'I wish to speak to you, sir.'

'I'm sorry, but I'm very busy just now. You can put it off until to-morrow, or to-night a little later, perhaps.' 'It must be now.'

Ladd raised his eyebrows. 'Wait outside for a minute; then I'll talk with you.' In spite of his annoyance Ladd's voice was affectionate.

The Greek's eyes flickered and a look of devotion passed over his dark face, interrupting his angry insistence, but he did not move. 'You are going to leave us,' he blurted out, caring for nothing but to get this greatest matter into the open.

'Not to-night, at least,' Ladd answered. 'Will you go, please?'

'But my sister is waiting to know. She did not ask me to come hereshe forbid - no! no!' His stiff English was evidently difficult for him. 'She tell me I dare not speak to you about this very important question, but she is waiting. It is not dignified for her to wait.'

The effect of this bungling betrayal of the fact which these other people in the room, Captain Ladd and the Clombs, had uppermost in their minds was for a moment nothing at all. They had been ignoring it, of course, although Mrs. Clomb must have guessed the truth long before. Then the colonel swore under his breath as if somebody had made a bad slip in playing a game, and his wife looked dangerously at the miserable Aghniades. The Greek gave up trying to talk English and launched into his own cataracting tongue, pouring out entreaties on Ladd, who tried in vain to quiet him. Finally Ladd said something which made the Greek stop, wideeyed and stricken. There was a dead silence and Aghniades's hand went slowly toward the holster at his belt. My glance followed and I felt my heart jump. Mrs. Clomb gave one sharp little scream. Ladd's face was absolutely

stony. The Greek had the automatic in his hand and was talking again in a low hurried murmur.

Ladd held out a steady hand. 'I'll take your gun, Aghniades,' he said.

The Greek backed away a step, still holding the weapon down. I had no exact idea of his threat. It was all rather tense bewilderment; I knew only that he was a mortally threatening man and that his desperation might take any form.

'Give me that pistol,' Ladd commanded, more sharply, 'and consider yourself under arrest.

Aghniades reached up with his left hand and tore, with two fierce tugs, the insignia from his khaki collar and backed away another step. I have no idea what Colonel Clomb was doing. Ladd and his sergeant were facing each other in the middle of the room in a silent contest to see which could intimidate the other. The pistol came slowly upward; the poor Greek was still uncertain but impelled by a desperate force. The silence had a stealthy quality — ready to conceal events. Aghniades's big hand shook, but the pistol moved. I waited, helpless, fascinated, to see the muzzle come into line with Ladd's face. But it was not pointed at him. His faithful sergeant, who 'would die for him if necessary,' had another idea of unanswerable protest. He pointed the black barrel at his own temple. He would stop this desertion of his sister, this treason, by sacrificing himself. A bizarre, Oriental gesture; but we were all held in a silent agony as his slow arm moved. Then the door opened quietly and the girl came in.

She spoke to her brother in Greek, acknowledging the presence of the rest of us only by the slightest inclination of her head. He did not answer her. She said something to Ladd, also in Greek; he only spread out his hands in an unEnglish sign of helplessness.

Since then I have wondered about the scene she played before us, wondered how conscious she was and how much she intended of the effect she created. At the time my heart was in my throat; no one could have questioned her tragic sincerity. It was very simple; there she was, the evident reason for Mortimer Ladd's love of Cyprus. Her presence in the room, crowded before she came, put all the rest of us into a dim background to give her beauty full play in the light. And it was breath-taking.

First she lifted from her head a thin, white-silk scarf, folded it carefully in her hands, and held it toward Ladd. He stood there, like a man upright in Hell, and did not move. She put it down on the desk beside him. She was returning his gifts. As the light shone on the gold waves of her hair and the incredible grace of her head, poised on her round white neck, she bared her arm and took off a little silver bracelet and put that down beside the scarf. I am sure her English lover, as long as he lived, never forgot the bending of her head over her arm as she took off the trinket slowly-the curve of her throat, and the gentle pulling of her fingers at the silver band. Her face was as calm as if she had been alone. She reached up to her hair, took out a shell comb that held it, and shook it free. It fell round her like a heavy cloud of spun metal, filled with light. She showed her beauty as simply and as confidently as a goddess. But she was not a goddess; her gesture as she stooped to put the comb on the desk beside the other gifts was too wistful and too sweet.

Her brother spoke to her, harshly, but she turned on her heel and, without looking at him or any of us, walked from the room. He followed her, his forgotten pistol still in his hand, and stumbled blindly at the threshold.

In the silence of the little room, which

VOL. 134-NO. 5

B

was suddenly emptied as if Mrs. Clomb and her husband and Ladd and I had never occupied it, I got to my feet and made a clumsy excuse to get free.

For an hour or two afterward I walked the black tortuous streets, not thinking, seeing only the Greek girl with her hair unbound and the little Englishman's stony, anguished face.

IV

Next day, just at sunset, we pulled anchor and slipped smoothly out toward the southeast. The ruined freighter, with the windmill on its deck and its rotting wooden sides, was still there. Out toward the red west was the brown sail of a coasting fisherman, riding the wine-dark seas.

The Syrians and Turks and Jews swarmed and buzzed and hung over the rail as we moved. Some of the Moslem women peered from behind their little partitions of gay blankets or pulled their veils down over their faces so that they too might come among the crowd at the ship's side and see the darkening town and the bare slopes dropping away behind us.

Mrs. Clomb and her husband stood in much the same attitude as when we had left Smyrna a week before, calmly surveying land and sea. She turned toward me. 'You will be interested, I'm sure,' she said, her pale eyes challenging mine, 'to know that Captain Ladd has decided to stay in Cyprus — for a while longer.'

I murmured something about his work, his duty.

"The governing instinct was always very strong in Mortimer,' she said.

I looked away as the ship swung farther to the south. In the west blazed a star. It seemed to be shining of its own lambent life, casting over Cyprus and the foam of the sea behind us an eternal and unquenchable radiance.

It must be apparent to the most casual observer that the public is beginning to have grave misgivings as to the efficacy and real service performed by its penal institutions.

It is trying, more than ever before, to devise ways and means for keeping the misdemeanant outside the bars rather than behind them and, with this end in view, has greatly added to the number of persons on probation and parole.

That part of the public interested in civic reforms realizes that locking up a man or woman for thirty, sixty, or ninety days and then letting him loose on society again is an unscientific and futile performance, which tends to make more criminals rather than to reduce their number.

Although we admit that our hope lies in keeping our people within the law and even forgiving them as much

as possible for overstepping the legal boundary (a line often as invisible as that which separates the colors in the spectrum), our legislators still spend a large part of their time in complicating our already complex civilization with more and more laws, many of them impossible to enforce.

Both men and women are still laboring under the superstition that making an abuse of liberty illegal solves the question and that henceforth we shall be secure from that particular abuse.

The Federated Women's Clubs of Detroit drew up an elaborate anti-vice bill, designed to do away with prostitution and its consequent evils. They were zealous in their efforts, lobbying in the State Capitol through many weeks. Asked for an opinion, there was only one answer which could be truth