ly. What was it? But she could
not remember, because she felt very sleepy and relaxed, and as though
everything was indeed as right as rain.

It was evening when she looked up again, and the room was dark. The
doctor had gone, and the grave young man was still in the room. There
was another figure there, tall and straight, and at first she thought it
was Jim Doyle.

"Jim!" she said. And then: "You must go away, Jim. I warn you. I am
going to tell all I know."

But the figure turned, and it was Howard Cardew, a tense and strained
Howard Cardew, who loomed amazingly tall and angry, but not with her.

"I'm sorry, Nellie dear," he said, bending over her. "If we'd only
known--can you talk now?"

Her mind was suddenly very clear.

"I must. There is very little time."

"I want to tell you something first, Nellie. I think we have located the
Russian woman, but we haven't got Doyle."

Howard was not very subtle, but Willy Cameron saw her face and
understood. It was strange beyond belief, he felt, this loyalty of women
to their men, even after love had gone; this feeling that, having once
lain in a man's arms, they have taken a vow of protection over that man.
It was not so much that they were his as that he was theirs. Jim Doyle
had made her a prisoner, had treated her brutally, was a traitor to her
and to his country, but--he had been hers. She was glad that he had got
away.

CHAPTER XLVII

It was dark when Howard Cardew and Willy Cameron left the hospital.
Elinor's information had been detailed and exact. Under cover of the
general strike the radical element intended to take over the city.
On the evening of the first day of the strike, armed groups from the
revolutionary party would proceed first to the municipal light plant,
and, having driven out any employees who remained at their posts,
or such volunteers as had replaced them, would plunge the city into
darkness.

Elinor was convinced that following this would come various bomb
outrages, perhaps a great number of them, but of this she had no
detailed information. What she did know, however, was the dependence
that Doyle and the other leaders were placing in the foreign element
in the nearby mill towns and from one or two mining districts in the
county.

Around the city, in the mill towns, there were more than forty thousand
foreign laborers. Subtract from that the loyal aliens, but add a certain
percentage of the native-born element, members of sedit