincing.

"I remember cutting him," continued Lady Wastwood reminiscently, "enough to have drawn blood. My Jerry always said—you remember how keen he was on golf? 'Mums carries too many clubs for one game, and always uses a niblick when it ought to be a putter!' But, believe me,—I really meant well!"

And that was the sealing of a compact of sisterhood between Katharine and Trixie.... For that we have striven for we love as part of us.... And Friendship forged on the anvil of Endurance is a metal that will stand strain.

II

Fresh from great triumphs in France, a Man came to Egypt in June, 1917—burly and square-jawed, clear-eyed, vigorous and outspoken; startlingly young in looks for his fifty-six years,—until he removed his cap and you saw his bald, domed brow. The successes at Romani and Magdhaba and Rafa had whiskers. Plans for the taking of Gaza, that stoutly resisting stronghold of the Turk—long since evacuated by all civilians—had fizzled out; there was a hang-up somewhere, things had to be set going again. He moved G.H.Q. from Cairo to Kelat, in Southern Palestine—a huge wire-enclosed area on the grass-covered slopes within sight of the Mediterranean—and took things in hand. Two Rolls-Royce box-cars carried him and his Staff,—three armoured Fords preceded him as Scouts—and two others followed with Wireless and life's necessaries. So he would appear unexpectedly in various quarters, causing confusion it may be, to commanding officers—and huge contentment to the rank and file.

He looked, upon a certain day in July,—on the positions of the forces attacking Gaza—from an observation-point affording room for three.... The day was misty, the Turkish 5.9 inch guns were silent; no warning drone of propellers counselled care as his binoculars swept the enemy trenches towards Beersheba, noting the railway-system for the shifting of big guns; the defence-works—enormously strong, and a tangle of barbed wire—running from Beersheba down to the sea.

He came down, and went through the trenches asking questions: sat on a gun-limber eating bully out of a tin with a jackknife and commended the Engineers and the Egyptian Labour Corps for the pace at which the railway had followed on the heels of our Advance. Then he went away—and the rations increased in quantity, and later certain trucks came up by railway—containing barrels of a malty liquor much welcome to the thirsty throats of British soldier-men....

Later in October, when the Irish Division, and the Indian Cavalry and the entire strength of the Camel Transport Corps, and the London Division which had fought with the assistance of one John Benn Hazel in France and Macedonia—had been added to the army of strange nations now mustered upon the soil of Palestine,—and the capture of Beersheba, with the well-springs of Sheria and the huge Turkish dumps that lay to the rear of them—combined with a bombardment from the hill tops round about her—from the sea to the West of her and the hot sky above her—had brought the gates of Gaza toppling down,—he swung into the camp of the battle-weary 'Fenchurch Streets,' a stalwart stranger in a battered pith helmet, sleeveless shirt, shorts and canvas shoes; and stooped under the door-fly of a tent full of dusty undersized Cockneys; unwashed, unshaven, bone-weary and just lying down to snatch an eyeful of sleep.

"How's things going, Londoners?" he asked with cheery brevity; and a gaunt brown giant of six feet four with a bristling two-inch beard, and a portentously hooked nose, Acting Company Sergeant pro So and so, sick or wounded—I forget which—recognised him, and said in a big bass voice, displaying a mouthful of large white teeth:

"All the better, Sir, because you've come! We fellows said all along you'd be the man for the job!"

"And, by G—" he said in his deep strong voice, "if you go on doing as you've done at Sheria, it won't be long before we carry through.... See you're wounded.... Anything much?" He laid a finger on a naked brown left arm, knotty with muscle, and decorated above the elbow with a bandage of iodine-smeared gauze....

"Nothing, Sir, thank you, but a bit of a flesh-cut. A German officer slashed at me with his sword, as he tried to shoot me left-handed with his revolver."

"Moral," he said, with his big schoolboy's chuckle, "don't try to do two things at once! And a scratch may turn septic, in this fly-cursed country, so don't neglect it, man! ..."

