"In the twinkling of an eye"

_Author of_

“The Mark of the Beast” “Life’s Lookout”, “Wops, the Waif”, Etc.

Copyright 1918

THE BIOLA BOOK ROOM BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES 536-558 South Hope Street Los Angeles, Cal.

Author’S Foreword

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Some years ago, I received from an important Southern town, a letter from a Ladies’ Temperance Committee, to this effect:—“Sir, We, the undersigned, are a committee of Ladies, who, for many years, have purchased your “Stories for the People” in very large numbers, for free distribution and loan; always assuming that you were to be thoroughly relied upon as an upholder of strict Total-abstinence principles. But your latest story has sadly undeceived us, as regards your usefulness as a worker in the great cause we are pledged to uphold and further. On _pp_ —— of your last story, you make your hero, returning from a day’s run with the hounds, come upon a woman lying in a lonely place, who has been injured in a trap accident. You say, speaking of your hero’s prompt help to the woman, that “taking his hunting flask from his pocket, he forced a few drops of the brandy between the woman’s lips, etc.” Now, sir, we contend that had you had the cause of Total-abstinence fully at heart, you would have made that huntsman’s flask to have contained _water_.”

So much for the letter. The moral of it lies on the surface. There are some persons who seem unable to see anything from the side of _real, actual_ life—that Ladies’ committee could not—whose vision is narrowed down to the tiny slit of their own cramped, cabined life and thought, they have no true _out_look upon life, as a whole.

I preface this foreword with the above incident, because I am perfectly certain that the standpoint from which I have written this book will be utterly, absolutely misunderstood by many earnest, loving-hearted people, whose eyes, with my own, have caught the _up_ward gaze “from whence we look for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I would at once acknowledge that the inceptive idea of writing such a book as this was born within me from reading “Long Odds,” that wondrous little half-penny booklet written by the late General Robertson, I believe, a booklet that has been so marvellously “owned and blessed.”

For five or six years the idea for this present volume has been simmering and seething in my mind. The first and only real problem I had to face in the matter was that of the _principle_ involved in using the fictional form to clothe so sacred a subject (for, to me, the near Return of our Lord is the _most_ sacred of all subjects.) But the problem of the _principle_ was speedily settled, as I remembered how wondrously God had owned and blessed “Long Odds,” in which the fictional is the vehicle of the teaching.

Then, too, there are, I know, myriads of people into whose hands “Long Odds,” could never, by any chance, fall—for there are multitudes who will not so much as glance at, or touch a tract, while a volume will easily win its way among all classes. There is an enormous percentage of attendants at our churches and chapels, and many otherwise very earnest Christian workers, to whom the whole subject of the Lord’s Second Coming is an absolutely unknown realm of Truth—and these I would fain reach and arouse with the message of this book.

To those Christians who are looking for the Return of the Lord, to whom the subject is the most tenderly sacred of all subjects, who will at first sight condemn the use of the fictional element, the dramatic colour in this book—and many good people will, I am assured—I would say, first, that the book is not written for them, and second, that, our Lord Himself, speaking of His own Return, used two very remarkable illustrations from life’s strangest dramas. First, “_As it was in the days of Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until THE DAY_, etc.” Now, think what a myriad _dramas_ were being enacted when the flood came. And had the disciples asked their Lord, privately, after His utterance, to explain more fully what He meant, what thrilling stories He _could_, He _doubtless WOULD have sketched_. If any Christian cavils at the dramatic in this book, I would refer him or her to Christ’s own pointing in the picture of Noah’s time, then bid them fill out, by help of the feeblest, simplest imagination, the picture of the myriad dramas that were being enacted when that flood came, of old time. Then, if the objector is honest, and is _capable_ of the least imagination, he will say “I see! and, now that I see this fact, my wonder is _not_ that there is a certain dramatic freedom in this book, but that the writer has kept so powerful a restraint upon his pen.”

Again, Christ said:—“_As it was in the days of LOT_,” etc. Now think over _this_ saying of our Lord’s, and remembering what is actually recorded in Genesis, of the _vice_ and _crime_ of Sodom, (and how, alas! even when saved from the doomed city, Lot and his daughters brought away much of the vicious, criminal essence of the place with them,) think how the Return of our Lord, presently, will mean the snatching away of many of His own out of scenes infinitely more awful than anything I have used herein, or ever hinted at. A book written on the subject here chosen, and written in the vein our Lord Himself suggests in the two passages referred to above, could not have been written in any other way—to be true to life, and to the subject.

Should any reader object to the expository lectures of Major H——, as the chief vehicle for the doctrinal teaching, I would say that personal experience has proved the style to be infinitely more acceptable to readers than that of the dialogue mode.

I have purposely placed special emphasis on the Jewish side of the subject, since the Jewish question is infinitely more closely enwrapped with the fact of our Lord’s near return, than many speakers and writers give prominence to.

Sydney Watson.

“The Fire,” Vernham Dean, Hungerford, Berks.

Contents

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Chapter Page

I.—Taken At The Flood 11

II.—“The Courier” 20

III.—Flotsam 26

IV.—“I Only Reaped What I Sowed” 33

V.—“Lily Work” 38

VI.—An Interesting Talk 44

VII.—“Coming” 55

VIII.—Reverie 64

IX.—A Threat 75

X.—In The Nick Of Time 82

XI.—“Long Odds” 93

XII.—The Center Of The Earth 101

XIII.—A Demon 110

XIV.—Major H—— On “The Coming!” 118

XV.—The Address 124

XVI.—Her Cabin Companion 136

XVII.—Casting A Shoe 142

XVIII.—Told In A Cab 154

XIX.—Tom Hammond Reviewing 164

XIXa.—“MY MENTOR” 176

XX.—The Placard 185

XXI.—Was He Mad 189

XXII.—From The Prophet’S Chamber 195

XXIII.—Passover! 200

XXIV.—“This Saying Shall Come To Pass” 209

XXV.—Foiled! 218

XXVI.—A Castaway 221

XXVII.—A Stricken City 226

XXVIII.—“Hallelujah Lass” 232

XXIX.—In St. Paul’S 238

XXX.—Conclusion 246

“In The Twinkling Of An Eye”

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Chapter I.

Taken At The Flood.

The man walked aimlessly amid the thronging press. He was moody and stern. His eyes showed his disappointment and perplexity. At times, about his mouth there lurked an almost savage expression. As a rule he stood and walked erect. Only the day before this incident one of a knot of flower-girls in Drury Lane had drawn the attention of her companions to him as he strode briskly along the pavement, and in a rollicking spirit had sung, as he passed her:

“Stiff, starch, straight as a larch, Every inch a soldier; Fond o’ his country, fond o’ his queen, An’ hawfully fond o’ me.”

But to-day there is nothing of the soldier in the pose or gait of Tom Hammond.

Yet the time and place ought to have held his attention sufficiently to have kept him alert to outward appearance. It was eleven in the forenoon. The place was Piccadilly. He came abreast of Swan and Edgar’s. The pavement was thronged with women on shopping bent. More than one of them shot an admiring glance at him, for he had the face, the head, of a king among men. But he had no eyes for these chance admirers.

Tom Hammond was thirty years of age, a journalist, and an exceptionally clever one, at the time we make his acquaintance. He was a keen, shrewd man, was gifted with a foresight and general prescience that were almost remarkable, and hence was commonly regarded by his journalistic friends as “a coming man.” He had strongly-fixed ideas of what a great daily paper should be, but never having seen any attempt that came within leagues of his ideal, he longed—lusted would not be too strong a term—for the time and opportunity when, with practically unlimited capital behind him, and with a perfectly free hand to use it, he could issue his ideal journal.

This morning he seems farther from the goal of his hopes than ever. For two years he had been sub-editor of a London daily that had made for itself a great name—of a sort. There were certain reasons which had prompted him to hope, to expect, the actual editorship before long. But now his house of cards had suddenly tumbled about his ears.

A change had recently taken place in the composition of the syndicate that financed the journal. There were wheels within wheels, the existence of some of which he had never once guessed, and which in their whirling had suddenly produced unexpected results. The editor-in-chief had resigned, and the newly elected editor proved to be a man who had, years before, done him, Tom Hammond, the foulest wrong one journalist can do to another.

Under the present circumstances there had been no honourable course open for Hammond but to resign. That morning he had found his resignation not only accepted, but he found himself practically dismissed.

Enclosed in the letter of acceptance of his resignation was a cheque covering the term of his notice, together with the intimation that his services would cease from the time of his receipt of the cheque.

His dejection, at that moment when we meet him, was caused not so much at finding himself out of employment as from the consciousness that the new editor-elect had accomplished this move with a view to his degradation in the eyes of his profession—in fact, out of sheer spite.

To escape the crowd that almost blocked the pavement in front of Swan and Edgar’s windows, he turned sharply into the road, and literally ran into the arms of a young man.

“Tom Hammond!”

“George Carlyon!”

The greeting flew simultaneously from the lips of the two men. They gripped hands.

“By all that’s wonderful!” cried Carlyon, still wringing his friend’s hand. “Do you know, Tom, I am actually up here in town for one purpose only—to hunt you up.”

“To hunt me up!”

“Oh, let’s get out of this crush, old man,” interrupted Carlyon.

The pair steered their way through the traffic, crossed the Circus, stopped for a moment at the beautiful Shaftesbury Fountain, then struck across to the Avenue. In the comparative lull of that walk Carlyon went on:

“Yes, I’ve run up to town this morning to find you out and ask you one question: Are you so fixed up—excuse the Americanism, old boy. I’ve a dashing little girl cousin, from the States, staying with my mother, and—well, you know, old fellow, how it is. Man’s an imitative creature, and all that, and absorbs dialect quicker than anything else under the sun. But what I was going to say was this: are you too fixed up with your present newspaper to forbid your entertaining the thought of a real plum in the journalistic market?”

Hammond’s customary alert look returned to his face. He was now “every inch a soldier,” as he cried, excitedly, “Don’t keep me in suspense, Carlyon; tell me quickly what you mean.”

“Let’s jump into a gondola, Tom. I can talk better as we ride.”

Carlyon had caught the eye of a cab-driver, and the next moment the two friends were being driven along riverwards.

“Someone, some Johnnie or other,” began Carlyon, as the two men settled themselves back in the cab, “once called the hansom cab the gondola of London’s streets——”

He caught the quick, impatient movement of Hammond’s face, and with a light laugh went on:

“But you’re on thorns, old boy, to hear about the journalistic plum. Well, here goes. You once met my uncle, Sir Archibald Carlyon?”

Hammond nodded.

“He is crazy to start a daily,” said Carlyon. “It is no new craze with him; he has been itching to do it for years. And now that gold has been discovered on that land of his in Western Australia, and he is likely to be a multi-millionaire—the concessions he has already sold have given him a clear million,—now that he is rich beyond all his dreams, he won’t wait another day; he will be a newspaper proprietor. It’s a case of that kiddie in the bath, Tom, doncher-know, that’s grabbing for the soap—‘he won’t be happy till he gets it.’”

“He wants to find at once a good journalist, who is also a keen business man; one who will take hold of the whole thing. To the right man he will give a perfectly free hand, will interfere with nothing, but be content simply to finance the affair.”

An almost fierce light was burning in the eyes of the eager, listening Hammond. A thousand thoughts rioted through his brain, but he uttered no word; he would not interrupt his friend.

“I told Nunkums last night, when he was bubbling and boiling over with his project, that I had heard you say it was easier to drop a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds over the starting of a new paper than perhaps over any other venture in the world.

“Nunkums just smiled as I spoke, dropped a walnut into his port glass, and said quietly, ‘Then I’ll drop them.’

“He hooked that walnut out of his wine with the miniature silver boathook—he had the thing made for him for the purpose,—devoured the wine-saturated nut, then smiled back into my face, as he said: ‘Yes, Georgie, I am quite prepared to drop my hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand, if needs be, as I did my walnut. But I am equally hopeful—if I can secure the right man to edit and manage my paper,—that I shall eventually hook out an excellent dividend for my outlay. I want a man who not only knows how to do his own work well, as an editor, but one who has the true instinct in choosing his staff.’

“Of course, Tom, I trotted you out before him. He remembered you, of course, and jumped at the idea of getting you, if you were to be got. The upshot of it is, nothing would satisfy him but that I should come up by an early train this morning—early bird catches the worm, and all that kind of business, you know,—and now, in spite of the fact that my particular worm had wriggled and squirmed miles from his usual habitat, I’ve caught him. Now, tell me, are you open to treat with Sir Archibald?”

“Yes, and can begin business this very day!” Hammond laughed with the abandon of a boy, as he told, in a few sentences, the story of his dismissal.

“Good!” Carlyon, in his own exuberant glee, slapped his friend’s knee.

“Sir Archibald,” he went on, “was to come up by the 10:05 from our place, due at Waterloo at 11:49. He’ll be fixed up—“Hail Columbia!” again—at the hotel by this time. That’s where we are driving to now, and—ah! here we are!”

A moment later the two men were mounting the hotel steps. One of the servants standing in the vestibule recognized Carlyon, and saluted him.

“My uncle arrived, Bates?” Carlyon asked.

“Yes, sir, and a young lady with him!”

Carlyon turned quickly to Hammond.

“That’s Madge, my American cousin, Tom. I’m awfully glad she has come; I should like you to know her.”

Turning to the servant, he asked, “Same old rooms, Bates?”

“Yes, sir.”

Three steps at a time, laughing and talking all the while, Carlyon, ignoring the lift, raced up the staircase, followed more slowly by his friend.

Hammond never wholly forgot the picture of the sitting-room and its occupant, as he entered with Carlyon. The room was a large one, exquisitely furnished, and flooded with a warm, mellow light. A small but cheerful-looking wood fire burned upon the tiled hearth, the atmosphere of the room fragrant with a soft, subtle odour, as though the burning wood were scented. From a couch, as the two men entered, a girl rose briskly, and faced them. She made a picture which Tom never forgot. The warm, mellow light that filled the room seemed to clothe her as she stood to meet them. “America” was stamped upon her and her dress, upon the arrangement of her hair, upon the very droop of her figure. She was tall, fair, with that exquisite colouring and smoothness of complexion that is the product of an unartificial, hygienic life.

Her face could not be pronounced wholly beautiful, but it was a face that was full of life and charm, her eyes being especially arrestive.

“Awfully glad you came up, Madge!” cried Carlyon. “I’ve run my quarry down, and this is my own particular, Tom Hammond.”

He made a couple of mockingly-funny elaborate bows, saying: “Miss Madge Finisterre, of Duchess County, New York. Mr. Tom Hammond, of—oh, shades of Cosmopolitanism!—of everywhere, of London just at present.”—Tom bowed to the girl.—She returned his salute, and then held forth her hand in a frank, pleasant way, as she laughingly said, “I have heard so much of Tom Hammond during the last few days, that I guess you seem like an old acquaintance.”

Tom shook hands with the maiden, and for a moment or two they chatted as freely and merrily as though they were old acquaintances.

The voice of Carlyon broke into their chat, asking: “Where’s Nunkums, Madge?”

Before the girl could reply, the door opened and Sir Archibald entered the room.

One glance into his face would have been sufficient to have told Tom the type of man he had to deal with, even if he had not seen him before. A warm-hearted, unconventional, impulsive man, a perfect gentleman in appearance, but a merry, hail-fellow-well-met man in his dealings with his fellows.

