did. The article had been twice "modified," that was to say more or less

altered, and Amory could hardly be expected to go on reading it in its various forms for ever. What did Mr. Strong want? If he whittled much more at Mr. Prang's clear statement of a point of view of which the single virtue was its admitted extremeness, he would be reducing the "Novum" to the level of mere Liberalism, and they had long ago decided that, of the Conservative who opposed and the Liberal who killed by insidious kindnesses, the former was to be preferred as a foe. Besides, there was an alluring glow about Mr. Prang's way of writing. No doubt that was part and parcel of the glamour of the East. The Eastern style, like the Eastern blood, had more sun in it. Keats had put that awfully well, in the passage about "parched Abyssinia" and "old Tartary the Fierce," and so had that modern man, who had spoken of Asia as lying stretched out "in indolent magnificence of bloom." Yes, there was a funny witchery about Asia. In all sorts of ways they "went it" in Asia. Bacchus had had a spree there, and it was there--or was that Egypt?--that Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba or somebody had smuggled her satiny self into a roll of carpets and had had herself carried as a present to King Solomon or Mark Antony or whoever it was. It seemed to be in the Asian atmosphere, and Mr. Prang's prose style had a smack of it too. Mr. Strong--his literary style, of course, she meant--might have been all the better for a touch of that blood-warmth and thrill....

And there were ripping bits of reckless passion in Herodotus too.

But Mr. Strong continued to stand between the tea-table and the asbestos log, and to let fall irresolute sentences from time to time. Prang, he said, really was a bit stiff, and he, Mr. Strong, wasn't sure that he altogether liked certain responsibilities. Not that he had changed his mind in the least degree. He only doubted whether in the long run it would pay the "Novum" itself to acquire a reputation for exploiting what everybody else knew as well as they did, but left severely alone. In fact, he had assumed, when he had taken the job on, that the work for which he received only an ordinary working-salary would be conditioned by what other editors did and received for doing it.... At that Amory looked up.

"Oh? But I thought that the truth, regardless of consequences, was our motto?"

"Of course--without fear or favour in a sense--but where there are extra risks----"

What did this slow-coach of a man mean?----"What risks?" Amory asked abruptly.

"Well, say risks to Cosimo as proprietor."

"You mean he might lose his money?" she said, with a glance round the satiny triceps and the apple-bud of an elbow.

"Well--does he _want_ to lose his money?--What I mean is, that we aren't paying our way--we've scarcely any advertisements, you see----"

"I think that what you mean is that we ought to become Liberals?" There was a little ring in Amory's voice.

Mr. Strong made no reply.

"Or Fabians, perhaps?"

Still Mr. Strong did not answer.

"Because if you _do_ mean that, I can only say I'm--disappointed in you!"

Now those who knew Edgar Strong the best knew how exceedingly sensitive he was to those very words--"I'm disappointed in you." In his large and varied experience they were invariably the prelude to the sack. And he very distinctly did not want the sack--not, at any rate, until he had got something better. Perhaps he reasoned within himself that, of himself and Prang, he would be the more discreet editor, and so lifted the question a whole plane morally higher. Perhaps, if it came to the next worst, he was prepared to accept the foisting of Prang upon him and to take his chance. Anyway, his face grew very serious, and he reached for the footstool, drew it close up to Amory's couch, and sat down on it.

"I wonder," he said slowly, looking earnestly at his folded hands, "whether you'll put the worst interpretation on what I'm going to say."

Amory waited. She dropped the satiny-white upper arm. Mr. Strong resumed, more slowly still--

"It's this. We're risking things. Cosimo's risking his money, but he may be risking more than that. And if he risks it, so do I."

Into Amory's pretty face had come the look of the woman who prefers men to take risks rather than to talk about them.--"What do you risk?" she asked in tones that once more chilled Mr. Strong.

"Well, for one thing, a prosecution. Prang's rather a whole-hogger. It's what I said before--we want to use him, not have him use us."

"Oh?" said Amory with a faint smile. "And can't you manage Mr. Prang?"