And he passed on, to gladden the heart of the Battalion Commander with discriminating praise, and drop a few curt sentences;—pregnant with great issues—before he went away. Pausing beside the step of his car to ask with the smile that won the men and charmed the women:

"Who's the big tyke overtopping the little Terriers in F. Company's tent? Not an exotic in this climate, or I don't know what it is to command a Jewish Battalion."

"I think," said the C.O., "you refer to Private Hazel, Acting Sergeant to F. Company in place of Langston.... We call Hazel the 'Lightning Change Artist,' because he's always doing somebody's duty, and doing it uncommonly well too! Killed twelve Turks with the bayonet in the scrapping at Sheria.... Sings as he fights—a habit when he's butchering men...."

"Sings, does he? Curious...."

"Sings in Hebrew, the men'll swear to you. Some of them call him 'The Musical Maccabee.' We've two other Jews in the Battalion, both good men, but he's damned good! ... Peculiar in his refusal of stripes and so forth, else he'd have had his Commission long ago. Has the Distinguished Conduct Medal for something he did in France...."

"Glad to hear that. He seems a hefty kind of beggar. Have noticed that he's wounded.... Would you recommend him for the Military Medal when you're sending in the other names?"

The pleased Colonel reddened through dust and sun-tan:

"Certainly, Sir, with pleasure, if you'll permit me! ... But there are a great many names, and I was rather thinking—"

"My dear Sir, never under any circumstances think that there can be too many names!"

"Thank you, Sir. With regard to Acting Sergeant Hazel.... He has been very keen on leave for Alex., since Sheria—most unusual thing with a man of that sort to risk the loss of a scrap. Some family affair perhaps. Has big interests in Palestine—chiefly wine and olives and so forth. Kind of a millionaire, I am told, in his way...."

"I don't care a Syrian curse about the millionaire! but I'm ready to stretch a point to oblige the man who spits twelve Turks—and sings while he's doing it! He's got a knock from a German, too—and might have put in for a Red Cross bag—a ride in the White train—and a cane chair on the lawn at Montana on the strength of it! So send him down to railhead at Gamli with the wounded.... He can put in three weeks at the General Hospital at Alex, and attend to his business there...."

"Very good, Sir! But it occurs to me that an R.F.C. two-seater scouting-plane in difficulties came down in our lines about an hour ago,—Wing Major Essenian Pasha on board—an Egyptian officer from the Ismailia Air Station—"

"I know Essenian Pasha!" The tone was enigmatical. "Copt or Moslem,—nobody seems certain. Some people seem to think it's a case of being all things to all men. Though,—for my own part—if I had to place him—I'd rank him with the Advanced or Super-Jews. But the man's an incomparable scout, and flies like one of the Sons of Eblis.... Some of his reports have been damned useful! We sent for him to do some special reconnaissance over the enemy's rearguard in the hills. Have Djemal's sharpshooters potted the Pasha? Hope he'd made his observations first!"

"The Pasha's all right, Sir, but his observer was shot dead. Flying-Lieutenant Usborn—there was a regular ding-dong battle over Hebron with some Turkish fighting-planes.... And Essenian Pasha would like us to bury Lieutenant Usborn—and supply an observer to replace him for the home-flight to Ismailia!"

"Well, can you?"

"It appears, Sir, that the Pasha knows Hazel. They foregathered at Salonika a month or so ago. And there being a lot of dysentery among the men of the Pasha's Flying Squadron—and Hazel having dabbled in aviation—five-guinea flutters at Hendon, I suppose!—the Pasha took him on several reconnaissance-flights. By the way, Sir, he has brought in a bit of intelligence.... The Sherif of Mecca's tribesmen are at Diariyeh—among the hills to the N.E. with the Emir Feisal and a host of Bedwân cavalry. And they're waging guerilla warfare against the enemy's rearguards and flanks."

"Good for the Sherif Husain!" The keen blue eyes sparkled. "And news worth having. We shall be able to shift the —th Division outposts a good bit more to the N.E. Where's the Pasha? Marhabâ, Essenian Pasha!"