With a bit of mock drama in the gesture, Madge Finisterre flourished her hand towards the newcomer, crying,

“Sir Archibald, George? Lo, he is here!” She flashed a quick glance to the piano as she added, “If only I had known you were about to enter, uncle, I would have treated you to a few crashing bars of stage-life entree-music.”

“Go away with your nonsense!” laughed the old man.

“Nonsense, indeed!” the girl laughed as merrily as the old man. Then, with a sudden, swift movement, she crossed to the piano, struck one sharp note upon it, and whispered in well-feigned hoarseness, “Slow music for the three conspirators as they retire to plot the destruction of London’s press, and the accumulation of untold millions by their own special journalistic production!”

Her fingers moved over the ivory keys, and low, weird, creepy music filled the room with its eerie notes.

Sir Archibald and George Carlyon fell in with the girl’s mood, and crept doorwards on tiptoe.

“Number three,” hissed the girl.

And Tom Hammond laughingly followed with the two other men.

“She is a treat, is Madge!” laughed George Carlyon, as the three men passed through the doorway and made for the study-like room of Sir Archibald.

Chapter II.

“The Courier.”

For two hours the three men held close conference together. At the end of that time all the preliminaries of the new venture were settled. Tom Hammond had explained his long-cherished views of what the ideal daily paper should be. Sir Archibald was delighted with the scheme, and, in closing with Hammond, gave him a perfectly free hand.

“You were on the point of saying something about a striking poster to announce the coming paper, Mr. Hammond,” said the old baronet.

“Yes,” Tom replied; “I think a great deal may be done by arresting the attention of the people—those in London especially. My idea for a poster is this: the name of the paper is to be ‘The Courier.’ Very well, let us have an immense sheet poster, first-class drawing, striking but harmonious colouring, and bold, arrestive title of the paper and announcement of its issue. Following the title, I would have in the extreme left a massive sign-post, a prominent arm of the structure bearing the legend ‘To-morrow.’ On the extreme right of the picture I would put another sign-post, the arm of which should bear the words ‘The Day After To-morrow.’ I would have a splendidly-drawn mounted courier, the horse galloping towards the right-hand post, having left ‘To-morrow’ well in the rear.”

The old baronet exclaimed, “Rush the thing on! Flood the hoardings of London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff—all the large towns, and the smaller ones as well, if you can get hoardings big enough. Don’t study the expense, either in the get-up or in the issue of the picture. Don’t let the pill-sellers or cocoa or mustard people beat us.”

The old man sprang to his feet and paced the floor, rubbing his hands, crying continually,

“Good! good! We’ll wake old England up. We’ll——”

“Toddle into lunch,” interrupted George Carlyon. “That’s the third summons we’ve had!”

Tom Hammond sat next to Madge at luncheon, and was charmed with her easy, unconventional manners. But his mind was too full of the new paper, of the great opportunity that had come to him so unexpectedly, to be as wholly absorbed with the charm of her personality as he might otherwise have been.

He did not linger over the luncheon table.

“There are one or two fellows, Sir Archibald,” he explained, “whom I should like to secure on my staff at once. I don’t want to lose even an hour.”

As he bade Madge Finisterre good-bye, he expressed the hope that he might see her again soon, and the girl in reply allowed her eyes unconsciously to express more than her words.

“She is the most charming woman I ever met,” he told himself, as he followed Sir Archibald into his room for the final word for which the baronet had asked. George Carlyon had remained behind with Madge.

“It was about the first working expenses I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Hammond,” the baronet began. They were seated in the baronet’s room.

“I will have fifty thousand pounds—or shall we say a hundred thousand?—deposited, at once, in your name at—what bank?”

“Any good bank you please, Sir Archibald, so long as the particular branch is fairly central.”

“Capital and Counties—how will that do?” the baronet asked, adding, “I always bank with them myself.”

“That will do, sir.”

“How about the Ludgate Hill branch, Mr. Hammond?”

“Could not be better, sir.”

“Settled, then, Mr. Hammond!” There were a few more words exchanged between master and man, and then they parted.

As Tom Hammond strode along the Embankment towards Waterloo Bridge, his heart was the heart of a boy again.

“Is life worth living!” he cried inwardly, answering his own question with the rapturous words: “In this hour I know nothing else that earth could give me to make life more joyous!”

People passing him saw his face radiant with a wondrous joy. It’s rare to see peace, even, in faces in our great cities. It is rarer still to see joy’s gleam. He allowed his glance to flash all around him, as he murmured, “I am glad, too, that I am in London. Who dare say that London is dull, or grim, or sordid? Who was it that wrote, “No man curses the town more heartily than I, but after travelling by mountains, plain, desert, forest, and on the deep sea, one comes back to London and finds it the most wonderful place of them all!”

“Ah! It was Roger Pocock, I believe, wrote that sentiment. Roger Pocock, ‘I looks towards yer, sir. Them’s my senterments!’”

He laughed low and gleefully at his own merry mood. Then as his eyes took in the river, the moving panorama of the Embankment, and caught the throb of the mighty pulsing of life all about him, Le Gallienne’s lines came to him, and, while he moved onward, he murmured:

“London, whose loveliness is everywhere. London so beautiful at morning light, One half forgets how fair she is at night.

“London as beautiful at set of sun As though her beauty had just begun! London, that mighty sob, that splendid tear, That jewel hanging in the great world’s ear.

“Ah! of your beauty change no single grace, My London with your sad mysterious face.”

He moved forward in a strange rapture of spirit. He forgot even “beautiful London”; he was momentarily unconscious how he travelled or whither. He might have been blind or deaf for all that he now saw or heard. The drone of a blind beggar’s voice reading the Scriptures, however, presently had power to break his trance. He paused a moment before the man.

“This same Jesus,” droned the blind man’s voice, “who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.”

Hammond dropped a sixpence into the beggar’s box, and moved away, the wonder of the words he had just heard read arresting all his previous thoughts of his glad success.

“Shall so come in like manner!” he murmured. “I wonder what it means?”

The next instant a woman’s pitiful voice filled his ear, crying:

“For the love of God, good sir, give me the price of a piece of bread.”

He turned sharply towards her. Her face was haggard and hunger-filled; her eyes were wells of despair. He slipped his finger and thumb into the fob of his coat. The first coin that came to his touch was a shilling. He dropped it into the emaciated, outstretched palm.

The wretched creature gazed at the coin, then at him. Her lips moved, but no words came from them. Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. He passed on. But the incident moved him strangely.

“If Christ,” he mused, “ever comes back to earth again, surely, surely He will deliver it from such want and misery as that!”

He paused and looked back at the woman. Her face was buried in her hands. Her form was shaking with sobs. Curiosity tempted him to go back.

As he came abreast of her, a child, a girl about nine, barefooted and tired-looking, was saying to the woman, “What’s the matter, missis? Wouldn’t that swell giv’ yer nuffink w’en yer arst ’im?”

“Give me nothing?” The woman glanced down at the child. “Why, he is kinder than Gawd, fur he give me a shilling!”

At this Tom Hammond hurried away.

“Kinder than God!” he murmured. “Oh, God, that we should have it in our power to buy such happiness for so small a sum!”

“Kinder than God” he repeated to himself. He was now mounting the granite steps to the bridge. “Of course, one knows better; yet how difficult of proof it would become, if one had to explain it to that poor soul, and to the thousands like her in this great city!”

For the first time since leaving Sir Archibald his own joy was forgotten. The awful problem of London’s destitution had supplanted London’s beauty in his thoughts.

Chapter III.

Flotsam.

“Only nine hours!”

Tom Hammond laughed amusedly at his own murmured thought. It seemed ridiculous almost to try to believe that only nine hours before he had been a discharged journalist, while now he was at the head of what he knew would be the greatest journalistic venture London—yea, the world—had ever seen.

He had just dined. He felt that he wanted some kind of movement, some distraction, to relieve the tension. He was in that frame of mind when some kind of adventure was necessary, although he did not tell himself this, being hardly conscious of his own need. He knew that the haunts of his fellows—club, theatre, music-hall—would only serve to irritate him. Some instinct turned his feet riverwards.

It was now a quarter past seven o’clock. Night had fallen upon London. Tom Hammond crossed the great Holborn thoroughfare. The heavier traffic of London’s commercial life had almost ceased. The omnibuses going west were filled with theatregoers, and other pleasure-seekers. Hansoms flitted swiftly either way, each holding a man and a woman in evening dress.

Having crossed the roadway, he paused for a moment at the corner of Chancery Lane, and let his eye take in all the scene. And again Le Gallienne came to his mind, and he softly murmured:

“Ah! London! London! our delight, Great flower that opens but at night, Great city of the midnight sun, Whose day begins when day is done.

“Lamp after lamp against the sky Opens a sudden beaming eye, Leaping alight on every hand, The iron lilies of the Strand,

“Like dragonflies the hansoms hover With jewelled eyes to catch the lover; The streets are full of lights and loves, Soft gowns and flutter of soiled doves.”

He turned with a faint sigh, and began to pass on down Chancery Lane.

“Oh, London!” he mused, “thy surface may be wonderful and beautiful; but below—what are you below the surface?”

“The human moths about the light Dash and cling in dazed delight, And burn and laugh, the world and wife, For this is London, this is life!

“Upon thy petals butterflies, But at thy root, some say, there lies A world of weeping, trodden things, Poor worms that have not eyes or wings.”

He moved onwards in the direction of the Law Courts. Presently he neared the Waterloo Bridge approach. He had, all unrealized by himself, since he left the restaurant where he had dined, been walking towards the river. A moment or two after, and he was leaning on the parapet of the bridge, looking down into the dark waters. Sluggish, oil-like in appearance, as seen in the dull gleam of the lamps, the river moved seawards. A sudden longing to get out upon those dark waters came to him.

“If only——” he mused. Then, turning briskly, he came face to face with a man in a blue guernsey, who was crossing the bridge. It was the very man of his half-uttered thought. “If only I could run up against Bob Carter!” he had almost said.

“Good evening, Mister Ham’nd.” The man in the guernsey saluted with a thick, tar-stained forefinger as he recognized Tom Hammond.

“Good evening, Carter.” Hammond laughed as he added, “I was just wishing I could meet you, for I felt I should like to get out on the river.”

“I’m jes’ going as fur as Lambeff, sir. Ef yer likes ter go wif me, you’ll do me proud, sir; yer know that, I knows!”

A few minutes later the two men sat in Carter’s boat. Hammond, in the stern, was steering. The man Carter, on the first thwart, manipulated the oars. Hammond had known the man about a year. He had done him a kindness that the waterman had never forgotten.

“Aw’d go to ther world’s end fur yer, sir,” he had often said since.

The man was ordinarily a silent companion, and to-night after a few exchanged words between the pair, he was as silent as usual.

Down the wide, turgid river the boat, propelled by Carter’s two oars, shot jerkily, the rise and fall of the glow in the rower’s pipe-bowl synchronizing with the lift and dip of the oars.

Hammond enjoyed the silence. There was a weirdness about this night trip on the river that fitted in with his mood. His brain had been considerably overwrought that day. The quiet row was beginning to soothe the overwrought nerves. Where he sat in the stern of the boat, he faced the clock-tower at Westminster. The gleaming windows of the great embankment hotels lay behind him. A myriad electric lights were on his right hand. The gloom and darkness of the unlighted wharfage on the Surrey side were on his left.

Only by a waterway miracle Carter cleared an anchored barge that, defying the laws of the river, carried no warning light.

“Drat ’em!” growled the man Carter. “They oughter do a stretch in Portlan’ or Dartmoor fur breakin’ the lor. There’s many a ’onest waterman whose boat’s foun’ bottom-up, or smashed to smithereens, an’ whose body’s foun’, or isn’t, jes, as the case may be, all becos’ they lazy houn’s is too ’ide-boun’ to light a lamp, cuss ’em!”

His growl died away in his throat. The glowing fire of his pipe rose and fell quicker than ever, telling of a fierce anger burning within him.

“Ssh!” he hissed. Hammond saw that his face was turned shorewards. He heaved aft towards Hammond, and whispered, “Kin yer see that woman, sir?” He jerked his chin in the direction of a line of moored barges.

Hammond had turned his head, and could plainly discern the form of a woman standing on the edge of the outer barge of the cluster.

The men in the boat sat still, but watchful.

“Do she mean sooerside, sir?” whispered Carter. “Looks like it, sir. Don’t make a soun’.”

Even as he spoke the woman leaped into the air. There was a low scream, a splash, a leap of foam flashed dully for one instant, then all was still again.

The waterman plied his oars furiously. Hammond steered for the spot where that foam had splashed. An instant later the boat was over the place where the body had disappeared. Carter lay on his oars, and peered into the darkness on one side. Hammond strained his eye on the other side.

With startling suddenness a hand darted upwards within a foot of where Hammond sat in the stern of the boat. In the same instant the woman’s head appeared. Hammond reached out excitedly, and caught the back hair of the woman, twisting his fingers securely into the knot of hair at the back of her head.

Carter shipped his oars, and in two minutes the wretched woman was safe in the boat. Her drenched face gleamed white where they laid her. A low whimpering sob broke from her.

“Turn ’er over on her face a little, sir, while I makes the boat fast fur a minute or two, sir,” jerked out the waterman.

“Pore soul ov ’er!” he went on, knotting his painter to a bolt in the stern of a barge. “She ’ave took in a bellyful of Thames water, an’ it ain’t filtered no sort, that’s sartin!”

Hammond had by this time turned the woman over on her face.

Carter came aft bearing a water-beaker in his hands.

“I’ll lift her legs, sir,” he said, “and you put this beaker under her, jes’ above her knees; that’ll ’elp her a bit.”

That was done, and almost instantly the woman was very sick.

“In my locker there, sir, I’ve got a drop o’ whisky. I keeps it there fur ’mergencies like this,” said Carter.

Hammond moved to allow the man to reach a seat-locker in the stern. The next minute, while Hammond supported the woman, the waterman poured a few drops of the spirit down her throat.

She coughed and sputtered, but the draught restored her. She began to cry in a low, whimpering way.

“We must get her ashore, Carter,” cried Hammond. “I’ll take the oars, and, as you know the riverside better than I do, just steer into the nearest landing-place you know.”

Carter leaped to the bows, cast off the painter, and hurried aft again.

“Jes’ ’long yere, sir, there’s an old landin’ as’ll jes’ serve us. Wots yer fink ter do wi’ the pore soul, sir—not ’and her over to the perlice?”

“No, neither the police nor workhouse, Carter. I wish I could see her face, and see what kind of woman she is.”

By way of reply, Carter struck a match, and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. When the wick had caught light, he flashed it on the face of the woman.

Her eyes were closed, her face was deadly pale. Her hair was dishevelled. But in the one flashing glance Hammond took at her, he recognized her.

“It’s Mrs. Joyce!” he muttered half-aloud and in amazed tones.

“Know ’er, sir?” asked the waterman.

“A little!” he replied. “Her husband is a reporter—a drinking scamp.”

Carter shut off the light of the bull’s-eye, at that moment.

“We’re jes’ ’ere now, sur, so’s best not to be callin’ ’tention like wi’ a light.”

He steered the boat into a kind of narrow alley-way between two crazy old wharves.

* * * * *

Hammond, rightly gauging the kindly heart of his landlady, had brought the drenched woman in a cab to his lodgings. She was still in a half-fainting condition when he carried her into the house. In two sentences he explained the situation to the landlady, whose natural kindness and loyalty to her lodger made her willing to aid his purpose of rescue.

“I will carry her up to the bath-room,” he said. “Let your girl get a cup of milk heated as hot as can be sipped, while you bath this poor soul quickly in very hot water. Then let her be got to bed, and have some good, nourishing soup ready. She’ll probably sleep after that. And in the morning—well, the events of the morning will take their own shape.”

