ing the night air for miles around might have
guided these messengers into the German trenches had not a nearer and more
imperious perfume annihilated it. Headlong, amorous, impatient they had
whirled toward the embraces of Madam Death; the nearer and more powerful
perfume had drawn the half-maddened, half-drugged messengers. The spy in
the room upstairs, like many Germans, had reasoned wrongly on sound
premises. His logic had broken down, not his amazing scientific
foundation. His theory was correct; his application stupid.

And now this young man was about to die. Maryette understood that. She
comprehended that his death was necessary; that it was the unavoidable
sequence of what he had attempted to do. Trapped rats must be drowned;
vermin exterminated by easiest and quickest methods; spies who betray
one's native land pass naturally the same route.

But this thing, this grotesque, incredible, terrible attempt to engraft
treachery on one of nature's most amazing laws--this secret, cunning
Teutonic reasoning, this scientific scoundrelism, this criminal enterprise
based on patient, plodding and German efficiency, still bewildered the
girl.

And yet she vaguely realized how science had been already prostituted to
Prussian malignancy and fury; she had heard of flame jets, of tear-bombs,
of bombs containing deadly germs; she herself had beheld the poison gas
rolling back into the trenches at Nivelle under the town tower. Dimly she
began to understand that the Hun, in his cunning savagery, had tricked,
betrayed and polluted civilization itself into lending him her own secrets
with which she was ultimately to be destroyed.

The very process of human thinking had been imitated by these monkeys of
Europe--apes with the ferocity of hogs--and no souls, none--nothing to
lift them inside the pale where dwells the human race.

There came a rapping on the cafe door. The girl rose wearily; an immense
weight seemed to crush her shoulders so that her knees had become
unsteady.

She opened the cafe door; it was Sticky Smith, come for his nightcap
before turning in.

"The man upstairs is a German spy," she said listlessly. "Had you not
better go over and get a gendarme?"

"Who's a spy? That Dutch shrimp you had in your garden?"

"Yes."

"Where is he?" demanded the muleteer with an oath.

She placed her lighted candle on the bar.

"Wait," she said. "Read these first--we must be quite certain about what
we do."

She laid t