know why you
offered your money to me.'

Mr. Benjamin leaned forward, and taking up his glasses, waved them
hypnotically at the young man. 'Simply business,' he said. 'Same with
you--same with me. You write all this dope against war--why? Because
you know there's big money in it. I pay you to lecture because you can
help to keep America out of the war. In 1913 I was worth two hundred
thousand dollars. To-day I have ten million. We are wise men, Mr.
Selwyn, both of us. While all the rest of the peoples fight, you and I
make money.'

As if his bones were aching with fatigue, Austin Selwyn rose wearily to
his feet, and, without comment, walked slowly out of the office. But
the clerks noticed that his face was ashy-pale, like that of a prisoner
who has received the maximum sentence of the law.

III.

The days that followed were the bitterest Austin Selwyn had ever known.

It is not in the plan of the Great Dramatist that men shall look on
life and not play a part. It is true that there are a few who escape
the call-boy's summons, and gaze on human existence much as a passing
pageant, but even for them is the knowledge that there is a moment
called Death when every man must take the stage.

For years Austin Selwyn had stood apart, mingling with those who were
enduring the sword-thrusts of fate, as an author chats with the players
on the stage between the acts. Even the great tragedy of war had
served only to enrich the processes of his mind. It is true he had
known compassion, sorrow, and anger through it, but they were only
counterfeit emotions, born of the grip of war on his imagination.

But at last life had reached out its talons and grasped him. Every
human experience he had avoided, he was now to know, multiplied.
Stripped of his last hope of justifying his idealism, he saw remorse,
discouragement, a sense of utter futility, the scorn of friends, the
applause of traitors--he saw them all as shadows closing into blackness
ahead of him.

He tried to return to England, but passport difficulties were made
insurmountable. He went to Boston, only to find that those he valued
turned against him, and those he detested welcomed him as comrade. He
returned to New York, but every avenue of activity was closed to him,
save the one he had chosen for himself--that of world-pacificism.

He had always been a man of strong, underlying passions, and in his
veins there was the hot undissipated blood of youth;