Half-an-hour later, as Hammond took a cup of coffee, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the woman he had saved was in bed, and doing well.

“Poor soul!” he mused. “That brute of a husband has probably driven her to this attempt on her life. I wonder what her history was before she married, for I remember how it struck me, that day when I saw her at the office, that she was evidently a woman of some culture.”

It was nearly ten now. He had no desire to go out again. It wanted two hours quite to his usual bed-time. But a strange sense of drowsiness began to steal over him, and he went off to his bed.

“What a day this has been!” he muttered, as he laid his head on the pillow.

Chapter IV.

“I Only Reaped What I Sowed.”

Hammond awaited the woman whom he had saved from drowning.

“She has slept fairly well,” the landlady told him, “and I made her eat a good breakfast that I carried up to her myself, Mr. Hammond!”

Now he waited to speak to her. A moment or two more, and the landlady ushered her into the room, then slipped away.

“How can I ever repay you, sir!” cried the woman, seizing the hand that Hammond held out to her.

For a moment or two her emotion was too great for further speech. Hammond led her to an armchair and seated her. She sobbed convulsively for a moment or two. He allowed her to sob. Presently tears came. The paroxysm passed, the tears relieved her, and she lifted her sad, beautiful eyes to his face.

“You know—oh, yes, you must know, Mr. Hammond—(I recognized you last night)—how I came to be in the water. I tried to take my life. I was miserable, despairing! God forgive me.”

His strong eyes were full of a rare tenderness, as he said, “But, Mrs. Joyce, you surely know that death is not the end of all existence. I am not what would be called a religious man, but every fibre of my inward being tells me that death does not end all.”

He saw a shiver pass over her, as she hoarsely replied, “I, too, realize that this morning, Mr. Hammond. But last night the madness of an overwhelming despair was upon me. My life had been a literal hell for years, until yesterday I could bear it no longer. I was famished with hunger, sick with despair, and——”

She sighed wearily. “Perhaps,” she went on, “if you knew all I have borne, you would not wonder at my rash, mad act.”

“Tell me your story, Mrs. Joyce,” he said, gently. “It may relieve your overcharged heart, and, anyhow, I will be your friend, as far as I can.”

She sighed again. This time there was a note of relief, rather than weariness, in the sigh.

“My father was a well-to-do farmer,” she began, “in North Hants. I was the only child, and I fear I was spoiled. I received the best education possible, and loved my studies for their own sake, for culture, in all its forms, had a strong attraction for me. I had been engaged to a young yeoman farmer for nearly a year. I had known him all my life, and we had been sweethearts even as children. Then there came suddenly into my life that man Joyce, for whom I sacrificed everything. God only knows how he contrived to exercise such an awful fascination over me as to make me leave everyone, everything, and marry him.”

For a moment she paused, and shuddered. Her voice, when she spoke, again, was hollow, and full of tears.

“I killed my father by eloping on the very eve of my arranged marriage with Ronald Ferris. Ronald left the country as soon as he could wind up his affairs. And I—well, here in this mighty Babylon, I have ever since been reaping some of the sorrow I had sown. Not a penny of my father’s money ever reached me, and that brute Joyce only married me for what he expected to get with me. He has done his best to make earth a hell for me, and I, in my mad blindness, last night, almost exchanged earth’s fleeting hell for God’s eternal hell.”

A look of shame filled her eyes as she lifted them to Hammond.

“What you reminded me of just now, Mr. Hammond, I, deep down in my soul, know only too well—that death does not end all. My father was a true Christian, and a lay preacher. I have travelled with him hundreds of times to his preaching appointments, playing the harmonium and singing solos for him in his services. More than once the sense of God’s claim upon me was so great as almost to compel my yielding my heart and life. Would to God I had! But my pride, my ambitions, strangled my good desires, and, as I said just now, I broke my father’s heart. I killed him, and ruined all my own life, though I have no pity for myself. Then London life, my husband’s brutality, my own misery, all helped to drive even the memory of God from my mind.”

“Yet,” broke in Hammond, “the Christian religion teaches that sorrow and suffering ought to drive the possessor of the faith nearer to God.”

There was a hint of apology in his tones as he went on:

“Don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. Joyce; I only speak from hearsay. I have heard parsons preach it, but I know nothing experimentally about these things myself.”

She smiled in a slow, sad way, and, catching her breath in a kind of quick sob, said: “Neither have I ever known anything experimentally of these truths. I drifted into the outward form of a correct, religious, life. I learned to like the brightness of our chapel services, the fun of choir practice, the merry company, the adulation heaped upon me for my solo-singing. Then there were the tea-meetings, the service of song, and a multitude of other mild excitements which went to brighten the monotony of a rural existence. But of God, of Christ, of the Divine life, I fear I knew nothing.”

Hammond smiled inwardly as he listened to this strange confession. The phraseology was new to him.

“It is the shibboleth of Nonconformity, I suppose,” he told himself. “And I suppose each section of religious society has its own outward form of things in which it trusts, thinking, caring, nothing for the great Divine verities that should be the true religious life.”

He did not utter his thoughts aloud, but asked with some apparent irrelevance, “Where is your husband, Mrs. Joyce?”

“Off on one of his drinking bouts, or maybe, locked up for drunkenness; I cannot say.”

Her lifted eyes were full of beseeching, as she went on, “You will keep secret, Mr. Hammond, all this wild, mad episode of my life. If only I could know that the sad, mad, bad story was locked up between God and you, your kind landlady and myself, I think I could go back and face my misery better.”

“Do not fear, Mrs. Joyce,” he replied quickly. “The affair shall be as though it had never been. I can answer for Mrs. Belcher, my landlady; and for myself I give you my word, and——”

“God reward you, sir!” she sobbed. “Already you have given me clearer views of Him than any minister or any sermon ever did.”

A few moments later Mrs. Joyce rose to leave. He pressed three sovereigns into her hand, and in spite of her tearful protestations made her take the money.

“If you are ever in desperate need, come to me, or write me, Mrs. Joyce, and I will help you, if I can. Meanwhile, be assured that the little I have done for you I would have done for any stranger, for, after all, the human race is linked by a strange, a mighty family tie. Good-bye.”

She wrung the hand he gave her, then with a sudden, impulsive movement she lifted it sharply to her lips and kissed it with a tearful passionateness.

The next moment she was gone. His hand was wet with her tears.

“Poor soul!” he muttered.

Passing across the room to the window, he glanced out. She was moving down the street. Her handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.

“How strange,” he murmured, as he turned from the window, “are these chance encounters in life! Like ships at sea, we sight, hail, exchange some kind of greeting, then pass on. Do we, after all, I wonder, unconsciously influence each other in these apparently trivial life-encounters? If so, how? Take this episode now, for instance. Will my encounter with that poor soul have any effect on my life, or on hers? If so, what?”

Chapter V.

Lily Work.

The room we now enter is a large one. It is close under the roof of a house in Finsbury. The man there at work pauses for a moment.

The room is a workshop. The man is a Jew—but what a Jew! He might have posed to an artist as a model, a type of the proudest Jewish monarch over Israel. Face, form, stature—not even Saul or David or Solomon could have excelled him.

The room held the finished workmanship of his hands for the three past years. And now, as he paused in his labour—a labour of love—for a moment, and drew his tall form erect, and lifted his face to the window above him, a light that was almost holy filled his eyes.

“God of our fathers,” he murmured, “God of the Holy Tent and of the Temple, instruct me; teach my fingers to do this great work.”

He let his hands fall with an almost sacred touch upon the chapiter he had been chasing. He wist not that his face shone with an unearthly light, as for a moment his lips moved in prayer. Then quietly reaching a thick old book from a shelf, he opened it at one of its earlier pages, and read aloud.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all kinds of workmanship. And I, behold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan: and in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all that I have commanded thee: the tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy-seat that is thereupon, and all the furniture of the tabernacle.”

The light—it was now almost a fire—deepened in his eyes. A rare, a rich, cadence filled his voice as he read the holy words. His fingers moved to the middle of the book. It easily opened at a certain place, as though it had been often used at that page. Again he read aloud:

“And the chapiters that were upon, the top of the pillars were of lily work, ... and the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also above, ... and the pomegranates were two hundred, in rows round about upon the other chapiter, ... and he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin (”He shall establish“); and he set up the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz (”In it is strength“). And on the top of the pillars was lily work: so was the work of the pillars finished.”

With a reverent touch the man closed the book, replaced it on the shelf, then, lifting his eyes again to where the cold, clear light streamed down through the great skylight in the ceiling, he murmured:

“How long, O Lord, shall Thy people be cast off and trodden down, and their land, Thy land, be held by the accursed races?”

For a moment a look of pain swept into his face. Then, as he became conscious of the touch of his lowered hand upon the chapiter, his eyes travelled downwards to the exquisite “lily work,” and the light of a new hope swept the pain off his face.

“The very fact that the time has come,” he murmured, “for us to be preparing for the next temple, is a token from Jehovah that the day of Messiah draweth nigh.”

His eyes lingered a moment on the rare and beautiful workmanship, then he took up a chasing tool and continued his toil; yet, while he worked he kept up a running recitative of Ezekiel’s description of the great temple—for he knew by heart all the chapters of that prophet.

As he presently repeated the words: “And the Prince in the midst of them, when they go in, shall go in; and when they go forth, shall go forth,” he lifted his eyes with a deep holy rapture shining in all his face.

He closed his recitative with a ringing note of triumph in his voice, as he cried, “It shall be round about eighteen thousand cubits: and the name of the city from that day shall be Jehovah-Chammah”—“The Lord is there.”

There was a moment of absolute silence. The graver was still, the hand that held it might have been stone, so rigid did it become. The lips of Abraham Cohen moved, but no other sound came from him save the words “Jehovah was there,” and he prayed aloud.

In the midst of his rapt devotion the door of the workroom opened. The slight sound aroused the dreamer. He turned his face in the direction of the door, and his eyes flashed with pleasure.

“Ah, Zillah!” he cried in greeting. The girl he addressed closed the door, thus shutting out the odour of frying fish. She crossed the floor quickly, with a certain eagerness, and came towards him with a rare grace. She was singularly beautiful, of an Eastern style of beauty. Her complexion was of the Spanish olive tone, and her melting eyes were of that same Spanish type. Her hair—a wondrous crown of it—was blue-black. She had a certain plumpness of form that seemed to add rather than take from her general beauty. She was sister to his wife.

“Supper will be ready in five minutes, Abraham,” she began. “Will you be ready for it?”

He smiled down into her great black eyes. He was never very keen on his meals. He ate to live only; he did not live to eat. She knew that, and had long since learned that his labour of love was as meat and drink to him. Her eyes glided past him and rested on his work.

“It is very beautiful, Abraham!” she cried. There was reverence as well as rapture and admiration in her voice and glance.

“It cannot be too beautiful, Zillah,” he returned.

Her eyes were on his work. His were on her face. He read in it the rapturous admiration of his workmanship.

“When will the Messiah come?” she sighed.

“Soon, I believe!” he returned. “Jehovah rested in His creative work after six days’ labour. A thousand years with Him are as one day. May it not well be, then, that as there have passed nearly six thousand years (each thousand years, representing one day) that He will presently rest in His finished work for His people, through the coming of the Messiah, as He did at the creation?”

He laid his tool aside, and turned to the beautiful girl, as he continued:

“Besides, do not our sacred books say that when three springs have been discovered on Mount Zion, Messiah will come? Two springs have lately been discovered by the excavators in Jerusalem, and our people out there excitedly watch the work of these men, expecting soon the discovery of the third spring.”

Her eager, parted lips told how she hung upon his speech. He smiled down gratefully into her great black lustrous eyes, though a sigh escaped him as he said:

“Ah! I wish Leah would only show a little of the interest in all this, that you do, Zillah!”

“You must not blame Leah too much, Abraham,” the girl answered quickly. “She has her children, you know. Mother always said that if ever Leah had babies, that there would be nothing else in the world for her except the babies. Besides, Abraham, no two of us are constituted alike, and Leah is what the Gentiles about here call happy-go-lucky. But, Abraham, tell me more of what you think of Messiah’s coming. Leah’s five minutes will be sure to run to a quarter of an hour.”

“I do think Messiah is coming soon,” cried the young fellow excitedly. “Who knows? Perhaps when the Passover comes again, and we set His chair, and open the door for Him to enter, that He will suddenly come. Did I tell you, Zillah, about the date discovery at Safed, in Palestine?”

“No, what is it?” The girl’s face glowed with a strange earnestness, her voice rang with it.

“Safed,” he went on, quickly, “is a little town to the north-west of Galilee. Our Rabbi there has discovered from our sacred books, that Messiah’s coming, and the overthrow of our enemies, will be in the year five thousand six hundred and sixty-six—nineteen hundred and six according to the Gentile reckoning. Our Father Moses, and all the children of Israel sang, when Jehovah delivered them from the Red Sea:—‘Yea, by the force of Thy swelling waves hast Thou demolished those who arose against Thee. Thou didst discharge Thy wrath, it devoured them up like stubble.’ Our Rabbis—and even the Christian Gentile teachers—agree that the deliverance of our race from Pharaoh, and the destruction of his hosts, picture our race’s future as well as its past. And the numerical value of ‘Thou shalt overthrow’ (part of those two song-stanzas I have just repeated) gives the date I have mentioned as the time of our deliverance from all our troubles, when Messiah shall come.”

There was a sudden clatter of little feet outside at that moment, and a boy and a girl burst into the room.

“What do you think, father?” cried the boy, with the excited impulsiveness of a child bursting with news. “A boy—he’s a Gentile, of course—whom I know says that Messiah has come, that the cursed Nazarene was He, and that——”

“We will go to supper, Reuben, and you and I will talk about that another time.” Cohen spoke quietly to his boy. He had his own reasons for checking the subject at that time.

His aunt caught the boy’s hand, and danced with him out of the room. Rachel, the little girl, a wondrous miniature of Zillah, clung to her father, and the whole family trooped off to wash their hands before the meal.

Chapter VI.

An Interesting Talk.

“The Courier” was now an established fact. As a newspaper it was as much a revelation to the journalists as to the general public. London had taken to it from the first moment of its issue. The provinces, instead of following their usual course of waiting to see what London did, took their own initiative, and adopted the new paper at once. Every instinct about the ideal paper, felt and nursed during the waiting years by Tom Hammond, had been true instinct. He had always felt them to be true; now he realized the fact. He was a proud man, a happy man.

One curious feature of the new journal had attracted much attention, even before the publication of the first issue. In his “Foreword,” as he had termed it, in a full page announcement that appeared in three of the leading London dailies, Tom Hammond had said:

“An important feature of the ‘Courier’ will be the item or items (as the case may be) which will be found each day under the heading, ‘From the Prophet’s Chamber.’ A greater man than the editor of ‘The Courier’ once said, ‘Every editor of a newspaper ought to have a strain of the seer in his composition. He ought to have the gift of prophecy up to a certain point. He ought to be so thoroughly conversant with the history of his own and every other nation that when history is on the point of repeating itself—as it has a habit of doing,—he may not be caught altogether napping.’ It is the unexpected that happens, we say.

“True, but there are many of the so-called happenings of the unexpected that to the spirit of the seer will have been expected and more than half-prophesied.

