Or was

of his type, but none the less unhealthy. Was it some remnant of grumous atmosphere carried like an infection from the circle he had once adorned? it an egoism which, fed and fattened upon itself, had finally developed into grotesque repulsiveness? Undoubtedly, I decided. At all events, he was the sort one avoids-the sort that by no possibiliy, as it seemed, could have attracted Sybil Dauriac. Yet, evidently he had.

My eyes bristled with questions as she caught my gaze-her answer a shrug with a suggestion of defiance.

In another moment the car was drawing up at the Portland Place house, Jermyn slouched out and, with proprietory mien that I resented, gave an order to the chauffeur.

"You see," said Sybil, her manner suddenly changing to its usual blitheness as we entered the hall, "Eric is my patient from nine in the morning until after dinner. Do come in and I'll show you the lion's den. You'll excuse us, Eric."

Jermyn nodded and walked nonchalantly into the drawing-room, Sybil waiting until the tapestry closed behind his slim, well-shaped back. Then she took my arm in silence and led me into an apartment, a recent addition, evidently, to the house-and altogether extraordinary.

It was nothing more or less, if I may coin a term, than a color cure. The ceiling was the even turquoise of a summer sky, which, with the spring green of carpet, upholstery, and tapestry, the sunlit yellow of the walls, and the thrilling rays of light falling through double curtains of violet, green, and red, had combined in the creation of the most inspiring atmosphere imaginable. Certainly the normal drab of London had no place here.

"Splendid." I glanced about smiling. "One expands here; one certainly does-"

"You feel it, Leslie?"

"Feel it! I want to go right out and push a bridge over. Your nerves,

I

"Eric Jermyn's," she said, simply. "Eh?" I regarded her dazedly. "Why, Leslie," she rejoined, "don't

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 816.-105

"I have made a brave man,' she corrected. She gestured impatiently. "Oh, I have had no illusions, Leslie. I'll tell you, because I know how good a friend you are: Eric Jermyn"-her voice sank almost to a whisper-"was the most arrant coward that God ever fashioned. But now," she went on, "he's going back into the army-reinstated. He doesn't know how near it is. Nor do I, precisely. But it is near." Her eyes were flaming. "Leslie, I'd never done anything big in my life before. But now- I want you to appreciate it, want you to understand. You'll go to your clubs, to the War Office, and you'll meet enemies—I mean Eric's and mine-many of them important, or, worse, those who scoff. Iwe- -want you with us, because you

count."

"Yes, to be sure." I spoke absently, for my mind was singing with the revelations that had blazed before. I turned to her suddenly. "Sybil, how deucedly, how sublimely like you!"

And it was. In her intense, burning way, led by an imagination and impulses as likely as not to be weird, uncanny, tinged at times with morbidity --she had seized upon this broken reed not only as an issue upon which to attach the surplus energy of her abounding mentality, but as a deed of patriotic emprise-damming the strong wayward currents of decadent nature and diverting them into channels of normality; she would-to change the metaphortake worthless clay and re-mold it and give to her country, wound up and ready to go, a heroic automaton.

That she had done this I had not the slightest doubt; her serene belief in her work, her ineffable confidence, would have submerged misgiving, even were there not the memory of Jermyn's hectic mood of exaltation.

Later, when Jermyn rejoined us, there

came a sudden, utterly startling thought that Sybil was not coming through this mess untouched. Something in his attitude-a pettish, exacting manner which no other man had ever held toward this ebullient, brilliant young woman-and her uncharacteristic and, yes, unwholesome acceptance of it, gave me the idea.

I took it away with me to the club, where I found it amply confirmed. No scandal, not a breath of it; and yet one would have had to be stupid indeed not to have caught hints of those ominous clouds on the horizon of things, clouds whose rising and eventual precipitation would surely and inevitably sweep the world-Sybil's wonderful world-bare of her. She had changed, undoubtedly; so ran the veiled comment. Professionally and in many more subtle ways-as though the miasmic introspectiveness of Jermyn's personality had invested her-she was not herself.

Was it love? There were those who would have it so. Others who cared most for her shrugged, and, with the mien of persons selecting the least of evils, hoped that it might be so. Personally, I had not the slightest doubt: Sybil had played once too often with fantasy, and now all the deeper emotions of an emotional nature were hopelessly, helplessly involved in the personality of a man who cared for nothing at all but himself.

