on his eyes. The
listeners sat or stood motionless.

"Well, I might have spared my pains. The letters were returned to me
from the States. Daphne had arranged it all so cleverly that I was some
time in tracing her. By the time I had got to Sioux Falls she was
through a month of her necessary residence. My God!"--his voice dropped,
became almost inaudible--"if I'd only carried Beatty off _then_!--then
and there--the frontier wasn't far off--without waiting for anything
more. But I wouldn't believe that Daphne could persist in such a
monstrous thing, and, if she did, that any decent country would aid and
abet her."

Boyson made a movement of protest, as though he could not listen any
longer in silence.

"I am ashamed to remind you, Barnes,--again--that your case is no worse
than that of scores of American citizens. We are the first to suffer
from our own enormities."

"Perhaps," said Barnes absently, "perhaps."

His impulse of speech dropped. He sat, drearily staring into the fire,
absorbed in recollection.

* * * * *

Penrose had gone. So had Boyson. Roger was sitting by the fire in the
vicar's study, ministered to by Elsie French and her children. By common
consent the dismal subject of the day had been put aside. There was an
attempt to cheer and distract him. The little boy of four was on his
knee, declaiming the "Owl and the Pussy Cat," while Roger submissively
turned the pages and pointed to the pictures of that immortal history.
The little girl of two, curled up on her mother's lap close by, listened
sleepily, and Elsie, applauding and prompting as a properly regulated
mother should, was all the time, in spirit, hovering pitifully about her
guest and his plight. There was in her, as in Boyson, a touch of
patriotic remorse; and all the pieties of her own being, all the sacred
memories of her own life, combined to rouse in her indignation and
sympathy for Herbert's poor friend. The thought of what Daphne Barnes
had done was to her a monstrosity hardly to be named. She spoke to the
young man kindly and shyly, as though she feared lest any chance word
might wound him; she was the symbol, in her young motherliness, of all
that Daphne had denied and forsaken. "When would America--dear, dear
America!--see to it that such things were made impossible!"

Roger meanwhile was evidently cheered and braced. The thought of the
interview to which Boyson had confidentially bidden him on the