“Now, while we propose that the whole tone of ‘The Courier’ shall show the spirit of the seer in a measure, we shall endeavour to make the particular column to which we are now alluding essentially new. In it we shall deal with every class of subject likely to prove mentally arrestive to our readers, and shall make it prophetic up to the limits of our capacities as man, citizen and editor. How far the possession of the quality of the seer will be found in us we must leave the future—and our readers—to decide. But we certainly anticipate that ‘The Prophet’s Chamber’ column will be one of the most popular features of what we shall aim to make the most popular paper of the day.”

Tom Hammond was no believer in luck. He had left nothing to chance in the production of his paper. There was not a department left to subordinates which he did not personally assure himself was being carried out on the best, the safest, lines. For weeks he literally lived on the spot where his great paper was to be produced, taking his meals and sleeping at an hotel close by the huge building that housed “The Courier.”

He saw very little of Sir Archibald Carlyon during these weeks, and nothing at all of George, or the fair American, Madge Finisterre. George was in Scotland; Madge on the Continent.

His thoughts often turned to the American girl, and his eye brightened and his pulse quickened whenever he heard of her from Sir Archibald.

Once he had been permitted by Sir Archibald to read a gossipy letter sent by her to the old baronet. He laughed over a quotation in that letter.

“I am not like the Chicago girl,” she wrote, “of whom our Will Carleton writes, who, telling all about her tour in ‘Urop,’ says,

“Old Scotland? Yes, all in our power, We did there to be through; We stopped in Glasgow one whole hour, Then straight to ‘Edinborough.’ At Abbotsford we made a stay Of half-an-hour precisely. (The ruins all along the way Were ruined very nicely.)

“We ‘did’ a mountain in the rain, And left the others undone, Then took the ‘Flying Scotchman’ train, And came by night to London. Long tunnels somewhere on the line Made sound and darkness deeper; No; English scenery is not fine Viewed from a Pullman sleeper.

“Oh, Paris! Paris! Paris! ’Tis No wonder, dear, that you go So far into ecstasies About that Victor Hugo! He paints the city, high and low, With faithful pen and ready. (I think, my dear, I ought to know, We drove there two hours steady.”)

“I feel,” Madge had written, “that one wants a life-time to ‘do’ the Continent.”

Tom Hammond’s thoughts often flew to the gay girl. This morning, having seen a review of Carleton’s latest book of ballads, he had been reminded of her, and he laid down his pen a moment, as he gave himself up to a little reverie about her. An announcement aroused him.

“Miss Finisterre and Mr. Carlyon, sir.”

He smiled to himself. “Talk of angels, etc.,” he mused.

The next moment he was greeting his callers. Madge Finisterre looked, in Tom Hammond’s eyes, more radiant now than ever.

“Fancy, Mr. Hammond,” she laughed, when the greetings were over, “George and I met at Dover! He had come south to see a friend off from Dover, and was on the pier when I landed from the Calais boat. We’ve been down to that dear old country house, but I wanted to do some shopping, and to see how you looked as editor-in-chief and general boss of the biggest daily paper in the world.”

Tom Hammond’s eyes flashed with a pleased light at her confession, which implied that she had thought of him, even as he had thought of her. He noted, too, how an extra shade of colour warmed the clear skin of her cheeks as she made her confession.

“Because,” she went on, “all the world declares that ‘The Courier’ is the premier paper of the world, and everyone who is anyone—in the know of things, I mean—knows that Mr. Tom Hammond is ‘The Courier.’”

The talk, for a few minutes, was “shop.”

“You don’t go in for a column of comic,” Madge presently said. “If you did, I could give you an item, we, George and I, heard in the train as we ran up to town. There were two of your English parsons in our carriage, talking in that high-faluting note that always reminds me of your high-pitched church service,—‘dearly-beloved-brethren’ note.

“Well, the two parsons were telling yarns one against the other—chestnuts were cheap, I assure you,—and one of them told a story he tacked on to General Booth—the last time I heard it, it was told of Spurgeon. He said that the General was going down Whitechapel, and, seeing the people pouring into a show, and wondering what there was so powerfully attractive to the masses in these shows, he determined to go into this particular one. It was advertised as a ‘Museum of Biblical Curiosities.’ Just as he got in, the showman was exhibiting a very rusty old sword, and saying,

“‘Now, yere’s a werry hinterestin’ hobject. This is the sword wot Balaam ’it ’is hass wiv, ’cos ’ee wouldn’t go.’ Booth speaks up, and says,

“‘Hold hard there, my friend; you’re getting a little mixed. Balaam hadn’t got a sword. He said, “Would that I had a sword.”’

“‘That’s all right, guv’nor,’ cried the showman; ‘this is the sword ’ee wished ’ee ’ad.’”

The girl’s mimicry of the coster-showman’s speech was inimitable, and the two men laughed as much at her telling as at the tale itself.

George Carlyon got up from his seat, saying, “But I say, you two, do you mind if I leave you to amuse each other for an hour? I want, very much, to run down to the club. I’ll come back for you, Madge, or meet you somewhere.”

“Bless the boy!” she laughed. “Do you think I was reared in an incubator, or in your Mayfair? Haven’t you learned that, given a Yankee girl’s got dollars under her boots to wheel on, it ain’t much fuss for her to skate through this old country of yours, nor yet through Europe, come to that, even though she has no more languages under her tongue than good plain Duchess county American. I told the ‘boys’ that before I left home.”

George Carlyon laughed, as, accepting his release, he nodded to the pair and left the room.

It was a strangely new experience to Tom Hammond, to be left alone with a beautiful and charming woman like Madge Finisterre.

The picture she made, as she moved round the room looking at the framed paintings, all gifts from his artist friends, came to him as a kind of revelation. When he had met her that day in the Embankment hotel, he had been charmed with her beauty and her frank, open, unconventionality of manner. He had thought of her many times since—only that very day, a moment before her arrival,—thought of her as men think of a picture or a poem which has given them delight. But now he found her appealing to him.

She was a woman, a beautiful, attractive woman. She suggested sudden thoughts of how a woman, loved, and returning that love, might affect his life, his happiness.

Her physical grace and beauty, the exquisite fit of her costume, the perfect harmony of it—all this struck him now. But the woman in her appealed strongest to him.

“Awfully good, this sketch of street arabs!” she turned to say, as she stood before a clever bit of black-and-white drawing.

An end of a lace scarf she was wearing caught in a nail in the wall. He sprang forward to release the scarf. It was not readily done, for his fingers became infected with a strange nervousness. Once their hands met, their fingers almost interlocked. A curious little thrill went through him. He lifted his eyes involuntarily, and met her glance. A warm colour shot swiftly into her face. And he was conscious at the same moment that his own cheeks burned.

“I guess I’ll sit down before I do any more mischief,” she laughed.

Woman-like, she was quicker to get at ease than he was.

“Do you know, Mr. Hammond,” she went on, as she seated herself in a revolving armchair, “I just wanted very much to see how you were fixed up here, and how you looked now that you are a big man.”

He made a deprecatory little gesture.

“Oh, but you are a really great man,” she went on. “I have heard some big people talk of you, and say——”

She leaned back, and smiled merrily at him, as she went on,

“Well, I guess if there’s only a shadow of truth in the old saying, then your ears must often have burned.”

Madge Finisterre gave the chair in which she was sitting a half twist.

“Why don’t you British people go in for rockers?” she asked. “I simply can’t enjoy your English homes to the full, for want of a good rocker, wherever I go.”

An indiarubber bulb lay close to his hand. He pressed it without her noting the movement. A clerk suddenly appeared. Hammond looked across at Madge, with an “Excuse me, Miss Finisterre, one moment.”

He drew a sheet of notepaper towards him. The paper was headed with “The Courier” title and address.

“Send me, at once, unpacked and ready for immediate use, the best American drawing-room rocking-chair you have in stock. Send invoice, cash will follow,” etc.

That was what he wrote. He enclosed it in an envelope, then on a separate slip of paper he wrote:—

“Take a cab, there and back, to Wallis’s, Holborn Circus. See how smart you can be; bring the chair, ordered, back with you.”

From his purse he took a four-shilling piece, and gave the young fellow the note, the slip of instructions, and the coin.

As the attendant left the room, he turned again to Madge, who, utterly unsuspicious of the errand on which he had sent his employee, was amusing herself with a copy of “Punch.” She looked up from the paper as the door closed.

“I like ‘The Courier’ immensely, Mr. Hammond,” she cried. There was a rare warmth of admiration in her tone.

“Thank you, Miss Finisterre!” His eyes said more than his words, “what do you specially like in it?” he asked; “or is your liking of a more general character?”

“I do like it from a general standpoint,” she replied; “I think it the best paper in the world. But especially do I like your own particular column, ‘From a Prophet’s Chamber.’ But, Mr. Hammond, about the Jew—you are going in strong for him, aren’t you?”

“From the ordinary newspaper point, yes,” he said. “I cannot quite recall how my mind was first switched on to the subject, but I do know this—that the more I study the past history of the race, and the future predictions concerning it, the more amazed I am, how, past, present, and future, the Jews, as a nation, are interwoven with everything political, musical, artistic—everything, in fact. And I wonder, equally, that we journalists, as a whole—I speak, of course, as far as I know my kinsmen in letters—should have thought and written so little about them.

“Take their ubiquitousness, Miss Finisterre,” went on Hammond. “There does not appear to have been an empire in the past that has not had its colony of Jews. By which I do not mean a Ghetto, simply, a herding of sordid-living, illiterate Hebrews, but a study colony of men and women, who, by sheer force of intellect, of brain power, have obtained and maintained the highest positions, the greatest influence.

“Why, in China, even, isolated, conservative China, before Christ was born in Bethlehem, the Jews were a prosperous, ubiquitous people, worshipping the one God, Jehovah, amidst all the foulness of Chinese idolatries.”

Madge Finisterre listened with rapt interest. The man before her, fired with his subject, talked marvellously. A good listener helps to make a good talker, and Tom Hammond talked well.

“It is not simply that they practically hold the wealth of the world in their hands, that they are the world’s bankers, but they are dominating our press, our politics.”

With glowing picture of words he poured out a flood of wondrous fact and illustration, winding up presently with:

“Then you cannot kill the Jew, you cannot wipe him out. Persecution has had the effect of stunting his growth, so that the average Britisher is several inches taller than the average Jew. But the life of the Hebrew is indestructible. Sometimes of late I have asked myself this question, as I have reviewed the history of the dealings of so-called Christianity with the Semitic race—Has Christianity been afraid of the Jews, or why has she sought to stamp them out?”

The pair had been so engrossed with their talk that they had lost all count of time. A half-hour had slipped by since Tom Hammond had sent his messenger to Wallis’s. The young fellow suddenly appeared at the door.

“Got it, Charlie?”

Without waiting for a reply to his question, the editor bounded from his seat and passed outside. Thirty seconds later the door opened again, and he appeared, bearing a splendid rocker in his arms.

Before she fully realized the wonder of the whole thing, Madge found herself seated in the rocking-chair. Swaying backwards and forwards, and blushing and smiling, she cried:

“You are a wonderful man, Mr. Hammond!”

“You said you could never fully enjoy our English houses for want of a rocker. Now, however ‘angelic’ your visits to this room may be, you shall have one inducement to slip in—a rocker.”

She was beginning her thanks again, when he interrupted with:

“But, excuse me, Miss Finisterre, what about some tea? Shall we go out and get some, or would you prefer that I should order it in here?”

“Oh, here, by all means! I can have tea at a restaurant every day of my life, but with a real London lion—a real live editor—and in his own special den. Why, it may never fall to my lot again. Oh, here, by all means!” she cried, excitedly.

He squeezed that rubber bulb again. To the lad Charlie, who appeared, he gave a written order to a neighbouring restaurant. Twenty minutes later the tea was in the room.

Madge officiated with the teapot. Hammond watched her every movement. A truly pretty, graceful girl never looks handsomer to a man than when presiding at a tea-table. Tom Hammond thought Madge had never looked more charming. The meal was a very enjoyable one, and as she poured out his second cup he paid her a pretty compliment, adding:

“To see you thus, Miss Finisterre, makes one think what fools men are not to——”

He paused abruptly. She flashed a quick glance of enquiry at him.

“Not to what, Mr. Hammond?”

“I wonder,” he replied, “if I ought to say what I left unsaid?”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I don’t know why I should not,” he laughed. “I was going to say that, to have a bright, beautiful, graceful woman like Madge Finisterre pouring out tea for him, makes a man think what a fool he is not to marry.”

His tone and glance were alike full of meaning. She could not mistake him. Her colour heightened visibly. Her eyes drooped before his ardent gaze. The situation became tense and full of portent.

The opening of the door at that instant changed everything. George Carlyon had returned. At the same moment a wire was brought to Hammond, together with a sheaf of letters—the afternoon mail.

Chapter VII.

“Coming.”

George Carlyon’s entrance, the arrival of the afternoon mail, and the telegram gave Madge Finisterre an opportunity to escape. George Carlyon was anxious to leave, and Madge rose at once to accompany him.

Tom Hammond did not press them to stay, for he, too, felt awkward. The friends shook hands. The eyes of Madge and Hammond met for one instant. Each face flushed under the power of the other’s glance.

When the door had closed upon them, Tom went back to his old place by the table, his eyes involuntarily sweeping the whole apartment. He smiled as he suddenly realized how empty the room now seemed. His glance rested upon the tea-tray, and he rang for the lad Charlie.

“Clear all this away, Charlie, please,” he began. Then with a smile he said, “You will find a capital cup of tea in that pot.”

The boy grinned. At his first glance at the tray he had mentally decided that he would be able to have a rare feast. A couple of minutes, and the boy had gone.

Tom Hammond gathered up his mail, and was about to drop into his ordinary seat, when he remembered the rocker. With a smile at Madge’s occupancy of the chair, he dropped into it.

For fully five minutes he sat still thinking, reviewing all the circumstances of the peculiar situation upon which the unexpected coming of George Carlyon had broken. He asked himself whether he was really in love with the fair Madge, and whether he would have proposed to her if her cousin had not so unexpectedly turned up? He made no definite reply to his own questioning, but turned to his mail.

The telegram he had opened at once on its receipt. He turned now to the letters. He had opened all but two. The last one was addressed in a woman’s hand-writing. Breaking the envelope, he took out the letter, and turned first to the signature on the fourth page.

“Millicent Joyce,” he read. “Millicent Joyce?” he repeated. Unconsciously he had laid his emphasis on the “Millicent,” and he forgot the “Joyce.”

But suddenly it came to him that the letter was from Mrs. Joyce, the woman whom he had helped to save from drowning on the night of that memorable day when the great chance of his life had come to him.

“Poor soul!” he muttered. “I wonder what she has written about?” The next instant he was reading the letter.

Tom Hammond cast his eyes over the letter which Mrs. Joyce had sent him, and which ran thus:

“Dear Sir,

“I gave you my word that if ever I was in special trouble or need I would write, or come to you for help.

“I did not promise you, however, that if any great joy or blessing should come to me, that I would let you know. I don’t think I believed any joy could ever possibly come into my life again. But joy and wondrous gladness have come into my life, and in an altogether unexpected way.

“You will remember how I said to you in parting, that morning, that your strong, cheery words had given me a clearer view of God than any sermon I had ever listened to. That impression deepened rather than diminished when I got home. My husband, I heard, had been sent to Wandsworth Prison for a month, for assaulting the police when drunk.

“And in this month of quiet from his brutalities, the great joy of my life came to me. I began to attend religious services from the very first night after my return home. I went to church, chapel, mission hall, and Salvation Army.