As I sit writing now in a little room at Field Headquarters in Flanders, with a winter gale shrieking over a desolate area of frozen mud, I am the more thoroughly convinced that, whether four weeks or four decades as an inhabitant of this grim earth have been allotted me, Sybil Dauriac's after-theater supper will survive always with extraordinary distinctness.

I recall the beauty of the day-fleeting beauty; it endured perhaps until noon, when the ardor began to fade from the impeccable heavens and a chill wind and drizzling rain blotted out the glory of the blithe May season. Dinnerhour saw the city a vague domain of dripping unreality. Taxicabs drifted hither and thither, their lamps invest

ing them in a watery nimbus. Only corner street-lamps were lighted; beneath them lay glowing pools. Pedestrians, their figures blurred and distorted, hurried by with heads bent before the driving rain.

It was an evening meet for the advent of terror and terror I suppose there was in the hearts of those whom long experience had not rendered immune from the keener dread of air attack, even though the elemental conditions so grisly and uncanny in all their manifestations bespoke a safety which the starlit skies would not have vouchsafed. Probably the early beauty of the day had tempted raiders forth, and even now there was no fog, merely a mist which no doubt tended greatly to accentuate and magnify every random light.

There had appeared in the newspapers of the preceding day or so despatches vaguely warning from the Admiralty, per the Wireless Press, and the late evening editions this night had spoken of hostile aircraft as sighted along the coast of Essex, Suffolk, and Kent. There was the rumor of a Zeppelin shot down in the Thames Estuary.

The club hummed with it, and while the time had gone by when such visitation excited anything more than extreme irritability, there was, nevertheless, general satisfaction that nature had conspired to deprive the Huns of the full moon that the calendar had promised, if not to defeat their murderous plans altogether.

Sybil had me on the telephone from the theater, inquiring as to further news of the raiders. Her manner seemed rather tense for a young woman whose coolness in an attack the preceding month had averted a panic and kept the audience in their seats while the play went on.

"Oh, I'm not worrying," she exclaimed, laughing, as I proceeded to supplement my avowed inability to give her information with a reassuring word. "It isn't that, don't you know. . . . It is only that it fits so beautifully into the effect of the supper. . . . I had been worrying about the atmosphere; an atmosphere of a certain sort-you'll understand when you see."

I knew I would, of course, marveling,

however, at a sense of detail so rigid that a threatened air raid would be welcomed as playing into her mise en scène. And yet it was not uncharacteristic. If the complete success of this function demanded flames, I had no doubt Sybil would joyously set fire to her house.

I spoke of it to Sir Derric Cecil, one of the secretaries at the War Office, as we taxied to Portland Place through the rain. He diagnosed the idea with gloomy perspicuity.

"Sybil was looking for something additional in the way of a Rembrandt effect designed to throw the stature of her hero into stronger relief."

I didn't reply, my thoughts wandering to Jermyn, whose snake-like twinings about the mind and personality of Sybil Dauriac had become only too apparent after my seven days in London to be misunderstood.

"And we are to supply the applause," added Cecil.

"And lend your influence?" I suggested. "You really think Jermyn wants another opportunity?"

"My word!" he wheezed, "that girl doesn't do things half-way-what?"

Learoyd, the journalist, who had worked up to the second flight, called some laughing reference to the anomalous circumstance of a girl so popular as Sybil Dauriac establishing a NoMan's Land in her own house.

It was all very jolly, the barbed wire being filled with arriving guests, while from the third-floor landing came a striking reproduction of machine-gun reports.

We reached the top without casualties and entered the apartment which, improvised as a dugout, was quite the best thing that Sybil Dauriac had ever done. It was very like. The great attic room had been given over to the Savoy stage-carpenters and artists, who had converted it beyond flaw into a segment of France. The mud and sandbags were painted on canvas, but there were real posts, real ladders, real straweverything, in fact, but rats. The table was of plain pine, and candles flickered from candelabra of bayonets supporting trench bombs.

Sybil, in a night-blue and silver gown with silver-lace cap and black aigrette, her dark eyes snapping excitedly, would have none of our congratulations.

But I was not so certain. "If Sybil could go with him," I began. But Cecil most manifestly had withdrawn his mind.

Neither of us spoke again until we reached Portland Place. There were two men at the door in soldier garb, trench helmets, muddy uniforms, and equipment complete. They saluted, They saluted, and the butler, in the dress of a French peasant, ushered us into a hallway which had been transformed into a small grove. "The dugout," he said, "is on the upper floor."