There was no doubt at all in Mr. Strong's mind what that meant. "Because if you can't," it plainly meant, "I dare say we can find somebody who can." Without any qualification whatever, she really was beginning to be a little disappointed in him. She wondered how Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba would have felt (had such a thing been conceivable) if, when that carpet had been carried by the Nubians into her lover's presence and unrolled, Antony or whatever his name was had blushed and turned away, too faint-hearted to take the gift the gods offered him? Risks! Weren't--Indian policies--worth a little risk?...

Besides, no doubt Cosimo was still with Britomart Belchamber....

She put her hands behind her head again and gave a little laugh.

Well, (as Edgar Strong himself might have put it in the days when his conversation had been slangier than it was now), it was up to him to make good pretty quickly or else to say good-bye to the editorship of a rag that at least did one bit of good in the world--paid Edgar Strong six pounds a week. And if it must be done it must, that was all. Damn it!...

Perhaps the satiny upper arm decided his next action. Once before he had made its plaster facsimile serve his turn, and on the whole he would have preferred to be able to do so again; but even had that object not been out of reach on the wall and its original not eighteen inches away at the sofa's end, three hundred pounds a year in jeopardy must be made surer than that. He would have given a month's screw could Cosimo have come in at that moment. He actually did give a quick glance in the direction of the door....

But no help came.

Damn it----!

The next moment he had kissed that satiny surface, and then, gloomily, and as one who shoulders the consequences of an inevitable act, stalked away and stood in the favourite attitude of Mr. Brimby's heroes under great stress of emotion--with his head deeply bowed and his back to Amory. There fell between them a silence so profound that either became conscious at the same moment of the soft falling of rain on the studio roof.

Then, after a full minute and a half, Mr. Strong, still without turning, walked to the table on which his hat lay. Always without looking at Amory, he moved towards the door.

"Good-bye," he said over his shoulder.

There was the note of a knell in his tone. He meant good-bye for ever. All in a moment Amory knew that on the morrow Cosimo would receive Edgar Strong's formal resignation from the "Novum's" editorial chair, and that, though Edgar might retain his hold on the paper until his successor had been found, he would never come to The Witan any more. He had called Mr. Prang a whole-hogger, but in Love he himself appeared to be rather a whole-hogger. He had all but told her that to see her again would mean ... she trembled. The alternative was not to see her again. His whole action had said, more plainly than any words could say, "After that--all or nothing."

She had not moved. She hardly knew the voice for her own in which she said, still without turning her head, "Wait--a minute----"

Mr. Strong waited. The minute for which she asked passed.

"One moment----," murmured Amory again.

At last Mr. Strong lifted his head.--"There's nothing to say," he said.

"I'm thinking," Amory replied in a low voice.

"Really nothing."

"Give me just a minute----"

For she was thinking that it was her face, nothing else, that had launched him thus to the door. For a moment she felt compunction for its tyranny. Poor fellow, what else had he been able to do?... Yet what, between letting him go and bidding him stay, was she herself to do? At his touch her heart had swelled--been constricted--either--both; even had she not known that she was a pretty woman, now at any rate she had put it to the proof; and the chances seemed real enough that if he turned and looked at her now, he must give a cry, stride across the studio floor, and take her in his arms. Dared she provoke him?...

The moment she asked herself whether she dared she did dare. Not to have dared would to have been to be inferior to those great and splendid and reckless ones who had turned their eyes on their lovers and had whispered, "Antony--Louis--I am here!" If she courted less danger than she knew, her daring remained the same. And the room itself backed her up. So many doctrines were enunciated in that studio, the burden of one and all of which was "Why not?" The atmosphere was charged with permissions ... perhaps for him too. He was at the door now. It was only the turning of a key....

Amory's low-thrilled voice called his name across the studio.

"Edgar----"

But he had thought no less quickly than she. He had turned. Shrewdly he guessed that she meant nothing; so much the better--damn it! There was something female about Edgar Strong; he knew more about some things than a young man ought to know; and in an instant he had found the "line" he meant to take. It was the "line" of honour rooted in dishonour--the "line" of Cosimo his friend--the "line" of black treachery to the hand that fed him with muffins and anchovy paste--or, failing these, the all-or-nothing "line."... But on the whole he would a little rather go straight than not....

Nor did he hesitate. Amory had turned on the sofa. "Edgar!" she had called softly again. He swung round. The savagery of his reply--there seemed to Amory to be no other word to describe it--almost frightened her.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he broke out. "Haven't you done enough already? What do you suppose I'm made of?"