“One night I went to the hall of the Mission for Railway Men. A lady was speaking that night, and God found me, and saved me. All that I had ever heard from my dear father’s lips, when he preached about conversion, came back to me, and that night I passed from death to life.

“The subject of the address was ‘The Coming of the Lord.’ I listened in amazement as the lady speaker declared that, for this age, God evidently meant that this truth of the near coming of Christ should have almost, if not quite, the most prominent place in all public preaching.

“I was startled to hear her say that there were nearly three hundred direct references to the second coming of Christ in the Gospels and Epistles, and that there were thus more than double the number of references to that subject than even to that of salvation through the blood of the Atonement.

“With her Bible in her hand, she turned readily to a score of passages as illustrations of her statement, and all through her address she never made a statement without backing it up by Scripture. One thing she said laid a tremendous grip upon me, and led me to an immediate decision for Christ: she said, ‘How often is the possibility of sudden death advanced by a preacher as an incentive to unsaved souls to yield to God!

“‘But how poor an argument is that compared with the near approach of Christ! Sudden death might come to one person in a congregation before twenty-four hours, but in a sense, that would touch that one person only. But if Christ came to take up His people from the earth—the dead in Christ from their graves, the living from their occupations, etc.,—this would affect every unsaved soul in every part of the country, of the world, even.’”

Tom Hammond paused in his reading.

“What on earth can she mean?” he murmured, under his breath. Then he went on from the letter:

“I gave myself up to God there and then, Mr. Hammond, and am seeking now to live so that, should Christ come, even before I finish this letter, I may be ready to be caught up to meet Him in the air.”

Hammond paused again.

“What can the woman mean?” he murmured again. With the letter held in his hand, his eyes became fixed upon space, his mind was searching for something that he had recently heard or read bearing on this strange topic. The clue seemed almost within grasp, yet for awhile he could not recall it.

Suddenly it came to him. A volume of poems had been sent to him for review, amid the excitement of the second day’s issue of “The Courier.” He had glanced rapidly through the book, had written a brief line for his paper, acknowledging the receipt of the book, and promising to refer to it fully at some later date.

“That book,” he mused, “had something in it about—about——”

He got up from the rocker, took his place at his table, then wheeled about slowly in his revolving chair, and began searching his book-case. In an instant his keen eye picked out the volume he sought. He wheeled round again to his table, the book in his hand.

He turned a moment to the title-page. “Ezekiel and Other Poems,” he read. “By B. M.”

“B. M.,” he mused, “Whom have I heard writes under those initials? Ah! I remember! Mrs. Miller.—Barbara Miller.”

He ran the gilt-edged leaves rapidly through his practised fingers, his quick eye catching enough of the running pages to satisfy him. Suddenly he paused in his search. His eye had lit upon what he sought, and he began to read:

“Coming.”

“At even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning.”

“It may be in the evening, When the work of the day is done, And you have time to sit in the twilight And watch the sinking sun, While the long, bright day dies slowly Over the sea, And the hour grows quiet and holy With thoughts of Me; While you hear the village children Passing along the street, Among those thronging footsteps May come the sound of My feet.

“Therefore I tell you, ‘Watch,’ By the light of the evening star, When the room is growing dusky As the clouds afar; Let the door be on the latch In your home, For it may be through the gloaming I will come.”

He paused in his reading for a moment, for, like a voice near by, the drone of that blind beggar’s reading came to him, as he had heard it that day on the embankment.

“This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.”

“I remember,” he mused, “how that sentence arrested me. My mind was utterly pre-occupied a moment before, but that wondrous sentence pierced my pre-occupation.”

His eyes dropped to the poem again, and he read on:—

“It may be when midnight Is heavy on the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed. Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark room; For it may be that at midnight I will come.”

He read rapidly, but more eagerly interested each moment. The next section he scarcely paused upon, but the fourth he lingered over, and then read it the second time:

“It may be in the morning, When the sun is bright and strong, And the dew is glittering sharply Over the little lawn; When the waves are laughing loudly Along the shore, And the little birds sing sweetly About the door; With the long day’s work before you, You rise up with the sun, And the neighbours come in to talk a little Of all that must be done: But remember that I may be the next To come in at the door, To call you from your busy work For evermore. As you work, your heart must watch, For the door is on the latch In your room, And it may be in the morning I will come.”

He read on with a strange, breathless interest the next two pages of poem, then, with a sudden sense of hush upon him, he went carefully over the concluding lines:

“So I am watching quietly Every day. Whenever the sun shines brightly, I rise and say, ‘Surely it is the shining of His face!’ And look unto the gates of His high place Beyond the sea, For I know He is coming shortly To summon me. And when a shadow falls across the window Of my room, Where I am working my appointed task, I lift my head to watch the door, and ask If He is come; And the angel answers sweetly In my home: ‘Only a few more shadows, And He will come.’”

The face of Tom Hammond, as he laid down the book, was full of a strange, new perplexity. “Strange, very!” he muttered. “Do you know Joyce, Mr. Simpson?” Hammond asked a reporter. “He used to be on the staff of the——”

“‘Daily Tatler,’” cried the man. “Knew him well years ago, sir. Old school-fellows, in fact. Got wrong with the drink, sir. Gone to the dogs, and——”

“Have you seen or heard anything of him this last month, Mr. Simpson?”

“Yes, sir. He’s grown worse than ever. Magistrate at Bow Street, committing him for three days, said fellow ought to be put in Broadmoor. Pity his poor wife, sir. Perfect lady, sir.”

“You know Mrs. Joyce, then?” Hammond queried.

The reporter sighed, “Rather, sir! Wished a thousand times I could have had her for a wife, and he’d had mine. I should have had a happier life. And he——”

The man laughed grimly. “Well, he’d have had a tartar!”

Hammond had heard something about the shrewish wife Simpson had unfortunately married. But he had learned all he wanted to know, so dismissed the poor, ill-married fellow.

“I think I must call upon Mrs. Joyce, and learn more about this strange matter of the coming Christ,” he told himself.

He copied the address from the head of the letter into his pocket-book, then turned to the last letter of his mail.

This proved to be a comparatively short letter, but, to Hammond, a deeply-interesting one. It was signed “Abraham Cohen,” and the writer explained that he was a Jew, who had taken the “Courier” from the very first number, and had not only become profoundly interested in the recent utterances of the editor in the “Prophet’s Chamber” column, but he had, for some days, been impressed with the desire to write to the “Prophet.”

“Will you pardon me, sir,” the letter went on, “if I say that it would be to your immense advantage, now that your mind has become aroused to the facts and history of our race, if you would get in touch with some really well-read, intelligent Jew who knows our people well, knows their history, past, present, and future, as far as the latter can be known from our Scriptures and sacred books. Should you care to fall in with my suggestion, I should be pleased to supply you with the names and addresses of several good and clever men of our people.

“Yours obediently,

“Abraham Cohen.”

As he folded the letter slowly, Hammond told himself that there was something in the letter that drew him towards the writer.

“I will hunt him up, for it is evident that he is as enthusiastic over his people’s history as he is intelligent. I will see what to-morrow brings. Now to work.”

He put Cohen’s letter in his pocket, and turned to the hundred and one editorial claims upon his time.

Chapter VIII.

Reverie.

In spite of the time of the year, the evening was almost as warm as one in June. Madge Finisterre was on one of the wide hotel balconies overlooking the Embankment. She had dined with her cousin, George Carlyon, but instead of going out of town that evening with him—he had pressed her strongly to go,—she had elected to spend a quiet evening alone.

London’s roar, subdued a little, it is true, at that hour, rose all around her where she sat. The cup of coffee she had brought to her, cooled where it stood upon the little table at her elbow. She had forgotten it.

Her mind was engrossed with the memory of the latter part—the interrupted part—of that interview with Tom Hammond that afternoon.

“What would have happened if George Carlyon had not turned up at that moment?” she mused,—“if we had been left alone and undisturbed another five minutes?”

Her cheeks burned as she whispered softly to herself:

“I believe Tom Hammond would have proposed to me. If he had, what should I have replied?”

A far-away look crept into her eyes. She was back again in the little town where she had been “reared,” as she herself would have said. We have many villages in England larger, more populous, more busy, than her “town,” but, then, the people of her land talk “big.”

Before her mind’s eye there rose the picture of her father’s store, a huge, rambling concern built of wood, with a frontage of a hundred feet, and a colonnade of turned wooden pillars that supported a verandah that ran the whole length.

Every item of the interior of the store came vividly before her mind, the very odour of the place—a curious blend of groceries, drapery, rope, oils and colours, tobacco,—seemed suddenly to fill her nostrils. And in that instant, though she scarcely realized it, the first real touch of nostalgia came to her.

She saw the postal section of the store littered with men, all smoking, most of them yarning. One after another dropped in, and, with a “Howdy, all?” dropped upon a coil of white cotton rope, or lounged against a counter or cask. “Dollars” and “cents” floated in speech all around, while the men waited for the mail. It was late that night.

A week before she had sailed for England, she had gone down to the store, as she had gone every evening about mail-time, and, entering at the end nearest her home, she had come upon the scene that had now so suddenly risen before her mind’s eye. She had traversed all the narrow alley-way between the stored-up supplies, from which the various departments were stocked, singing as she went:

“The world is circumbendibus, We’re all going round; We have a try to fly the sky, But still we’re on the ground. We every one go round the sun, We’re moving night and day; And milkmen all go round the run Upon their Milky Way.”

“We’re all circumbendibus, Wherever we may be. We’re all circumbendibus, On land or on sea. Rich or poor or middling, Wherever we are found, We’re all circumbendibus, We’re all going round.”

She had punctuated the chorus with a series of jerked steps, her high heels striking the wooden floor in a kind of castanet accompaniment. Every waiting man had risen to his feet as she came upon them in that post-office section, and she had answered their rising with a military salute.

In the great mirror that ran from floor to ceiling of the store, she had caught a glimpse of herself. She recalled, even now, exactly what she was wearing that evening—a white muslin frock, a very wide sash of rich silk—crushed strawberry colour—about her waist, the long ends of the sash floating behind her almost to the high heels of her dainty bronze shoes. A knot of the same-hued ribbon, narrow, of course, with streamers flying, was fastened at her left shoulder. Her wide-brimmed hat was trimmed with the same colour. She had known that she made a handsome picture before she read the light of admiration in the eyes of the post-office loungers.

“Have you heard the news, boys?” she asked.

“Aw, guess we hev, Miss Madge.”

It was Ulysses Fletcher who had acted as spokesman.

In some surprise, and not altogether pleased, she had wheeled sharply round to the lantern-jawed Ulysses and asked,

“How did you hear the news, Ulysses? Dad didn’t tell you, I’m sure, for he promised me I should tell you all myself.”

“Met a coon down to the depot, an’ I guess he wur chuck full o’ it, an’ ’e ups an’ tells me.”

“A coon told you?” she had cried in ever-increasing amazement.

“Sartin, Miss Madge!”

“A coon!” she had repeated. “A coon—told you—down at the depot—that—I was—going—to Europe next week!”

Every eye had stared in wondering astonishment at Madge Finisterre at her announcement that she was going to Europe. Then there was a general laugh, and one of the smartest of the “boys” had cried:—

“I low there’s been a mistake some, Miss Madge, an’ that, too, all roun’. Fact is, we’ve been runnin’ two separate tickets over this news business, an’ thought it wur one an’ the same. We wur talkin’ ’bout Seth Hammond’s herd o’ hogs as wur cut up by the Poughkeepsie express ’smarnin’.”

She had joined in the laugh, and then in reply to the question of another of the men, as to whether it was really true that she was going to “Urop,” she had replied in the affirmative, adding, by way of explanation:

“I guess you all know that my momma is British, that she belonged to what the Britishers call, ‘the Quality’. She was the youngest sister of Sir Archibald Carlyon, was travelling over here, out west, when she was about my age, got fixed up in an awkward shop by half-breeds, and was rescued by my dear old poppa. Fact, that’s how he came to be my poppa, for she married him. Spite of her high connections in England, she was very poor, and she loved dad. If dear momma could only face the water journey, she’d go over with me.”

“Air you goin’ alone, Miss?” one of the boys had asked.

Then—how well she remembered it to-night!—she had given the answer, part of which she had given to George Carlyon that very day:

“Oh, I’ll git all right, boys, you can bet on that, without anyone dandying around me. For I guess if there’s one thing the Britishers are learning about our women, it’s this—that if a United States gel’s got dollars under her boots to wheel around on it ain’t much fuss for her to skate through their old country, nor yet through Europe, come to that, even if she has no more language under her tongue than good, plain, Duchess county American.”

With a merry smile, for which there had been no scrambling, since it was shed upon them all, she had passed on to where she knew she would find her father, ringing her boot-heels, castanet fashion, as she sang lightly:

“Mary’s gone wid a coon, Mary’s gone wid a coon; Dere’s heaps o’ trubble on de ole man’s min’ Since Mary flit wid de coon.”

How vividly it all came up before her in this hour of quiet reverie! But her mind flitted swiftly to another scene, one that had been hanging in the background of all her thought ever since (thinking of Tom Hammond and the interrupted conversation,) she had been reminded of home and its happenings.

There had been a Donation Party for their pastor (Episcopalian Methodist) at the house of one of the members on the very night of the store scene. Madge had gone, of course. Balhang was wont to say that a Donation Party simply could not be run without her.

Sitting on that Embankment hotel balcony, with eyes fixed on the lamps, the river, the bridge, the traffic yet seeing nothing of it all, that Donation Party all came back to her. Things had been a bit stiff and formal at first, as they often are at such gatherings.

The adults sat around and talked on current topics—how much turkeys would fetch for Thanksgiving, whether it would pay best to sell them plucked or unplucked, what would folks do for cranberries for Thanksgiving, since the cranberry crop had failed that year—“An’ turkey wi’out cranberry ain’t wuth a twist o’ the tongue.”

“An’ squash,” suggested one old man. “What’s turkey wi’out squash? I’d most so soon hev only Boston” (i. e., pork and beans) “fur dinner as ter go wi’out squash wi’ turkey.”

The young folk had been “moping around” like draggled chickens on a wet day when the barn-door is shut. Then, at this juncture, Madge had burst upon the scene. She swam into the largest room, swirling round and round with a kind of waltz movement, to the accompaniment of her own gay voice as she sang:

“I said, ‘My dear, I’m glad!’ Said she, ‘I’m glad you’re glad!’ Said I, ‘I’m glad you’re glad I’m glad, It is so very, very nice; It makes it seem worth twice the price, So glad you’re glad I’m glad!’”

With a gay laugh she had turned to the hostess, saying;

“Things want hustling a bit here, Miss Julie. Everyone is as glum as a whip-poor-will that is fixed up with the grippe.”

In the quiet of that corner of the hotel balcony she smiled at these remembrances of her nonsense that night. She had started the young people playing their favourite games of “Whisper,” “Amsterdam,” etc., in two or three of the smaller rooms; then had raced away again to the room where the adults were sitting squarely against the wall, as grim as “brazen images.” Dropping on to the piano stool, she struck a few soft, tender notes, suggestive of some very gracious hymn, then suddenly broke into song:

“Oh, dat’s so! Oh, dat’s so! Dar is nuffing ’neath de moon dat’ll satisfy dis coon. Like a K—I—double S, kiss, Since dat Cupid, wid his dart, made a keyhole in my heart For dat M—I—double S, miss.”

Behind a corner of the curtain the young pastor had watched and listened. He had thought his presence unknown to her. He was mistaken.