Dugout!" Cecil chuckled. "This is a 'rag'!"

We overtook old Lord Hardigan, the banker, making his way gingerly up the stairs through a maze of barbed-wire entanglement.

The poor boy worked himself half sick over it, you've no idea." When I came up she turned to me, whispering, "Now, Leslie, you can see how apropos an air raid would be."

I could, indeed, and said so. For that matter, the entire atmosphere of the city was already palpable in its tenseness. Several times in the course of the evening there had been alarms, with the usual association of eventspolice motors scurrying forth bearing their "take cover signs; the tube stations alternately filled and emptied by rich and poor seeking shelter in a common, congested herd; in short, all the sights and sounds of a civilized community suddenly called upon to face the last resort of murderous human passion.

Yet it bespeaks the potency of habit that Sybil Dauriac's party, with only

a thin roof above us-upon which the rain drummed incessantly-should have been no less care-free and enjoyable than had it been a house in New York or some other city remote from the attacks of Zeppelins and airplanes.

The company was rather a mixture, and yet interesting inasmuch as it reflected the skill of Sybil's campaign, as well as the wide range of her popularity. There were two or three members of her company, including the beautiful Irene Stoutenburgh, and Gladwin, the leading man. There was Tom Yorke, the stage-manager, and there were Basil Sides, the barrister, and his wife; the Honorable Ermentrude; Farrel, the novelist; Sir Albert Leach, of the Home Office-a very influential personage; General Cavendish, a War Office bigwig; Colonel Sellewe, of the army, and a sprinkling of other people important in their various social, official, or professional spheres.

It was, I suppose, the greatest tactical triumph Sybil Dauriac had ever scored. Here, through her sheer dynamic, indomitable personality, she had gathered from circles-several of them impenetrably exclusive-men and women who in many cases could singly wield heavy influence, who together formed a totality of weight that was altogether compelling. The impressiveness of the achievement was heightened by the puerile purpose underlying it. For, after all, in this age of sterling manhood what boots the making or unmaking of one individual poltroon?

Yet, again, I—and I suppose all of us could catch Sybil's viewpoint, which, of course, was the eternal feminine point of view, and loving her and admiring her as we did we tried to share it-even Derric Cecil, who certainly had every reason to be rebellious, since his pretensions regarding her had every sanction until she had developed the Jermyn incubus.

But Sybil notwithstanding, it was difficult; it would have been so in any case, but with Jermyn seizing upon the occasion as a long-delayed but none the less gratifying personal tribute, it was infinitely more trying. While Sybil stood back he became the genius of the scene, the ruling spirit, the guiding

light-the protagonist. His eyes burning with unnatural fire, his black hair straggling over his narrow forehead, he was here, there, everywhere, tossing his greetings in careless, throaty nonchalance, patronizing, defiant, fawning, boastful, as his kaleidoscopic succession of moods dictated.

Yet there was something fascinating about the man, the sort of fascination an actor asserts who is bearing his part with realistic artistry. At least that is the way it appealed to me. There were men present who were indubitably heroes, as the world esteems a hero, and yet in his presence they all, every one, seemed to lose stature and become ordinary. Such a shrinking one never saw. Sybil, radiant with success, took his arm as a bugle blew the mess call and delivered him over to Lady Jane Ketchell-a powerful woman whom many in official life feared to the extent of servile flattery. Whereupon, with much laughter and gaiety we moved to the table.

Jermyn, his eyes glittering, raised a glass of sherry. "To the assassin gods of the air and our breasts bared in defiance," he declaimed.

"To the gods of the air!" We drank standing, but before we could take our seats or even replace our glasses the faint booming of guns came from out the silent city.

Several of us moved to a window giving to the eastward. A changing wind was rending the clouds, and from behind one great mass appeared the shoulder of the moon forcing its way upward toward a broad gap of velvet blue. And on the horizon we could see the questing arms of searchlights.

"It was evidently no false alarm, after all," said Learoyd. "You should have selected the cellar, Miss Dauriac."

Jermyn's jaunty laughter and declamatory voice drowned her reply. "There is," he said, "a most comfortable sitting-room in the basement, safe beyond measure, for those who find the heights venturesome."

Learoyd flushed and took his seat next to Irene Stoutenburgh, who was smiling doubtfully.

"At all events," she said, "I shall show no fear. Since the raids began I have