"Marhabtain Gananâr Saiyid!" came the quick response to the greeting, as he turned to take the report from the dark hand of the Egyptian Flying Officer, looking back a moment later to say to the Colonel, with his parting handshake: "Well, so-long, Colonel! Remember, your next objective is Huj, the terminus of the Turkish branch-rail from Deir Sineid. The Desert Mounted Corps—3 Cavalry Divisions—pushed for there yesterday to cut off the garrison retreating from Gaza. So-and-so with such-and-such another force of mounted troops is working round by sea—to engage the enemy rear-guard at Beit Hannu. Dyemal's Eighth Army Corps on our right flankguard have rolled back towards Hebron." (Fifteen miles north-east from Beersheba, among the Judæan Hills.) "The only Turks now holding their ground are those facing the 53rd Division at Muweileh. They may not have heard of the fall of Gaza—as we have the cavalry between them and the rest of their Army—and Blank smashed the Gaza Wireless installation when he bombed their big mosque! You'll find the road to Huj nicely marked out with Turkish canteens, tin gas-mask-cases, stretchers and trenching-tools, and the terrain fairly continuous in its drop,—about forty feet to the mile.... Don't contemplate much trouble for you from well-posted Austrian batteries. The Warwicks and Worcesters and Australians have accounted for 'em all!"

And as the baking Earth rolled up, blotting out the huge red-hot sun; and the short twilight heralded the sudden swoop of Night on Syria, the Rolls-Royce box-cars carrying the Chief and his Staff moved smoothly on, following the four armoured scouters, and the other Fords swung out and dashed after them.... And the dust of Philistia—watered with the blood of brave men since Wars began on this sad earth—how many times? rolled up and blotted out the moving specks, on the safety of one of which hung the hopes of Christendom.

III

To Katharine Forbis, some seven weeks subsequently to her arrival at the Red Cross Hospital of Montana, an Egyptian Red Cross orderly brought a scrap of paper bearing a pencilled scrawl:

"Am back from the Front Palestine for ten days leave. Can you see me? Important yours faithfully John Hazel."

No more. But enough to call back the carnation bloom to cheeks paled by the sub-tropical heats of Egypt, and self-forgetful labours in the interests of wounded men....

Morning duty, consisting in the conveyance of a motor-car packed with convalescents on an expedition to Ramleh and back,—was over. Miss Forbis had just returned, and was free for the afternoon. In her well-cut white drill uniform-skirt and coat with its shoulder-titles, Special Service badges, and scraps of medal-ribbon, her white blouse with its polo collar and natty black silk tie; her brown silk stockings and tan brogue shoes bearing the unmistakable cachet of Bond Street, setting off the workmanlike ensemble, and her handsome head crowned by a soft white Panama hat of the uniform shape, with the Society's ribbon and badge,—she made a gallant, gracious figure, bringing a mist before the eyes of the big, battered-looking, sun-blackened man,—bristlier than ever about the cheeks and chin, and arrayed in battle-soiled and much-patched khaki drill,—who got out of his cane chair in the wide white marble hall with pleased alacrity, knocking over with a bandaged, sling-suspended left arm, the soiled and dusty regulation sun-helmet he had put down on a little table of inlaid Egyptian work.

And as he saluted her in his Eastern way, now familiar to Katharine, swift strangling emotion caught her by the throat. For a moment she could not find voice. For John Hazel brought the panelled parlour at Kerr's Arbour with him; and set it like a scene between the white marble pillars where whirred the electric fans, between the gilt and friezed and painted walls, and under the fretted ceilings of the Egyptian despot's palace, built on the rocky height at the foot of which break the milk-warm surges of the Mediterranean. And once again the old pain at her heart,—dulled by long months without news; by change of scene and change of work, to an aching sense of emptiness,—woke up and cried for all that she had lost.

She said with her wide heartening smile, as his huge hand swallowed hers, still wearing its tan gauntlet:

"You look wonderfully fit, though you're wearing a sling."