For three-quarters of an hour she had been the life of that room. Then, suddenly, as she was singing at the piano, the room grew very quiet. She was aroused by a voice just behind her ear, saying:

“Miss Finisterre, are you going to supper with this first batch, or will you wait the next turn?”

Turning, she found herself face to face with the young pastor, the room being otherwise empty. His gaze was very warm, very ardent. She had flushed under the power of that gaze.

She had railed him on his extra seriousness, and he had answered,

“Don’t, Madge! you must know why I am grave and sad, to-night.” (He had never called her Madge before.)

“No, I don’t,” she had replied.

“In less than a week,” he went on, “so I have heard to-night, you leave Balhang. You are going to Europe, and will be away long months, perhaps a year.”

She had gazed at him in honest wonder, not fully grasping his meaning.

“Why,” she asked, “should that make you sad?”

He had leaned closer towards her. There was no one to see them. The heavy door-curtain had slipped from its hook, and shut them in. Where her hand rested on the rounded, polished arm of the piano, his larger hand had moved, and her white fingers were clasped in his larger ones. His eyes had sought hers, and, under the hypnotic power of the strong love in his eyes, she had been compelled to meet his gaze.

“I thought, dear, you must have seen how, for a long time, I had learned to love you, Madge.”

His clasp on her fingers had tightened. He had leaned nearer to her still. No man’s face, save her father’s, had ever been so close to hers before, and the contact strangely affected her. She felt the warmth of his breath, the heat of his clean, wholesome flesh; even the scent of the soap he had used—or was it some perfume in his clothing?—filled all her sense of smell.

The perfume was violet, and she remembered to-night how, for many a day, she could not smell violets without recalling that moment, and seeing again the strong, earnest, eager face, with the fire of a mighty love burning in the eyes.

To-night she heard again the yearning, pleading voice as he had cried: “Madge, Madge, my darling! Can you ever guess how great is my love for you? Tell me, dear, do you, can you, love me in return? Will you be my wife? Will you come into all my life to bless it? And let me be wholly yours to help, to bless, to strengthen, to love, to cherish you? Tell me, darling!”

And she had cried, almost piteously:

“I don’t know how to answer you, pastor. It is all so sudden. I knew, of course, that we were great friends, and I am sure I like you very much, but—this proposal! Why, I never dreamed that you cared for me like that, for how could I be a minister’s wife? I am such a gay, thoughtless, foolish little thing—I——”

There had followed more tender pleading, and she had finally said, “If you love me, Homer, as you say you do, please do not bother me any more now. Wait until I come back from Europe—then—then——”

“What, Madge?” he had cried softly, eagerly.

“If I can honestly say ‘Yes,’” she had replied, “I will and I will not even wait for you to ask me again.”

He had bent over her. His gaze held her fascinated. She thought he was going to take toll of her lips before his right was confirmed. But at that instant there had come a rush of feet, a sound of many voices. The curtain was flung aside, just as her fingers strayed over the keys of the instrument, and the pastor succeeded in regaining his old unseen nook.

“I guess Miss Julie’s waitin’ fur yer, Miss Madge, ter go ter yer supper,” bawled an old deacon of the church.

She had swept the ivory keys with rollicking touch, and sang in gayest style:

“Allow me to say Ta-ta! I bid you good-day. Ta-ta! I wish I could stay, But I’m going away. Allow me to say Ta-ta!”

Amid the uproarious laughter of everyone in the room, she had bounded away to supper.

Except for one moment, when she was leaving the house for home, and he had helped her on with her cloak, the pastor had not spoken again directly to her that evening. He had managed then to whisper,

“God bless you, my darling! I shall pray for you, and live on the hope I read in your eyes to-night.”

It was all this which had risen so strangely before her mind, as to-night, on that hotel balcony, she had begun to ask herself how much she really cared for Tom Hammond, and what answer she would have given him had he proposed to her that afternoon.

“I told pastor,” she murmured, “that night, that I was not sure of myself. I am no nearer being sure of myself now than I was then.”

The scene with Hammond rose up before her, and she added: “I am less sure, I think, than ever!”

She gazed fixedly where the double line of lamps gleamed on the near-distant bridge. For a moment she tried to compare the two lives—that of an American Methodist pastor’s wife, with endless possibilities of doing good, and that of the wife of a comparatively wealthy newspaper editor-manager.

“Should I like to marry a popular man?” she asked herself. “I read somewhere once that popular men, like popular actors, make bad husbands, that they cannot endure the tameness of an audience of one.”

She laughed low, and a little amusedly, as she added, “Oh, well, Tom Hammond has not asked me to marry him. Perhaps he never will—and—well, ‘sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’ Pastor once preached from that, I remember.”

The night had grown cooler. She shivered a little as she rose and passed into the lighted room beyond.

Two hours later, as she laid her head upon the pillow, she murmured, “I don’t see how I could marry the pastor! Why, I haven’t ‘got religion’ yet. I am not ‘converted,’ as these Britishers would say!”

Chapter IX.

A Threat.

Tom Hammond paused before the house that bore the number at the head of Mrs. Joyce’s letter. It was in a mean street, and his soul went out in pity towards the unfortunate woman, who, with all her refinement, was compelled to live amid such squalid surroundings.

“And heart-starved, too,” he mused, pityingly. “Heart-starved for the want of love, of sympathy, of the sense of soul-union that makes life with a married partner at all bearable.”

“Yus, sir; Mrs. Joss lives yere. Top floor, lef’ ’and side. Yer kin go hup!”

A child had opened the door in response to his knock. Following the directions given, Tom Hammond climbed the dirty stairs. On the top landing were two doors. The one on the right was fast shut; that on the left was ajar a few inches. His approach did not seem to have been heard. Mrs. Joyce, the only occupant of the room, was seated at a bare deal table, sewing briskly.

He stretched out his hand to tap at the door, but some impulse checked him for a moment. He had the opportunity to observe her closely, and he did so.

She sat facing the window; the light shone full upon her. She was dressed in a well-worn but well-fitting black gown. Round her throat—how pure and white the skin was!—she wore a white turnover collar, like a nurse, white cuffs at her wrists completing the nurse idea. Her hair—she had loosened it earlier because of a slight headache—hung in clustering waves on her neck, and was held back behind her ears with a comb on either side. There was a rare softness and refinement in the pale face that drooped over her sewing. Seen as Tom Hammond saw her then, Mrs. Joyce was a really beautiful woman.

He gazed for a few moments at the picture, amazed at the rapidity of her sewing movements.

“The tragedy of Tom Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt,’” he muttered, as he watched the gleam of the flying needle.

“Oh, men with sisters dear! Oh, men with mothers and wives! It is not linen you’re wearing out, But human creatures’ lives! Stitch, stitch, stitch, In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Sewing at once, with a double thread, A shroud as well as a shirt.”

Under the magnetic constraint of his fixed gaze the woman looked towards the door. She recognized her visitor, and with a little glad cry started to her feet. Tom Hammond pushed the door open and entered the room. She sprang to meet him.

Now that he saw her, he realized the expression of her face had changed. Heaven—all the heaven of God’s indwelling pardon, love, peace, had come to dwell with her. All that she had said in her letter of her new-found joy, was fully confirmed by her looks.

“How good of you to come to see me, Mr. Hammond!” she cried, as she felt the clasp of his hand.

“How good of you to write me of your new-found happiness!” He smiled back into her glad, eager eyes.

He took the chair she offered, and with a question or two sought to lead her on to talk of the subject about which he had come to see her.

“The very title of the subject,” Hammond explained, “is perfectly foreign to me.”

“It was all so, _so_ foreign to me,” she returned. Then, as swift tears flooded her eyes, she turned to him with a little rapturous cry, saying,—

“And it would all have been foreign to me for ever, but for _you_, Mr. Hammond. I never, _never_ can forget that but for you my soul would have been in a suicide’s hell, where hope and mercy could never have reached me. As long as I shall live I shall never forget the awful rush of soul-accusation that swept over me, when my body touched the foul waters of that muddy river that night. The chill and shock of the waters I did _not_ feel, but the chill of eternal condemnation for my madness and sin I did feel.

“I saw all my life as in a flash. All the gracious warnings and pleadings that ever, in my hearing, fell from my sainted father’s lips, as he besought men and women to be reconciled to God, seemed to swoop down upon me, condemning me for my unbelief and sin. Then—then you came to my rescue—and——”

Her tears were dropping thick and fast now.

“And—my soul—had respite given in which to—to—seek God—because—you saved my body.”

Overcome with her emotion, she turned her head to wipe away the grateful tears. When next she faced him, her voice was low and tender, her eyes glowed with a light that Tom Hammond had never seen in a human face before.

“Now, if my Lord come,” she said softly, rapturously, “whether at morning, at noontide, at midnight, or cock-crowing, I shall be ready to meet Him in the air.

“I used to think that if ever I was converted, I should meet my dear father and mother at the last day, at the great final end of all things.

“But now I know that if Jesus came for His people to-day, that I should meet my dear ones to-day. For when ‘the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven ... the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.’”

Tom Hammond gazed at the speaker in wonder. The glory that filled her face, the triumph and rapture that rang in her voice, were a strange revelation to him.

“A starvation wage for making slop-shirts,” he mused, “yet more than triumphing over every discomfort of poverty by the force of the divine hope that dominates her! What is this hope?”

“Tell me of this wondrous thing, Mrs. Joyce,” he said, aloud, “that can transmute your poverty and suffering to triumph and rapture, and your comfortless garret to a heaven on earth.”

“Before I begin,” she replied, “tell me, Mr. Hammond, have ever you seen this?”

From the window-shelf she reached a tiny envelope booklet.

“‘Long Odds’!” he said, reading the boldly-printed title of the book. “No; I have never seen this. It sounds sporting, rather.”

“Take it, Mr. Hammond,” she went on; “if it does nothing else, it will awaken your interest in this wonderful subject.”

He slipped the book into his breast-pocket. She opened her mouth to speak again, when a sound from outside caught her ear. She started to her feet; her face turned deadly pale. The next instant the door was flung noisily open, and her husband entered the room.

The blear-eyed, drunken scoundrel glared at the two seated figures, then laughed evilly as he cried,—

“Turned religious? Oho! oho! Like all the rest of your religious people, make a mantle—a regular down-to-your-feet ulster—of your religion to cover every blackness and filthiness of life.”

“Silence, you foul-mouthed blackguard!”

Tom Hammond’s lips were white with the indignation that filled him, as he flung his command to the man.

“Silence yourself, Tom Hammond!” bellowed the drunken scoundrel. “I know you,” he went on. “You’re a big bug now! Think no end of yourself, and of your messing paper. Perhaps you’ll say you came to invite me to join your staff, now that I’ve caught you here?”

His sneering tone changed to one of bitterest hate, as he turned to the white, trembling woman.

“You’re a beauty, ain’t you? Profess to turn saint; then, when you think I’m clear away, you receive visits from fine gentlemen! Gentlemen? bah! they’re——”

“Silence, you drunken, foul-mouthed beast!” again interrupted Tom Hammond.

There was something amazing in the command that rang in the indignant tones of his voice.

“Unless,” he went on, “you want to find yourself in the grip of the law.”

For a moment or two Joyce was utterly cowed! then the devil in him reared its head again, and he hissed,

“You clear out of here, and remember this; if I have to keep sober for a year to do it, I’ll ruin you, Tom Hammond, I will!”

He laughed with an almost demoniacal glee, as he went on:

“I can write a par yet, you know. I’ll dip my pen in the acid of hate—hate, the hate of devils, my beauty—and then get Fletcher to put them into his paper. He’s not in love with the ‘Courier,’ or with Tom Hammond, the Editor.”

“You scurrilous wretch!” It was all that Hammond deigned to reply.

“Good day, Mrs. Joyce!” he bowed to the white-faced woman.

For her sake he did not offer to shake hands, but moved away down the stairs.

He caught a hansom a few moments after leaving the mean street. He had purposed, when he started out that morning, to hunt up his other correspondent, the Jew, Abraham Cohen. But after the scene he had just witnessed, he felt quite unwilling to interview a stranger.

“I wish,” he mused, as he sat back in the hansom, “I had not gone near that poor soul. I am afraid my visit may make it awkward for her.”

His eyes darkened as he added: “And even for myself. It will be very awkward if that drunken brute puts his threat into execution—and he _will_, I believe. Innuendo is a glass stiletto, which, driven into the victim’s character, into his heart and then snapped off from the hilt, leaves no clue to the striker of the blow. And a demon like that Joyce, playing into the hands of a cur like Fletcher, may slay a fellow by a printed innuendo, and yet the pair may easily keep outside the reach of the law of libel.”

For the first time since the floating of the “Courier,” his spirits became clouded.

“Then, too,” he muttered, “there is this sudden breakdown of Marsden, and, for the life of me, I don’t know where to look for a fellow, whom I could secure at short notice, who is at all fit for the ‘Courier’s’ _second_.”

His face had grown moody. His eyes were full of an unwonted depression.

“If only,” he went on, “Bastin had been in England, and were to be got——” He sighed. There was perplexity in the sigh.

“Where on earth can Ralph be all these years?” he muttered.

He glanced out of the cab to ascertain his own whereabouts. In two minutes more he would be at the office.

Chapter X.

In The Nick Of Time.

As Tom Hammond’s cab drew up at the office, another hansom drew up a yard ahead of his. The occupant alighted at the same instant as did Hammond, and glanced in his direction. Both men leaped forward, their hands were clasped in a grip that told of a very warm friendship. Like simultaneous pistol shots there leaped from their separate lips,—

“Tom Hammond!”

“Ralph Bastin?”

The friends presently passed into the great building, arm linked in arm, laughing and talking like holiday school-boys.

“Not three minutes ago, as I drove along in my cab, I was saying, ‘Oh! if only I could lay my hand on Ralph!”

They were seated by this time in Tom Hammond’s room.

“Why? What did you want, Tom—anything special?” the bronzed, travelled Bastin asked.

“Rather, Ralph! My second, poor Frank Marsden, has broken down suddenly; it’s serious, may even prove fatal, the doctors say. Anyway, he won’t be fit (if he recovers at all) for a year or more.”

He leaned eagerly towards his friend as he spoke, and asked,

“Are you open to lay hold of the post?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“To-morrow, if you like!”

“Good!”

Hammond stretched his hand out. Bastin grasped it. Then they talked over terms, duties, etc.

“But you, man?” said Hammond, when the last bit of shop had been talked. “Where have you been? What have you been doing?”

“Busy for an hour, Tom?” Bastin asked, by way of reply.

“No!”

“Come round to my diggings, then; not far—Bloomsbury. We can talk as we go. I shall have time to give you a skeleton of my adventures, to be filled in later. Then, when we get to my hang-out, I can tell you, when you have seen _her_, the story of my chief adventure, for it concerns her.”

Hammond flashed a quick, wondering glance at his friend.

“_Her!_” he said; “are you married, then?”

“No,” laughed Bastin, “but I’ve adopted a child. But come on, man!”

The pair left the office. In the cab, talking very rapidly, Bastin gave the skeleton sketch of his wanderings, but saying no word of the promised great adventure.

Tom Hammond never forgot the first sight of his friend’s adopted child. There was a low grate in the room, a blazing fire of leaping, flaming coals in the grate. Curled up in a deep saddle-bag armchair was the loveliest girl-child Hammond had ever seen.

She must have been half asleep, or in a deep reverie, but as the two men advanced into the room she sprang from the chair, and, with eyes gleaming with delight, bounded to meet Bastin. Wreathing her arms about his neck, she crooned softly over him some tongue of her own.

