carry her there quickly enough to escape those huge freckled hands that were silky with golden hairs. Her heart was beating so loudly that she was afraid he would hear it and be angry. "You didn't ask me to wait," she said. "It was my friend whom you wanted. She's still there. You've made a mistake. Why don't you go back and look for her?"

He banged his sword upon the floor angrily.

"A trick! A trick to get rid of me," he muttered. Then he unbuckled his sword, flung it against a chair, and began to unbutton his tunic.

"But you can't stay here," Sylvia cried. "Don't you understand that you've made a mistake? You don't want me. Go away from here."

"Money?" the giant muttered. "Take it."

He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a bundle of notes, and threw them on the bed, after which he took off his tunic.

"You're drunk or mad," Sylvia cried, now more exasperated than frightened. "Go out of my room before I wake up the house."

The giant paid not the least attention, and, seating himself on a chair, bent over to unlace his boots. Sylvia again tried to muster enough strength to rise, but her limbs were growing weaker every moment.

"And if you're not the girl I wanted," said the giant, looking up from his boots, "you're a girl, aren't you? I've paid you, haven't I? A splendid state the world's coming to when a cocotte takes it into her head to argue with a Russian officer who pays her the honor of his attentions. The world's turning upside down. The people must have a lesson. Come, get off that bed and help me undo these boots."

"Do you know that I'm English?" Sylvia said. "You'll find that even Russian officers cannot insult Englishwomen."

"A cocotte has no nationality," the giant contradicted, solemnly. "She is common property. Come, if you had wished to talk, you should have joined my table earlier in the evening. One does not wish to talk when one is sleepy."

The English acrobats slept next door to Sylvia, and she hammered on the partition.

"Are you killing bugs?" the giant asked. "You need not bother. They never disturb me."

Sylvia went on hammering; her arms were getting weaker, and unless help came soon she should faint. There was a tap on the door.

"Come in," she cried. "Come in at once—at once!"

Willie entered in purple silk pajamas, rubbing his eyes.

"Whatever is it, Sylvia?"

"Take this drunken brute out of my room."

"Bobbie! Bobbie!" he called. "Come here, Bobbie! Bobbie! Will you come? You are mean. Oh, there's such a nasty man in Sylvia's room! Oh, he's something dreadful to look at!"

The drunken officer stared at Willie in amazement, trying to make up his mind if he were an alcoholic vision; his judgment was still further shaken by the appearance of Bobbie in pajamas of emerald-green silk.

"Oh, Willie, he's got a sword!" said Bobbie. "Oh, doesn't he look fierce? Oh, he does look fierce! Most alarming I'm sure."

The intruder staggered to his feet.

"Foutez-moi le camp," he bellowed, making a grab for his sword.

"For Heaven's sake get rid of the brute," Sylvia moaned. "I'm too weak to move."

The two young men pirouetted into the middle of the room, as they were wont to pirouette upon the stage, with arms stretched out in a curve from the shoulder and fingers raised mincingly above an imaginary teacup held between the first finger and thumb. When they reached the giant they stopped short to sustain the preliminary pose of a female acrobat; then turning round, they ran back a few steps, turned round again, and with a scream flung themselves upon their adversary; he went down with a crash, and they danced upon his prostrate form like two butterflies over a cabbage.

The noise had wakened the other inhabitants of the pension, who came crowding into Sylvia's room; with the rest was Carrier and they managed to extract from her a vague account of what had happened. The aviator, in a rage, demanded an explanation of his conduct from the officer, who called him a maquereau. Carrier was strong; with help from the acrobats he had pushed the officer half-way through the window when Mère Gontran, who, notwithstanding her bedroom being two hundred yards away from the pension, had an uncanny faculty for divining when anything had gone wrong, appeared on the scene. Thirty-five years in Russia had made her very fearful of offending the military, and she implored Carrier and the acrobats to think what they were doing: in her red dressing-gown she looked like an insane cardinal.

"They'll confiscate my property. They'll send me to Siberia. Treat his Excellency more gently, I beg. Sylvia, tell them to stop. Sylvia, he's going—he's going—he's gone!"

He was gone indeed, head first into a clump of lilacs underneath the window, whither his tunic and sword followed him.

The adventure with the drunken officer had exhausted the last forces of Sylvia; she lay back on the bed in a semi-trance, soothed by the unending bibble-babble all round. She was faintly aware of somebody's taking her hand and feeling her pulse, of somebody's saying that her eyes were like a dead woman's, of somebody's throwing a coverlet over her. Then the bibble-babble became much louder; there was a sound of crackling and a smell of smoke, and she heard shouts of "Fire!" "Fire!" "He has set fire to the outhouse!" There was a noise of splashing water, a rushing sound of water, a roar as of a thousand torrents in her head; the people in the room became animated surfaces, cardboard figures without substance and without reality; the devils began once more to sprout from the floor; she felt that she was dying, and in the throes of dissolution she struggled to explain that she must travel back to England, that she must not be buried in Russia. It seemed to her in a new access of semi-consciousness that Carrier and the two acrobats were kneeling by her bed and trying to comfort her, that they were patting her hands kindly and gently. She tried to warn them that they would blister themselves if they touched her, but her tongue seemed to have separated itself from her body. She tried to tell them that her tongue was already dead, and the effort to explain racked her whole body. Then, suddenly, dark and gigantic figures came marching into the room: they must be demons, and it was true about hell. She tried to scream her belief in immortality and to beg a merciful God to show mercy and save her from the Fiend. The somber forms drew near her bed. From an unimaginably distant past she saw framed in fire the picture of The Impenitent Sinner's Deathbed that used to hang in the kitchen at Lille; and again from the past came suddenly back the text of a sermon preached by Dorward at Green Lanes—Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. It seemed to her that if only she could explain to God that her name was really Snow and that Scarlett was only the name assumed for her by her father, all might even now be well. The somber forms had seized her, and she beat against them with unavailing hands; they snatched her from the bed and wrapped her round and round with something that stifled her cries; with her last breath she tried to shriek a warning to Carrier of the existence of hell, to beg him to put away his little red devils lest he, when he should ultimately fall from the sky, should fall as deep as hell.

Sylvia came out of her delirium to find herself in the ward of a hospital kept by French nuns; she asked what had been the matter with her, and, smiling compassionately, they said it was a bad fever. She lay for a fortnight in a state of utter lassitude, watching the nuns going about their work as she would have watched birds in the cool deeps of a forest. The lassitude was not unpleasant; it was a fatigue so intense that her spirit seemed able to leave her tired body and float about among the shadows of this long room. She knew that there were other