l-power.

He was keenly moved by the meeting with Dick Durwent, and, almost
unknown to himself, his love for Elise was a smouldering fever whose
fumes mounted to his head. Love is so overpowering that it overlaps
the confines of hate, and his hunger for her was mixed with an almost
savage desire to conquer her, force homage from her. And she was
English!

In addition to these undercurrents affecting his thoughts, there was
the dislike towards England which lies dormant in so many American
breasts. Gloss it over as they will, no political _entente_ can do
away with the mutual dislike of Americans and Englishmen. It is a
thing which cannot be eradicated in a day, but will die the sooner for
exposure to the light, being an ugly growth of swampy prejudice and
evil-smelling provincialism that needs the darkness and the damp for
life.

Mingling these subconscious elements with those of logic and reason,
Selwyn wrote for two days, almost without an hour's rest, and when it
was finished 'The Island of Darkness' was a powerful, vivid, passionate
arraignment of England, the heart of the British Empire. It was
clever, full of big thoughts, and glowed with the genius of a man who
had made language his slave.

It lacked only one ingredient, a simple thing at best--_Truth_.

But that is the tragedy of idealism, which studies the world as a
crystal-gazer reading the forces of destiny in a piece of glass.

III.

A week later, in the early afternoon, Selwyn was going up Whitehall,
when he heard the sound of pipes, and turned with the crowd to gaze.
With rhythmic pomposity a pipe-major was twirling a staff, while a band
of pipes and drums blared out a Scottish battle-song on the frosty air.
Following them in formation of fours were five or six hundred men in
civilian clothes, attested recruits on their way to training-centres.

With the intellectual appetite of the psychologist, Selwyn looked
searchingly at the faces of the strangely assorted crowd, and the
contrasts offered would have satisfied the most rapacious student of
human nature.

His eyes seized on one well-built, well-groomed man of thirty odd years
whose slight stoop and cultured air of tolerance marked him a ''Varsity
man' as plainly as cap and gown could have done. Just behind him a
costermonger in a riot of buttons was indulging in philosophic quips of
a cheerfully vulgar nature. A few yards back a massive labourer with
clear untroubled eye and powerfu