She was loveliness incarnated. Her eyes, black as sloes, were big, round, and wide in their staring wonder at Hammond’s appearance. Her hair was a mass of short curls. She was dark of skin as some Spanish beauty.

Her costume lent extra charm to her appearance; for she wore a long, Grecian-like robe of some light, diaphanous ivory-cream fabric, engirdled at the waist with a belt composed of some sort of glistening peacock-green shells, buckled with frosted silver. The simple but exquisite garment had only short shoulder-sleeves, and was cut low round the throat and neck, and finished there—as were the edges of the shoulder-sleeves—with a two-inch wide band of sheeny silk of the same colour as the shells of her belt. The opening at the neck of the robe was fastened with a brooch of frosted silver of the same pattern, only smaller, as the buckle of the belt.

From beneath the silk-bound hem of her robe there peeped bronze slippers, encasing the daintiest little crimsoned-stockinged feet ever used for pedalling this rough old earth’s crust.

Bastin introduced the child. She gave Tom her hand, and lifted her wondrous eyes to his, answering his question as to her health in the prettiest of broken English he had ever heard.

A moment or two later the three friends were seated—Tom and Bastin in armchairs opposite each other, the child (Viola, Bastin had christened her) on a low stool between Bastin’s knees.

“Shall we use the old lingo—French?” Bastin asked the question in the Bohemian Parisian they had been wont to use together years before.

“As you please, Ralph,” Hammond replied.

“I have told you hurriedly something of where I have been,” Bastin began. “But I have reserved my _great_ story until I could tell it to you here——” He glanced down at the child at his feet. “I heard,” he went on, “when at La Caribe—as everyone hears who stays long in the place—that each year, in spite of the laws of the whites, who are in power, a child is sacrificed to the Carib deities, and I longed to know if it were true.

“During my first few week’s sojourn on the little island of Utilla, I was able to render one of the old priests a service, which somehow became so exaggerated in his eyes that there was almost literally nothing that he would not do for me, and eventually he yielded to my entreaties to give me a chance to see for myself the yearly sacrifice, which was due in a month’s time.

“During that month of waiting I made many sketches of this wonderful neighbourhood, and became acquainted with this little Carib maiden, painting her in three or four different ways. The child became intensely attached to me, and I to her, and we were always together in the daytime.

“As the time drew near for the sacrifice I noticed that the little one grew very elated, and there was a new flash in her eyes, a kind of rapturous pride. I asked her no question as to this change, putting it down as girlish pride in being painted by the ‘white prince,’ as she insisted on calling me.

“I need not trouble you, my dear fellow, with unnecessary details of how and where the old priest led me on the eventful night, which was a black as Erebus, but come to the point where the real interest begins.

“It was midnight when at last I had been smuggled into that mysterious cave, which, if only a tithe of what is reported be half true, has been damned by some of the awfullest deeds ever perpetrated. My priest-guide had made me swear, before starting, that whatever I saw I would make no sign, utter no sound, telling me that if I did, and we were discovered, we should both be murdered there and then.

“We had hardly hidden ourselves before the whole centre of the cave became illuminated with a mauve-coloured flame that burned up from a flat brass brazier, and seemed like the coloured fires used in pantomime effects on the English stage. By this wonderful light I saw a hundred and fifty or more Carib men and women file silently into the cave, and take up their positions in orderly rows all round the place. When they had all mustered, a sharp note was struck upon the carimba, a curious one-stringed instrument, and the circles of silent savages dropped into squatting position on their heels. Then the weirdest of all weird music began, the instruments being a drum, a flute, and the carimba.

“But my whole attention became absorbed by the grouping in the centre of the room—the fire-dish had been shifted to one side, and I saw a hideous statue, squatted on a rudely-constructed, massive table, the carved hands gripping a bowl that rested on the stone knees of the image. The head of the hideous god was encircled with a very curious band, that looked, from where I stood, like bead and grass and feather work. The face—cheeks and forehead—was scored with black, green and red paint, the symbolic colours of that wondrous race that once filled all Central America.

“In the back part of the wide, saucer-like edge of the bowl which rested on the knees of the statue, there burned a light-blue flame, and whether it was from this fire, or from the larger one that burned in the wide, shallow brazier on the floor, I cannot positively say, but a lovely fragrance was diffused from one or the other.

“Before this strange altar stood three very old priests, while seven women (sukias,) as grizzled as the men, stood at stated intervals about the altar. One of these hideous hags had a dove in her hand; another held a young kid clasped between her strong brown feet; a third held the sacrificial knife, a murderous-looking thing, made of volcano glass, short in blade, and with a peculiar jagged kind of edge; another of these hags grasped a snake by the neck—a blood-curdling-looking tamagas, a snake as deadly as a rattle-snake.

“Opposite the centre-man of the three old priests stood a girl-child, about ten years of age, and perfectly nude. During the first few moments the vapourous kind of smoke that was wafted by a draught somewhere, from the fire-pan on the floor of the cave, hid the child’s features, though I could see how beautiful of form she was; then, as the smoke-wreath presently climbed straight up, I was startled to see that the child was my little friend.

“In my amaze I had almost given vent to some exclamation, but my old priest-guide was watching me, and checked me.

“My little one’s beautiful head was wreathed with jasmine, and a garland of purple madre-de-cacoa blossoms hung about her lovely shoulders.

“Suddenly, like the barely-audible notes of the opening music of some orchestral number, the voice of one of the priests began to chant; in turn the two other priests took up the strain; then each of the seven hags in their turn, and anon each in the first circle of squatting worshippers, followed by each woman in the second row: and in this order the chant proceeded, until, weird and low, every voice was engaged.

“Suddenly the combined voices ceased, and one woman’s voice alone rose upon the stillness; and following the sound of the voice, I saw that it was the mother of my little native child-friend. I had not noticed her before—she had been squatting out of sight. Hers was not the chant of the others, but a strange, mournful wail. It lasted about a minute and a-half; then, rising to her feet, she gently thrust the child forward towards the altar, then laid herself face down on the floor of the cave.

“The little one leaned against the edge of the altar, and taking up, with a tiny pair of bright metal tongs, a little fire out of the back edge of the bowl on the knees of the god, she lighted another fire on the front edge of the bowl, her suddenly-illuminated face filled with a glowing pride.

“Then, at a signal from the head priest, the child lifted her two hands, extended them across the altar, when they were each seized by the two other priests, and the beautiful little body was drawn slowly, gently over, until the smooth breast almost touched the sacrificial fire she had herself lighted.

“Then I saw the woman who had held the knife suddenly yield it up to the head priest, and I made an unconscious movement to spring forward.

“My guide held me, and whispered his warning in my ear: yet, even though I must be murdered myself, I felt I dared not see that sweet young life taken.

“Like a man suffering with nightmare, who wants to move, but cannot, I stood transfixed, fascinated, one instant longer. But in that flashing instant the head priest had swept, with lightning speed, the edge of that hideous knife twice across the little one’s breast, and she stood smiling upwards like one hypnotized.

“The priest caught a few drops of the child’s blood, and shook them into the bowl of the god; then I saw the little one fall into her mother’s arms; there was a second sudden flashing of that hideous knife, a piteous, screaming cry, and I gave vent to a yell—but not _voice_ to it,—for the watching guide at my side clapped one hand tightly over my mouth, while with the other he held me from flying out into the ring of devils, whispering in my ear as he held me back,

“‘It is the goat that is slain, not the child.’

“Another glance, and I saw that this was so; one flash of that obsidian sacrificial blade across the throat of the kid had been enough, and now the blood was being drained into the bowl of the god.

“I need not detail all the other hideous ceremonies; they lasted for nearly two hours longer, ending with a mad frenzied dance, in which all joined save the priests and the mother and child.

“Every dancer, man and woman, flung off every rag of clothing, and whirled and leaped and gyrated in their perfect nudity, until, utterly exhausted, one after another they sank upon the floor.

“Then slowly they gathered themselves up, reclothed themselves, and left the cave. And now some large pine torches were lighted, and my guide drew me further back, that the increased glare might not reveal our presence, and I saw the curious ending to this weird night’s work. The priests and their seven women sukias opened a pit in the floor of the cave by shifting a great slab of stone, and lowered the idol into the pit. The remains of the kid, the sacrificial knife, and the dove were dropped into the bowl of blood that rested on the knees of the idol; then the sukia that had held the tamagas snake during the whole of those hideous night hours, dropped the writhing thing into the bowl, and the slab was lowered quickly over the pit, every seam around the slab being carefully filled, and the whole thing hidden by sprinkling loose dust and the ashes from the fire over the spot.

“Then, as soon as the last of the performers had cleared the cave, I followed my guide, and with a throbbing head, and full of a sense of strange sickness, I went to the house where I was staying.

“I lay down upon my bed, but could not sleep; and as early as I dared I went round to my little Martarae’s home—Martarae was her native name. Her mother met me, said that the child would not come out in the sun to-day, that I might see her for a moment if I pleased, but that she was not very well.

“Sweet little soul! I found her lying on her little bed, with a proud light in her eyes, and a very flushed face.

“A fortnight later the light flesh wounds were healed. She showed me her breast, confided to me the story, and asked me if I did not think she had much to be proud of.

“‘Will you keep a secret?’ I asked her. She gave me her promise, and I told her how I had seen the whole thing, and all my fears for her.

“A week later she was orphaned. Her mother was stung by a deadly scorpion, and died in an hour, and I made the child my care.

“She has travelled everywhere with me ever since, and you see how fair and sweet she is, and how beautifully she speaks our English. She is barely twelve, is naturally gifted, and is the very light of my life.”

“Would she let me see her breast, Ralph, do you think?” Hammond asked.

Bastin smiled, and spoke a word to the child, and she, rising to her feet and smiling back at him, unfastened the broach at her throat, and, laying back her breast-covering, showed the gleaming, shiny scars. Then as she re-covered her chest, she said softly:

“Ralph has taught me that those gods were evil; but though I shall ever wear this cross in the flesh of my breast, I shall ever love the Christ who died on the world’s great cross at Calvary.”

“It is a most marvellous story, Ralph,” he said tearing his eyes away from the child’s clear, searching gaze.

“The more marvellous because absolutely true,” returned Bastin.

Then, addressing Viola, and relapsing, of course, into English for her sake, he explained who Tom Hammond was, and that he (Ralph) was going to be associated with him on the same great newspaper.

“Mr. Hammond and you, Viola, must be real good friends,” he added.

“Sure, daddy!” the girl said smilingly; “I like him much already——”

She lifted herself slightly until she rested on her knees, and stretching one hand across the hearthrug to Tom Hammond, she laid the other in her guardian’s, as she went on:

“Mr. Hammond is good! I know, I know, for his eyes shine true.”

A ripple of merry laughter escaped her, as she gazed back into her guardian’s face, and added:

“But you, daddy, are always first.”

Chapter XI.

“Long Odds.”

For a wonder, Tom Hammond could not sleep. Usually, when the last thing had been done, and he was assured that everything was in perfect train for the morning’s issue, he ate a small basin of boiled milk and bread, which he invariably took by way of a “night-cap,” then went to bed, and slept like a tired ploughman. But to-night slumber would have none of him.

“It must be the various excitements of the day,” he muttered. “That story of Ralph’s Caribbean child was enough to keep a fellow’s brain working for a week. Then there was meeting Ralph so unexpectedly, just, too, when I so lusted for his presence and help. Then there was that Joyce item——”

His mind trailed off to the scene of the morning, every item of it starting up in a new and vivid light. Suddenly he recalled the booklet Mrs. Joyce had given him.

“I can’t sleep,” he murmured; “I’ll find that thing and read it.”

His fingers sought the electric switch. The next moment the room was full of light. He got out of bed, passed quickly through to his dressing-room, found the coat that he had worn that morning, and secured the booklet.

He went back again to bed, and, lying on his elbow, opened the dainty little printed thing and began to read thus:

“Long Odds”

“You don’t say so! Where on earth has she gone?”

“I can’t say, sir, but it’s plain enough she _is_ missing. Hasn’t been seen since last night when she went up to her room.”

I _was_ put out, I own; my man on waking me had informed me that the cook was missing; she had gone to bed without anything being noticed amiss, and was now nowhere to be found. She was always an odd woman, but a capital cook. What had become of her? The very last sort of person to disappear in this way—a respectable elderly Scotchwoman—really quite a treasure in the country; and the more I thought of it while I dressed, the more puzzled I became. I hardly liked to send for the police; and then again it was awkward, very—people coming to dinner that day. It was really too bad.

But I had scarcely finished dressing when in rushed my man again. I do so dislike people being excited, and he was more than excited.

“Please, sir, Mr. Vend has come round to see you; his coachman has gone—went off in the night, and hasn’t left a trace behind, and they say the gardener’s boy is with him.”

“Well,” said I, “it is extraordinary; tell Mr. Vend I’m coming; stay, I’ll go at once.”

It was really past belief—the three of them! After an hour’s talk with Vend, no explanation offered itself, so we decided to go to town as usual.

We walked down to the station, and saw at once something was wrong. Old Weeks, the stationmaster, was quite upset: his pointsman was missing, and the one porter had to take up his duty. However, the train coming up, we had no time to question him, but jumped in. There were three other people in the compartment, and really I thought I was going off my head when I heard what they were discussing. Vend, too, didn’t seem to know if he was on his head or his heels. It was this that startled us so: “What can have become of them all?”

I heard no more. I really believe I swooned, but at the next station—a large one—we saw consternation on every face. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I tried to persuade myself I was. Vend looked ghastly. A passenger got in; he did not look quite so dazed as some did, but savage and cross. For a time none spoke; at last someone said aloud—I don’t think he expected an answer—

“What on earth’s become of them?” and the cross looking man, who got in last, growled out,

“That’s the worst of it; they are not _on earth_, they are gone. My boy always said it would be so; from the very first moment I heard it, I knew what had happened; often he has warned me. I still have his voice ringing in my ears.

“‘I tell you, in _that night_ there shall be two men in one bed: the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.’ (Luke xvii. 34.)

“I know only too well ‘_that night_’ was _last_ night. I’ve often prayed for it without thinking, and so I daresay have you: ‘Thy kingdom come.’ It makes me so savage I don’t know what to do.”

Now, I was an atheist, and did not believe the Bible. For the last thirty years (I am past fifty) I had stuck to my opinions, and when I heard men talk religious trash I invariably objected.

But this seemed altogether different. I tell you, for a thousand pounds I couldn’t have said a word. I just hoped it would all turn out a dream, but the further we went, the more certain it became that we were all awake, and that by some unaccountable visitation of Providence a number of people had suddenly disappeared in the night.

The whole of society was unhinged; everybody had to do somebody’s else’s work. For instance, at the terminus, a porter had been put into Smith’s stall, as the usual man was missing. Cabs were not scarce, but some of those who drove them seemed unlicensed and new to their work. The shutters in some of the shops were up, and on getting to my bank I heard the keys had only just been found.

Everyone was silent, and afraid lest some great misfortune was coming. I noticed we all seemed to mistrust one another, and yet as each fresh clerk, turned up late, entered the counting-room, a low whisper went round. The chief cashier, as I expected, did not come. The newspapers no one cared to look at; there seemed a tacit opinion that _they_ could tell us nothing.

Business was at a standstill. I saw that very soon. I hoped as the day wore on that it would revive, but it did not. The clerks went off without asking my permission, and I was left alone. I felt I hated them. I did not know what to do. I could not well leave, else they might say the bank had stopped payment, and yet I felt I could not stay there. Business seemed to have lost its interest, and money its value. I put up the shutters myself, and at once noticed what a change had come over the City while I had been at the bank. _Then_ all were trying to fill the void places; _now_ it seemed as if the attempt had failed.

