ion, while his friend went on in carefully gauged voice.

"I am here," he explained, "as a guest in your house. I mean to make war
on certain plans and arrangements which presumably have your sympathy
and support--and I mean to make the hardest war I know." He paused, but
as Van gave no indication of cutting in, he went on in aggressive
announcement. "What I mean to do is my business--mine and a girl's--but
since she is your kinswoman and this is your place, it wouldn't be quite
fair to begin without warning."

For a time Bristow's attitude remained that of deep and silent
reflection. Finally he knocked the ashes from his pipe and came over
until he stood directly confronting Benton.

"So she has told you?" was his brief question at last.

The other nodded.

The master of "Idle Times" paced thoughtfully up and down the room. When
at length he stopped it was to clap his hand on his class-mate's
shoulder.

"George," he said, with a voice hardened to edit down the note of
sympathy that threatened it, "you seem to start out with the assumption
that I am against you. Get that out of your head. Cara has hungered for
freedom. We've felt that she had the right to, at least, her little
intervals of recess. It happened that she could have them here. Here she
could be Miss Carstow--and cease to be Cara of Maritzburg. I am sorry if
you--and she--must pay for these vacations with your happiness. I see
now that people who are sentenced to imprisonment, should not play with
liberty."

"She is not going to play with liberty," declared Benton categorically.
"She is going to have it. She is going to have for the rest of her life
just what she wants." He lifted his hand in protest against anticipated
interruption. "I know that you have got to line up with your royal
relatives. I know the utter impossibility of what I want--but I'm going
to win. If you regard me as a burglar, you may turn me out, but you
can't stop me."

"I sha'n't turn you out," mused Van quietly. "I wish you could win. But
you are not merely fighting people. You are fighting an idea. It is only
for an idea that men and women martyr themselves. With Cara this idea
has become morbid--an obsession. She has inherited it together with an
abnormally developed courage, and her conception of courage is to face
what she most hates and fears."

"But if I can show her that it is a mistaken courage--that instead of
loyalty it is desertion?" The man spoke with quick eagern