ton Square. There, with all its eccentricities and
absurdities, effort dwelt side by side with dilettante anarchy, and
strugglers with definite goals brushed shoulders with the "brittle
intellectuals that crack beneath a strain."

He grew to know some of the sincere workers of this American _Quartier
Latin_ and some exponents of affectation-ridden cults who travesty life
and the arts under creeds of pathetically shallow pretence.

But these things, though absorbed into observation were small,
foreground details of Boone's life at that time. The motif of the
picture was the vain search for Anne Masters, and the whole was drawn
against the sombre and colossal background of the war itself. For in
those epic months was fought the First Battle of the Marne. In them
Hindenburg emerged from the obscurity of retirement to drive the Russian
hordes back from East Prussia, and, most tragic of all, the flood was
sweeping across Belgium.

If he could think little of other matters than the girl he loved and had
come to seek, neither could the spirit that McCalloway had shaped ever
quite escape a deep feeling of the war, like an incessant rolling of
distant and sinister drums.

* * * * *

In the spring of 1916 the legations and embassies at Washington had
their birds of passage. They were neither secretaries nor attaches in
precise definition, yet men vouched for by their chiefs. Uniforms
bloomed, and among the visitors were those who wore scars and
decorations. To this category belonged the Russian Ivangoroff, and
between him and Boone Wellver sprang up a friendship which, if not
intimate, was certainly more than casual.

Ivangoroff was young, tall and electric with energy. Animation snapped
and sparkled in his dark eyes; it broke into a score of expressive
gestures that enlivened his words: it manifested itself in quick
movements and a freshet flow of unflagging conversation.

It puzzled Boone that, though he was some sort of adjunct to the Russian
Embassy, his gossip of intrigue at the Court of Petrograd should, on
occasion, permit itself a seemingly unguarded candour.

One evening, as the two sat together at dinner, the Kentuckian made bold
to suggest something of the sort, and his companion laughed with an
infectious spontaneity that bared the flash of his white teeth.

"Even at the court itself talk is quite frank," he declared. "Every
dinner party is a small cabal. What would you, with a