The moment he had said it he saw that he had made no mistake. It would not be necessary to go the length of turning the key. He glared at her for a moment; then he spoke again, less savagely, but no less curtly.

"You called me back to say something," he said. "What is it?"

Instinctively Amory had covered her face with her hands. It was fearfully sweet and dangerous. Flattery could hardly have gone further than that tortured cry, "What do you think I'm made of?" Her heart was thumping--thump, thump, thump, thump. A lesser woman would have taken refuge in evasions, but not she--not she, with Cosimo carrying on with Britomart, and Dorothy Tasker no doubt whispering to her Otis or Wilbur or whatever her American's name might be, and Stan perhaps deep in an intrigue with his Spanish female at that very moment. No, she had provoked him, and he had now every right to cry, not "Have you read '_The Tragic Comedians_'?" but "Do you know what you're doing?"... And he was speaking again now.

"Because," he was saying quietly, "if _that's_ it ... I must know. I must have a little time. There will be things to settle. I don't quite know how it happened; I suddenly saw you--and did it. Anyway, it's done--or begun.... But I won't stab Cosimo in the back.... It will have to be the Continent, I suppose. Paris. There's a little hotel I know in the Boulevard Montparnasse. It's not very luxurious, but it's cheap and fairly clean. Seven francs a day, but it would come rather less for the two of us. And you wouldn't have to spend much on dress in the Quartier. Or there's Montmartre. Or some of those out-of-the-way seaside places. I should like to take you to the sea first, and then to a town----"

He stopped, and began to walk up and down the studio.

Amory was suddenly pale. She had not thought of this. She had thought that perhaps Mr. Strong might give a cry, rush across the studio, and take her in his arms; but of this cold and almost passionless prevision of details she had not dreamed. And yet that was magnificent too. Edgar wasted no time in dalliance when there was planning to be done. There would be time enough for softer delights when the whole of the Latin Quarter lay spread out before them in indolent magnificence of bloom. He was terrifying and superb. Such a man not manage Mr. Prang! Why, here he was, ready to bear her off that very night at a word!

Paris--Montmartre--the Quartier!

It was Romance with a vengeance!

Then at a thought she grew paler still. The children! What about Corin and Bonniebell? It didn't matter so much about Cosimo; it would serve him right; but what about the twins? Were they also to be included in the seven francs a day? And wouldn't it matter how they dressed either in the Quarter? Or did Edgar propose that they should be left behind in Cosimo's keeping, with Britomart Belchamber for a stepmother?

Edgar had reached the door again now. He was not hurrying her, but there was a look on his face that seemed to say that all she needed was a hat and a rug for the steamer.

Such a very different thing from a carpet to roll round her----

She had risen unsteadily from the sofa. She crossed the floor and stood before Edgar, looking earnestly up into his blue eyes. She moistened her lips.

"What's happened----" she began in a whisper....

He interrupted her only to make the slightest of forbidding gestures with his hand; her own hands had moved, as if she would have put them on his shoulders. And she saw that he was quite right. At the touch of her his control would certainly have broken down. She went on, appealingly and almost voicelessly.

"What's happened--had to happen, hadn't it?" she whispered. "_You_ felt it sweeping us away too--didn't you?... But need we say any more about it to-night?... I want to think, Edgar. We must both think. There's--there's a lot to think about--and talk over. We mustn't be too rash. It _would_ be rash, wouldn't it? Look at me, Edgar----"

"Oh--I must go----," he said with an impatience that he had not to assume.

"But look at me," she begged. "I shan't sleep a wink to-night. I shall think about it all night. It will be lovely--but torturing--dear!--But you'll sleep, I expect...." She pouted this last.

"I'm going away," he announced abruptly.

"Oh!" she cried, startled.... "But you'll come in to-morrow?"

"I shall go away for a few days. Perhaps longer."

"But--but--we haven't settled about the paper!----"

He was grim.--"You don't suppose I can think about the paper _now_, do you?"

"No, no--of course not--but it _must_ be done to-day, Edgar! Or to-morrow at the very latest!... Can't we _try_ to put this on one side, just for an hour?"

He shook his head before the impossibility....

And that was how it came about that the Indian policy of the "Novum" was left in the hands of Mr. Suwarree Prang.