In the City some of the streets had that dismal Sunday appearance, while a few houses had been broken into; but in the main thoroughfares there was a dense mass of people, hurrying, it struck me, they knew not where. Some seemed dazed, others almost mad with terror. At the stations confusion reigned, and I heard there had been some terrible accidents. I went into my club, but the waiters had gone off without leave, and one had to help oneself.

As evening came on, I saw the lurid reflection of several fires, but, horrible to say, no one seemed to mind, and I felt myself that if the whole of London were burnt, and I with it, I should not care. For the first time in my life I no longer feared Death: I rather looked on him as a friend.

As the gas was not lit, and darkness came down upon us, one heard cries and groans. I tried to light the gas, but it was not turned on. I remembered there was a taper in the writing-room. I went and lit it, but of course it did not last long. I groped my way into the dining-room, and helped myself to some wine, but I could not find much, and what I took seemed to have no effect; and when I heard voices, they fell on me as if I were in a dream. They were talking of the Bible, though, and it now seemed the one book worth thinking of, yet in our vast club library I doubt if I should have found a single copy.

One said: “What haunts me are the words ‘Watch therefore.’ You can’t _watch_ now.”

I thought of my dinner party. Little had I imagined a week ago, when I issued the invitations, how I should be passing the hour.

Suddenly I remembered the secretary had been a religious fanatic, and I made my way slowly to his room, knocking over a table, in my passage, with glasses on it. It fell with a crash which sounded through the house, but no one noticed it. By the aid of a match I saw candles on his writing table and lit them. Yes! as I thought, there was his Bible. It was open as if he had been reading it when called away, and another book I had never seen before lay alongside of it—a sort of index.

The Bible was open at Proverbs, and these verses, being marked, caught my eye:

“Because I have called and ye refused, I have stretched out My hand and no man regarded; I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh.”

I had never thought before of God laughing—of God mocking. I had fancied man alone did that. Man’s laughing had ended now—I saw that pretty plain.

I had a hazy recollection of a verse that spoke of men wanting the rocks to fall on them; so looked it up in the index. Yes, there was the word “Rock,” and some of the passages were marked with a pencil. One was Deut. xxxii. 15: “He forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of our Salvation.”

Perhaps he marked that passage after he had had a talk with me. How well I remember the earnestness with which he pressed salvation upon me that day—explaining the simplicity of trusting Christ and His blood for pardon—and assuring me that if I only yielded myself to the Lord I should understand the peace and joy he talked about. But it was no use. I remember I only chaffed him, and said mockingly that his God was a myth, and time would prove it, and he answered,

“Never. ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Word shall not pass away.’ He may come to-night.”

I laughed and said, “What odds will you take? I lay you long ones.”

Another passage marked was 1 Samuel ii. 2, “Neither is there any rock like our God,” and lower still “Man who built his house upon a rock.”

I had no need to look that out. I knew what it referred to, and then my eye caught Matt. xxvii. 51, “The earth did quake, and the rocks rent.” That was when Christ died to save sinners, died to save me—and yet I had striven against Him all my life. I could not bear to read more. I shut the book and got up. There were some texts hanging over the fireplace:

“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out.”—Acts iii. 19.

“The blood of Jesus Christ His son cleanseth us from all sin.”—1 John i. 7.

“Now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”—2 Cor. vi. 2.

As I turned to leave the room these caught my eye, and I said, “Well, I have been a fool.”

Tom Hammond looked up from the little booklet,—a look of bewilderment was in his eyes, a sense of blankness, almost of stupefaction, in his mind. Like one who, half stunned, passes through some strange and wondrous experience, and slowly recalls every item of that experience as fuller consciousness returns, he went, mentally, slowly over the story of the little book.

“The verisimilitude of the whole story is little less than startling,” he murmured. His eyes dropped upon the book again, and he read the last line aloud: “Well, I have been a fool.”

Slowly, meditatively, he added: “And I, with every other otherwise sane man who has been careless as to whether such things are to be, am as big a fool as the man in that book!”

He laid the dainty little messenger down on the table by his bedside. His handling of the book was almost reverential. Reaching to the electric lever, he switched off the light. He wanted to think, and he could think best in the dark.

“Of course, I know _historically_,” he mused, “all the events of the Christ’s life, His death, His resurrection, and—and——Well, _there_, I think, my knowledge ends. In a vague way I have always known that the Bible said something of a great final denouement to all the World Drama—an award time of some kind, a millennium of perfect—perfect—well perfect everything that is peaceful and——Oh, I don’t know much about it, after all. I am very much in a fog, I see, for Mrs. Joyce and that booklet both speak of a return of Christ into the air, whither certain dead and certain living are to be caught up to be with Him and to begin an eternity of bliss.”

For a moment or two he tried to disentangle his many thoughts; then, with a weary little sigh, he gave up the task, murmuring: “_I_ certainly am not ready for any such event. If there is to be a hideous leaving behind of the _un_ready, then I should be left to all that unknown hideousness.”

A myriad thoughts crowded upon his brain. He gave up, at length, the perplexing attempt to think out the problem, telling himself that with the coming of the new day he would begin a definite search for the real facts of this great mystery—the second coming of Christ.

By an exercise of his will he finally settled himself to sleep.

Chapter XII.

The Centre Of The Earth.

“Will you come into my workroom, Mr. Hammond? It is a kind of sanctum to me as well as a workroom, and I always feel that I can talk freer there than anywhere else.”

It was the Jew, Abraham Cohen, who said these words. His visitor was Tom Hammond. It was the morning after that Tom Hammond had been troubled about “Long Odds” and its mysterious subject.

Jew and Gentile had had a few moments’ general talk in the sitting-room downstairs, but Cohen wanted to see his visitor alone—to be where nothing should interrupt their conversation.

Tom Hammond’s first vision of Cohen’s workroom amazed him. As we have seen before, the apartment was a large one, and, besides being a workroom, partook of the character of a study, den, sanctum—anything of that order that best pleases the reader.

But it was the finished work which chiefly arrested the attention of Tom Hammond, and in wondering tones he cried: “It is all so exquisitely wrought and fashioned! But _what_ can it be for?”

Cohen searched his visitor’s face with his deep grave eyes.

“Will you give me your word, Mr. Hammond,” he asked, “that you will hold in strictest confidence the fact that this work is here in this place, if I tell you what it is for?”

“I do give you my word of honour, Mr. Cohen.” As he spoke, Tom Hammond held forth his hand. The Jew grasped the hand, there was an exchange of grips; then, as their clasp parted, the Jew said:

“I do not wish to bind you to any secrecy as to the fact that such work as this is being performed in England, but only that you should preserve the secret of the whereabouts of the work and workers.” With a sudden glow of pride—it flashed in his eyes, it rang in his tones—he cried, “This work is for the New Temple!”

“The New Temple? I don’t think I quite understand you, Mr. Cohen. Where is this temple being built?” There was amaze in Tom Hammond’s voice.

“It is not yet begun,” replied the Jew. “That is, the actual rearing has not yet begun, though the preparations are well forward. The New Temple is to be at Jerusalem, Mr. Hammond.”

The ring of pride deepened in his voice as he went on: “There can be no other site for the Temple of Jehovah save Zion, the city of our God, beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth—the centre of the world, Mr. Hammond.”

As he talked, Tom Hammond, watching him intently, saw how the soul of the man and the hope of the true Israelite shone out of his eyes.

Crossing the room to where a chart of the world (on Mercator’s Projection) hung on the wall, the Jew took an inch-marked straight-edge, and laying one end of it on Barrow Point, Alaska, he marked the spot on the straight-edge where it touched Jerusalem. From Jerusalem to Wrangel Land, Siberia, farthest east, he showed by his straight-edge that practically he got the same measurement as when from the west. From Jerusalem to North Cape, Scandinavia, and from Jerusalem to the Cape of Good Hope, he showed again was each practically the same distance.

“Always, always, is Zion the centre of the inhabited earth!” he cried in quiet, excited tones. Moving quickly back to Hammond’s side, he said: “Did you ever think of this, sir, that, practically speaking, all the nations west of Jerusalem (those of Europe) write from west to east—that is, towards the city of our God; whilst all the Asiatic races (those east of Zion) write from east to west—just the opposite,—but always _towards_ Zion? No, no, sir; there can be no other place on earth for the New Temple of Jehovah save Jerusalem. Read Ezekiel, from the fortieth chapter, sir, and you will see how glorious a Temple Jehovah is to have soon. ‘Show the house to the people of Israel,’ God said in vision to His prophet, ‘and let them build it after the sum, the pattern which I show you.’ And that, sir, is what we are doing.”

“Who are the _we_ who are doing this?” Tom Hammond’s face was as full of wonder as his voice. “Who,” he continued, “makes the plans, gives the orders, finds the funds?”

“Wealthy, patriotic men of our people, sir. We as a race are learning that soon the Messiah will come, and we are proving our belief by preparing for the House of our God. Italian Jews all over Italy are carving the richest marbles; wrought iron, wondrous works in metal, gold and silver ornaments, cornices, chapiters, bells for the high priest’s robes, and a myriad other things are being prepared; so that the moment the last restriction on our land—the land of our fathers, the land which Jehovah gave unto our forefather Abraham, saying, ‘Your seed shall possess it’—is removed, we shall begin to ship the several prepared parts of the Temple to Palestine, as the Gentiles term our land.”

A curious little smile flittered over his face as he added,

“The very march of modern times in the East, Mr. Hammond, is all helping to make the consummation of our work more easy. The new railways laid from the coast to Jerusalem are surely part of the providence of our God. When Messiah comes, sir, we shall be waiting ready for Him, I trust.”

“But do you not know,” Tom Hammond interrupted, “that according to every record of history as well as the New Testament, all Christendom has believed, for all the ages since, that the Messiah came nearly two thousand years ago?”

“The _Nazarene_?”

There was as much or more of pity than scorn in the voice of the Jew as he uttered the word.

“How could _He_ be the Messiah, sir?” he went on. “Could any good thing come out of Nazareth? Besides, _our Messiah_ is to redeem Israel, to deliver them from the hand of the oppressor, and to gather again into one nation all our scattered race. No, no! a thousand times No! The Nazarene could not be _our_ Messiah!”

Turning quickly to Hammond, he asked, “Are _you_ a Christian, sir?”

For a moment Tom Hammond was startled by the suddenness, the definiteness, of the question. He found no immediate word of reply.

“You are a _Gentile_, of course, Mr. Hammond,” the Jew went on; “but are you a Christian? For it is a curious fact that I find very few Gentiles whom I have met, even _professed_ Christians, and fewer still who ever pretend to live up to their profession.”

Tom Hammond recovered himself sufficiently to say:

“Yes, I am a Gentile, of course, and I _suppose_ I am—er——”

It struck him, as he floundered in the second half of his reply, as being very extraordinary that he should find it difficult to state why he supposed he was a Christian. While he hesitated the Jew went on:

“Why should you say you _suppose_, sir? Is there nothing distinctive enough about the possession of Christianity to give assurance of it to its possessor? I do not _suppose_ I am a _Jew_, sir (by religion I mean, and not merely by race.) No, sir, I do not suppose, for I _know_ it. There is all the difference in the world, it seems to me, sir, between the mere theology and the religion of the faith we profess. The religion is life, it seems to me, sir; theology is only the science of that life.”

Both men were so utterly absorbed in their talk that they did not hear a touch on the handle of the door. It was only as it opened that they turned round. Zillah stood framed in the doorway. Cohen, who saw her every day, realized that she had never looked so radiantly beautiful before. She had almost burst into the room, but paused as she saw that a stranger was present.

“Excuse me,” she began; “I had no idea you had a friend with you, Abraham.”

She would have retreated, but he stopped her with an eager—

“Come in, Zillah.”

She advanced, gazing in curious inquiry at Hammond.

“This is Mr. Tom Hammond, editor of the ‘Courier,’ Zillah,” Cohen explained to the young girl. To Hammond he added, “My wife’s sister, Zillah Robart.”

The introduced pair shook hands. The young Jew went on to explain to Zillah how the great editor came to be visiting him.

Tom Hammond’s eyes were fixed upon the vision of loveliness that the Jewess made. She was going to assist at the wedding of a girl-friend, and had come to show herself to her brother-in-law before starting. Lovely at the most ordinary times, she looked perfectly radiant in her well-chosen wedding finery.

Tom Hammond had seen female loveliness in many lands—East, North, West, South. He had gazed upon women who seemed too lovely for earth—women whose flesh was alabaster, whose glance would woo emperors; women whose skins glowed with the olive of southern lands, the glance of whose black, lustrous eyes intoxicated the beholder in the first instant: Inez of Spain, Mousmee of Japan, Katrina of Russia, Carlotta of Naples, Rosie of Paris, Maggie of the Scottish Highlands, Patty of Wales, Kate of Ireland, and a score of other typical beauties. But this Jewish maiden, this Zillah of Finsbury—she was beyond all his thought or knowledge of feminine loveliness.

While Cohen talked on for a moment or two, and Zillah’s eyes were fixed upon her brother-in-law, Tom Hammond’s gaze was riveted upon the lovely girl.

Every feature of her beautiful face became photographed on his brain. Had he been a clever artist, he could have gone to his studio and have flung with burning, brilliant haste her face upon his canvas.

He thought of Zenobia as he looked upon her brow. He wondered if ever two such wide, black, lustrous eyes had ever shone in the face of a woman before, or whether a female soul had ever before been mirrored in such eyes.

Her mouth was not the large, wide feature so often seen in women of her race, but of exquisite lines, with ripe, full lips, as brilliant in colour as the most glowing coral. Her eyes were fringed with the blackest, finest, silkiest lashes. Her hair was raven in hue and wondrous in its wealth.

He realized, in that first moment of full gazing upon her, how faded every other female face must ever seem beside her glorious beauty. With a strange freak of mental conjuring, Madge Finisterre and that interrupted tete-a-tete rose up before him, and a sudden sense of relief swept over him that George Carlyon had returned at the moment that he did.

“It is all so strange, so wonderful to me, what I have seen and heard here,” he jerked out as Cohen finished his explanation.

Hammond spoke to the beautiful girl, whose great lustrous eyes had suddenly come back to his face.

For a moment or two longer he voiced his admiration of the separate pieces of finished work, and spoke of his own growing interest in the Jewish race.

The great black eyes that gazed upwards into his, grew liquid with the evident emotion that filled the soul of the beautiful girl. With the frank, hearty, simple gesture of the perfectly unconventional woman, she held forth her hand to Hammond as she said:

“It is so good of you, sir, to speak thus of my brother-in-law’s work and of our race. There are few who speak kindly of us. Even though, as a nation, you English give our poor persecuted people sanctuary, yet there are few who care for us or speak kindly of us, and fewer still who speak kindly to us.”

Tom Hammond held the pretty, plump little hand that she offered him clasped warmly in his, almost forgetting himself as he gazed down into her expressive face and listened to her rich musical voice. There was an ardency in his gaze that was unknown, unrealized, by himself.

The olive of the girl’s cheeks warmed under the power of his gaze. He saw the warm colour rise, and remembered himself, shifted his eyes, and released her hand.

“I must not stay another moment, Abraham,” she cried, turning to the Jew. “Adah would be vexed if I were late.”

She turned back to Hammond, but before she could speak he was saying,