"Fit's the word!" He grinned the big toothy grin so well remembered.... "A walking testimony to the nutritive qualities of Maconochie, tinned salmon, Prynn's Baked Beans, Army brickbats, sticky flycatcher dates and chlorinated Nile water.... For we've travelled a long way since the imbecilities of the Crimea," he said, with his black eyes drinking her in.

"Thank God, we have!" Katharine flushed a little under his strange scrutiny, painfully conscious of the unrelaxing grip of his huge, hard, blackened hand. For John Hazel stood, oblivious of its crushing pressure, drinking in the joy of her near presence, inhaling the rare sweetness of her fair, wholesome womanhood; the fragrance of her hair and breath, and garments, coming to him mingled with the perfume of the half-opened red rose—still dewy in the heart of it—that she had stuck in the buttonhole of her uniform jacket that morning, and forgotten to take out again.

And Katharine upon her side was conscious of a strange environing atmosphere; a virile, heady compound of exhalations from the desert, the march, the bivouac and the battlefield, emanating from the garments and the person of the man. The sun-baked blackness of his skin seemed its natural tinting. Whiffs of the wormwood of desolate places mingled with the aroma of thyme, clover and strong tobacco,—the smell of horses and tanned leather; the sharp tang of melinite, and the penetrating odour of sweating human flesh.

A moment more and he released the hand he held, giving a dismayed exclamation, and taking a long backward step.

"Hold on! What have I been thinking of!" Concern was in his voice. "I'm not fit to touch you! Do you know it's a fortnight since I washed last!" His fleshy mouth twisted in disgust, as he surveyed his martial griminess, continuing: "We've been short of water lately. Only allowed a pint per diem. Strictly for internal irrigation, nothing allowed for the outer man! And when Essenian Pasha dropped me at the Alex. Air Station—and thundering good of him too!—I'd only time to grab a bite of breakfast at the N.C.O.'s Mess Tent—swallow a mug of coffee—tumble into a car—borrowed from the R.F.C. men!—and just chuffle along. Why I was in such a cast-iron hurry—that's what I've got to explain to you. And when I saw you I clean forgot what a beastly sweep I am! I couldn't—" The deep, rough breath he drew added quite plainly, "I couldn't think of anything but you!"

"Don't you imagine, if you and other brave men can put up with Dirt for Duty's sake—that we women—even those of us who don't wear this uniform—can put up with you men? And you can have a hot bath here at any moment, Mr. Hazel." Katharine's full tones were tinged with laughter as she added: "And a second breakfast,—unless you don't mind waiting the half-hour, which will make it the official noonday meal. Now which will you do? Have that bath—or stay and talk to me on, the lawn or in here until the Staff lunch?—at which meal your picturesque battle-grime will make you the admired of all?"

"It's simply first-class here!—a kind of mix-up of the Alhambra at Granada and an Egypto-Grecian temple," he said to her, gratefully sensing the breezes from the whirring electric fans. "And that little fountain, splashing and gurgling—makes a man who was in the Syrian Desert east of Gaza, up to the evening of day before yesterday, marching and swotting Turks on a pint of doctored Nile water per diem—want to stick his blooming head in the basin and drink it all up."

"I—think I'm beginning to comprehend!" Miss Forbis's fine eyebrows relaxed their tension, and the puzzled expression left her face. "You fogged me rather, a minute back—about being in the Desert near Gaza up to the evening of the day before yesterday.... But now—"

"Now you're clear that it isn't a case of bats in the belfry. Haw—haw!" He broke out into the big noisy laugh that had once set Katharine's teeth on edge. "Of course it'd have taken three days if I'd come by the Woggler from Railhead. The Woggler, I ought to tell you, is the Desert Express. Trucks roofed with packing-cases nailed together—nail-ends up—to accommodate the troops. Pullmans,—seats faked with American cloth over a thin film of tibbin,—specially reserved for Officer Sahibs. Not that the Army ain't proud of the Woggler! In its way, it's an epoch-marking, eye-opening Thing. But I happened to be in a dithering hurry. And a chance turned up of getting here by the Air Route, do you see? ... Safe as houses, for we followed the coast and had no scraps—the Turks are very short of fliers!—and we only came down once, for petrol, at a seaplane station near the Rest Camp at El Arish."

