opoulos.

"Has he?" she murmured absently. "Do you think he'll come to-morrow
night?"

"Yes, I think so. I bet you're goin' to have Evanthia in, too."

"Well, perhaps he'll fall in love with her," she whispered delightedly.

"What, and him with a young lady in London!"

"I don't think he's very fond of his young lady in London."

"Well, how do you know that? Women...."

"Never mind. It's easy to tell if a man is in love," she answered,
watching him. He held her tightly for a moment.

"Not so easy to tell about a woman," he said into her hair. "Is it, my
little wife, my little wife?"

"Why, don't you know yet?" she bantered, giving him that secret,
fragrant, ambiguous smile.

"My little wife!" he repeated in a tense whisper. And as he said it, he
felt in his heart he would never know.

CHAPTER VII

It was evening and the _Tanganyika_, a tall unwieldy bulk, for she had
only a few hundred tons in her, lay at anchor waiting for her commander,
who was ashore getting the ship's papers. She was about to sail for
Alexandria, carrying back, through an area infested with enemy
submersibles, some of the cargo already discharged and reloaded in the
southern port. This apparently roundabout method of achieving results
had in it neither malice nor inefficiency. Those who have had anything
to do with military matters will understand the state of affairs, and
the seemingly insane evolutions of units proceeding blindly upon orders
from omnipotent commanders. The latter had ever before them the shifting
conditions of a dozen theatres of war, and to them it was nothing that a
crate of spark-plugs, for example, sorely needed in Persia, should be
carried to and fro over the waters of the AEgean, or that locomotives
captured from an Austrian transport and suitable for the Macedonian
railroads should be rusting in the open air in Egypt. These men, scoured
clean and pink as though with sand and boiling water every morning, in
their shining harness and great gold-peaked hats, moved swiftly in
high-powered motor cars from one consultation to another, the rows of
medal ribbons glowing on their breasts like iridescent plumage. They
lived in a world apart. For them it was inevitable that a whole fleet of
ships should be no more than a microscopic point in some great curve
named Supply. Behind them was a formidable element called Politics, a
power which appeared to them to come out of Bedlam and which would
suddenly change its