voice of Ilse. "We have taken
him to the Memorial Hospital in one of their ambulances."

"W--what is it?" asked Palla.

"They say it is pneumonia."

"Oh, Ilse!----"

"I'm not afraid. Jack is in magnificent physical condition. He is too
splendid not to win the fight.... And I shall be with him.... I shall
not let him lose."

"Tell me what I can do, darling!"

"Nothing--except love us both."

"I do--I do indeed----"

"Both, Palla!"

"Y--yes."

"_Do you understand?_"

"Oh, I--I think I do. And I do love you--love you both--devotedly----"

"You must, _now_.... I am going home to get some things. Then I shall
go to the hospital. You can call me there until he is convalescent."

"Will they let you stay there?"

"I have volunteered for general work. They are terribly short-handed
and they are glad to have me."

"I'll come to-morrow," said Palla.

"No. Wait.... Good-night, my darling."

CHAPTER XXI

As a mischievous caricaturist, in the beginning, draws a fairly good
portrait of his victim and then gradually habituates his public to a
series of progressively exaggerated extravagances, so progressed the
programme of the Bolsheviki in America, revealing little by little
their final conception of liberty and equality in the bloody and
distorted monster which they had now evolved, and which they publicly
owned as their ideal emblem.

In the Red Flag Club, Sondheim shouted that a Red Republic was
impossible because it admitted on an equality the rich and well-to-do.

Karl Kastner, more cynical, coolly preached the autocracy of the
worker; told his listeners frankly that there would always be masters
and servants in the world, and asked them which they preferred to be.

With the new year came sporadic symptoms of unrest;--strikes,
unwarranted confiscations by Government, increasingly bad service
in public utilities controlled by Government, loose talk in a
contemptible Congress, looser gabble among those who witlessly lent
themselves to German or Bolshevik propaganda--or both--by repeating
stories of alleged differences between America and England, America
and France, America and Italy.

The hen-brained--a small minority--misbehaved as usual whenever the
opportunity came to do the wrong thing; the meanest and most
contemptible partisanship since the shameful era of the carpet bagger
prevailed in a section of the Republic where the traditions of great
men and great deeds had led the nation to exp