The gesture of his blackened hand made light of fatigue, risks, perils and privations attending the long flight from Palestine.... Katharine admired the simplicity with which he spoke, as she said with a touch of reproachfulness:

"It seems very long since you came to me at Kerr's Arbour, Mr. Hazel. And all these months you have never once written—although you promised!"

"I said I would not fail to write—if I had any news for you!"

That deep voice, and the simple words that meant so much to Katharine.... The white marble pillars of the hall appeared to sway and totter. The jewelled plume of a fountain playing in a fretted basin seemed to leap to the patterned roof and then shrink small again....

"Have you news—at last?"

"Some!" he said briefly.

"What?—"

The sudden dilation and darkening of her lovely eyes betrayed the desperate hunger gnawing in her. The eyes fastened avidly on Hazel's blackened face. She held her breath for his answer. It came as he slewed his head,—looking through the triple arch of the Palace vestibule to the green, carefully nurtured lawn, the glory of Montana—whence the smack of racquet upon tennis-ball came, and the sound of cheerful voices, telling of relaxations on the part of the Medical Staff, the Nurses and V.A.D's.

"This—that Colonel Yaill is alive and well. I have seen him!"

"Thank God!" Katharine said, "O—thank God! ..."

She put out her hand to the back of a chair and gripped it to steady herself. When her leaping heart had quieted she addressed herself to a colossal back-view, so shorn of martial dignity by patches of Army sacking, that Katharine's voice wavered between laughter and tears:

"And God bless you, John Hazel, for bringing word to me!"

"I have better than a word!" He wheeled about and faced her. "I have a letter from him for you! ..."

As he drew it from a baggy front pocket of his tunic, the radiance that broke over her was fairly dazzling to the man's eyes.... He trembled as she stretched out both her hands to him, entreating:

"Give me his letter, dear John Hazel! ... Let me hold it while you tell me where you met with him! ..."

The object that caused such turmoil in Miss Forbis's bosom was a single sheet of coarse yellow Levantine paper, folded to oblong shape, stuck in three places along the edge and at either end, with a mixture of white clay and beeswax, and sealed with a ring given to Yaill eight years previously. How well the giver of the old love-token remembered that hexagonal sard, deeply cut in old Roman capitals with the name: "KATHARINE." How dear and familiar the small neat handwriting of the pencilled address: 'Miss K. M. Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Near Cauldstanes, Tweedshire, N.B.' ...

"The morning after Sheria—before it was daylight"—how she hung upon John Hazel's utterance, watching the movements of his fleshy lips, drinking in every word—"we were cleaning out enemy trenches, and blowing up ammunition-dumps and testing wells for poison, and burying dead Turks—and so forth!—I was passing the Intelligence Officer's tent—quite a toney fit-up on the top of a mound—with a native string-bed, and a camp chair, and a sugar-box table, and lighted candles on that,—for the thermometer was climbing up into the seventies and the front fly was up—for the sake of fresh air.... When I tell you that the I.O. was questioning Turkish prisoners—under a guard of Military Police,—and putting Syrian and Arab scouts through their paces, and interviewing village patriarchs—you'll understand that the atmosphere was—well!—"

"I can imagine! ... But, do please go on!" All unconsciously she cuddled the precious letter to her bosom, holding it with both hands and smiling over it at John....

"Well—as I was passing by and happened to glance in—an Arab dressed much the same as the others—a thin, tallish, sinewy Bedawi in a flowing black camel-cloth mantle, and silk head-veil trimmed with tufts of coloured gimp—and topped by the usual ring of twisted camel's hair,—rose up and made obeisance to the Intelligence Officer sitting at the sugar-box table,—and came out, followed by a brace of others—not quite so well got up. Walking as Arabs have the knack of doing—as if the round world and all that therein is—including the Desert—was hardly good enough to be trampled under the notched iron heels that they wear for killing snakes."

She drank in the words that were heavenly music, bending her high head the better to concentrate her gaze upon the speaker's face.

"And—?"

"Well, the three Arabs—two of 'em not particularly interesting, and the one who'd been talking to the Intelligence Officer—no end posh in a necklace of gold-mounted lion's-teeth, and with strings of blue and red seed-pearls twined in his long side-locks,—the three Arabs were going to where their hairies were picketed—munching tibbin and sesame off a spread saddle-cloth—ragged looking yellowish-grey brutes with ewe-necks, and queerly-sloped cruppers; and high-peaked wooden saddles and big-bitted bridles, jingling with silver amulets and jewellery of sorts.... One Arab had a kind of cage-basket strapped on behind the saddle, with live birds stirring about in it—I thought falcons trained for sport—until they started cooing.... Well then!—in the sudden way it happens in this East of ours,—Day jumped over the Hills of Judea—and the Arabs got their prayer-rugs from behind their saddles, and made ready to say their prayers...."

His black eyes seemed to look past Katharine into the scene that he described. He drew breath:

"I was sitting on a sack of Turkish ration-biscuits—not half bad if you've nothing else to eat!—smoking an Army Issue Woodbine—and though the place was stiff with praying Moslems, I watched these—or rather this one! He washed in the sand—laid his praying-rug diagonally in the line for Mecca, knelt down, and went through the whole programme—praying with his forehead to the ground—praying with his hands to the sides of his head—praying with his body straight, resting on the knees, in the regular Mohammedan way. An uncommonly swanky Arab too!—the stock of his long-barrelled gun inlaid with bits of turquoise and mother o' pearl, a curved nine-inch dagger in a gilded sheath stuck in the front of his girdle—and a long silver-plated ivory-stocked revolver—about 44 calibre I judge—on the other side. I was to left of him: so when he slewed his head over his right shoulder to smile at his Good Angel, I saw the back of it—and when he twirled it back again to scowl at the Counsellor of Evil, I found him staring full into my face and scowling at me!"

"And you knew him!—it was Edward!" Her voice was a song of joy!

IV

"I'd seen that scowl on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, last February," said John Hazel. "And though he gave no other sign to tell that he recognised me, his eyes flickered for the tenth of a second—and I saw they weren't black, but grey. He took no more notice of me.... He'd finished his prayer, and was squatting down cross-legged—running his beads between his fingers—so I pitched away my fag-end, and began to hum the tune of a song, sitting on the sack of Turkish Army biscuits. It might have been an English hymn—for all the genuine Arabs knew—"

"What was the song?"

"'Loch Lomond'—only the words were altered; to fit the situation—see? Something like this:

Muted down to the softness of a mother's cradle-song, the full mellow baritone breathed out the familiar refrain. Bringing tears brimming over Katharine's under-lids,—for by strangest chance the song was one of Edward's favourites, often sung by her to him in the twilight—in the dear familiar drawing-room of the old, distant home....

"So you.... It was wonderful of you to speak to him in that way! ..."

"Not original." He grinned at her. "A variation on the historic Blondel Stunt. Only Blondel was a London Tommy,—and Cœur de Lion a British Brass Hat, camouflaged as a Son of Islam. He took it like a rock, only I saw his eyelid quiver. Yes'm!—that descendant of the Prophet winked at the infidel with the eye that was next me.... Then I did a bit more of the Blondel dodge...."

The smile ceased to quirk the corners of his fleshy red mouth, as he sang under his breath in the full sweet baritone:

"And what then? ..." Her colour came and went.... "Didn't Edward—didn't Colonel Yaill manage somehow to speak to you privately? ..."

John Hazel shook his head.

"Nix a word! He's far too old a hand at the risky business of walking about in another man's skin, to give himself away in that style. He got up and shook off the dust,—stepped into his loose gazelle-leather boots,—rolled up his carpet, mounted and rode off with his two Arabs—leaving me chewin' the rag! And yet I knew it was Yaill—and that he'd got my message!"

"What did you do then? ..."

"What did I do! ..."

Forgetful in the excitement of his story, of his damaged left arm, he had released it from the sling, and used it freely, in the supple illustrative gesticulations that bespoke his Eastern blood:

"What? O, I sat tight on the sack of rooty, and smoked another fag, until the sun got too hot even for me! Then I got up and stretched myself, and caught my chameleon—who'd been trying to desert—and put him back on my sola topi. We all wear chameleons on our helmets, khaki drill or the tin basin variety—the beasts are champion fly-destructors!—and I believe that's how dragons, and wyverns, and other metal wild-fowl of that kind came to be worn on Crusaders' helms as crests.... Then I hied me back to my bivvy—it was in a cave of the Wady Sheria, and had been used by the natives for keeping goats—and other lively skippers!—and breakfasted with some mates of mine—chaps belonging to my Platoon. I think the menu consisted of rissoles, made of bully-beef with onion, biscuit-crumbs and sand-flies; the bottom of a tin of Dundee marmalade,—more sand-flies!—burned-bean coffee, and dates—with sand-flies again. Barely finished when we got the route. Our Division were to follow up Djemal Pasha's Eighth Army Corps—what was left of 'em—over the hills towards Hebron, and before my company marched off, a message came for me. The Intelligence Officer wanted to speak to Acting Company-Sergeant Hazel—"

Her eyes flashed comprehension:

"Edward! ... My letter! ... Ah! I understand! ..."

He nodded:

"It was the one way to get the thing to me without drawing suspicion.... And it was given me in a similarly—unobtrusive style. It lay before the I.O. on the packing-box table with a lump of mica schist on top of it for a paper-weight. Says Intelligence: 'Acting-Sergeant Hazel, I believe you have undertaken to forward this? ... The writer is much obliged!' So I saluted, and stuffed it in my pocket, and—"

"Oh—what?" cried Katharine Forbis, for the brown face had changed to an ugly livid colour, as John Hazel swayed giddily and caught at a column near.

"Nothing much! ... Got the sun on my head a bit yesterday. Right as rain in a minute—if—if I may sit down? But ... don't wait.... You haven't read your letter! And you must hate me for keeping you from that!"

He sat down heavily in the chair she drew to him, feeling her cool firm hand touch his wrist and her long womanly fingers encircle it, hearing her worshipped voice speaking close by:

"If one can hate one's kindest, truest friend, who has done so much—so simply and unselfishly—"

He shook his dizzy head in his heavy buffalo-like fashion,—and muttered through the whirring of the electrically-driven ventilating-fans:

"What have I done? Nothing much, anyway!"

"You have flown to me out of the midst of battle, bringing Edward's dear message.... Wounded and with a touch of fever, or I don't deserve my nurse's certificate! Do you call that nothing? ..."

"Little or nothing!" He shook his great black head doggedly as Katharine went on:

"And I take it as my right! What claim have I to such service?"

"Every claim," said Hazel's deep voice. "Every imaginable right!"

"And—" Her voice broke between tears and laughter:—"And you encourage me in selfishness. Why, I haven't even asked you if you wouldn't like a drink! ..."

"A drink!" he said with his old grin, though the brown of his face still showed faded, and deep lines showed by his jaws and at the wings of his great hooked nose. "A brandy and Polly with a lump of ice, and a ring of lemon in it. Offer me one now, Miss Forbis—and hear it boil as it goes down!"

"You shall have it." Katharine said laughing, though once her lip would have curled in scorn of the vulgarity of the ex-insurance-broker. "But first you must come to the Out-Patient's Department, and let the Surgeon in charge there look at this arm.... A mere nothing, perhaps, as you say"—for John was beginning to explain about its being a flesh-cut.... "When was it dressed last? ... The day before yesterday! ... That's quite enough.... You will come with me! ..."

So John Hazel, thrilling with well-concealed joy at being the object of his lady's solicitude, was towed away to a tile-lined, cement-floored Department on the Palace ground-floor, where the sword-cut on his left arm, looking rather angry—was bathed and cleaned, iodined, and strapped up by the doctor and nurse on duty there.... And the longed-for goblet of iced brandy and Apollinaris having been produced and duly disposed of—John Hazel took leave of Miss Forbis and went upon his way.

"Where shall you be? ... What address will find you?" she asked as she gave him her hand in farewell....

"I'm supposed to be quartered at a General Hospital at Alex.... Number Thirty-Seven," returned John. "But I'm not due there until to-morrow morning, and I'm going to wangle leave to live and sleep at my own house...."

"Your house! ... Have you a house at Alexandria? ..."

"We have had a house at Alexandria for more than sixteen hundred years!"

Again Antiquity rose up and confronted Katharine in the person of this big young man of powerfully Semitic type. He went on:

"Of course I never saw it until the Division came to Egypt. I went over from Kantara, and entered into possession a week or so before we got the route for Palestine.... I like it! ... You would like it.... It is the kind of place that's bound to interest you—for several reasons.... One of them being that it's a wonderfully preserved example of Roman-Egyptian Domestic Architecture. A relic of Alexandria—as Alexandria used to be...."

Katharine said with her characteristic sweet heartiness, though Yaill's letter was burning to be read:

"I should love to visit your house at Alexandria—if I may bring a friend with me? ... Lady Wastwood, who came out with me on the poor Hospital ship Loyalty and has been very ill here. She is convalescent now and helping us in the Secretarial Department, until she is fit to take over her own work. And I believe she is rather keen on ancient inscriptions, cat-headed goddesses and crowned uræi—and all that sort of thing."

"Then will you both honour me by coming to tea with me in the City to-morrow?—Numero VII, Rue el Farad,—I'll have a car waiting for you at the Palace gateway by sharp half-past four."

He smiled, well pleased, as Katharine consented; and heaved up his great body, and reached for the battered drill sun-helmet, as the silvery note of the luncheon-gong sounded from the long corridor crossing the bottom of the pillared entrance-hall.

"That's settled then.... Thanks all the same!—but I won't stay to luncheon.... Do you think I don't know how you're longing to get rid of me—and run away and shut yourself up, and read what you've got there! ..."

His black eyes went significantly to the outline of Yaill's letter, thrust by Katharine between the buttons of her white silk blouse, when—at some juncture of the wound-dressing in the Out-Patient's Department—she had come to the help of the surgeon and charge-Sister with deft, accustomed hands.

Her fine brows frowned a little at the familiarity, but there was no use in being angry with the man. John Hazel was just—John Hazel—Miss Forbis told herself; as standing in the sun-blaze on the doorsteps of the Hospital, she watched his great figure stride down the sanded avenue of swaying casuarina-trees, on the way to find the borrowed car left waiting at the entrance-gates.

Women and doctors and V.A.D. members were streaming towards the Palace from every quarter,—but for Katharine the Staff luncheon-gong issued its second summons in vain. She was hurrying down a shady side-alley of cypresses and tamarisks—ending in a pavilion of marble fretwork—covered with the royal mantle of a great Bougainvillia—standing in a riotous tangle of November-blooming roses,—a dear resort of hers and Lady Wastwood's in their free unworking hours....

"Oh! just like a girl of nineteen!" she murmured, conscious of the thrill and tumult of her fair soul and pure body as she drew Yaill's letter from its fragrant hiding-place.

Ah, my Katharine, but there you were wonderfully mistaken. Miss Nineteen would have failed to experience one-tenth of your blissful emotion as you kissed the folded sheet of coarse Eastern paper,—broke the clay and beeswax seals bearing the impression of your love-gift, the cut sardonyx—and read the words penned but a few days previously by Yaill's beloved hand.

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....