Triona, light-hearted, gave himself up to the pleasure of this new existence. He found in it stimulus to work, being in touch with the thought and the art of the moment. The newness of his Odyssey having worn off, he was no longer compelled to dilate on his extraordinary adventures; people, growing unconsciously impatient of the realistic details of the late cataclysm, conspired to regard him more as a writer than as a heroic personage; wherein he experienced mighty relief. He could talk of other things than the habits of the dwellers round Lake Baikal and the amenities of Bolshevik prisons. When conversation drifted into such channels, he employed a craftiness of escape which he had amused himself to develop. Freed from the obsession of the little black book, he regarded his Russian life as a phase remote, as a tale that was told. His facile temperament put the whole matter behind him. He lived for the future, when he should be the acknowledged English Master of Romance, and when Olivia's burning faith in his genius should be justified. He threw off memories of Ellen and the kitchen chair and went his way, a man radiant with happiness. Each day intensified the wonder of his wife. From the lips and from the writings of fools and philosophers he had heard of the perils of the first year of marriage; of the personal equations that seemed impossible of simultaneous solution; of the misunderstandings, cross-purposes, quarrels inevitable to the attempt; of the hidden snags of feminine unreason that shipwrecked logical procedure; of the love-rasping persistence of tricks of manner or speech which either had to be violently broken or to be endured in suffering sullenness. At both fools and philosophers he mocked. A fiction,

this dogma of inescapable sex warfare. Never for a second had a cloud arisen on their horizon. The flawlessness of Olivia he accepted as an axiom. Equally axiomatic was his own faultiness. In their daily lives he was aware of his thousand lapses from her standard of grace, when John Briggs happened to catch Alexis Triona at unguarded moments and threw him from his seat. But, in a flash, the instinctive, the super-instinctive, the nothing less than Divine hand, was stretched out to restore him to his throne. As a guide to conduct she became his conscience.

Work and love and growing friendship filled his carefree days. His novel was running serially in a weekly and attracting attention. It would be published in bookform early in the New Year, and the publishers had no doubt of its success. All was well with the world.

Meanwhile they concerned themselves busily, like happy children, with their projects of travel. It was a great step to book berths for Bombay by a January boat. They would then cross India, visit Burmah, the Straits Settlements, Australia, Japan, America. All kinds of Companies provided steamers; Providence would procure the accommodation. They planned a detailed six months' itinerary which would take a conscientious globe-trotter a couple of years to execute. Before launching on this eastern voyage they would wander at their ease through France, see Paris and Monte Carlo, and pick up the boat at Marseilles. As the year drew to its close their excitement waxed more unrestrained. They babbled to their envious friends of the wonder-journey before them.

Blaise Olifant, who, on his periodical visits to London,

was a welcome visitor at their flat, was entertained with these anticipations of travel. He listened with the air of elderly indulgence that had been his habit since their marriage.

"Don't you wish you were coming with us?" asked Olivia.

He shook his head. "Don't you remember the first time I saw you I said I was done with adventures?"

"And I said I was going in search of them."

"So you're each getting your heart's desire," said Triona.

"Yes, I suppose so," replied Olifant, with a smile.

There was a touch of sadness in it which did not escape Olivia's shrewd glance. He had grown thinner during the year; his nose seemed half-comically to have grown sharper and longer. In his eyes dwelt a shadow of wistful regret.

"The life of a hermit cabbage isn't good for you," she said. "Give it up and come with us."

Again he shook his head. No. They did not want such a drag on the wheels of their joyous chariot. Besides, he was tied to Medlow as long as she graciously allowed him to live there. His sister had definitely left her dissolute husband and was living under his protection. "You should be living under the protection of a wife," Olivia declared. "I've told you so often, haven't I?" "And I've always answered that bachelors are born, not made and I'm one born."

"Predestination! Rubbish!" cried Triona, rising with a laugh. "Your Calvanistic atavism is running away with you. It's time for your national antidote. I'll bring it in."

He went out of the room, in his boyish way, in search of whisky. Olivia leaned forward in her chair.

"You may not know it, but from that first day a year ago you made yourself a dear friend-so you'll forgive me if I" She paused for a second, and went on abruptly: "You've changed. Now and then you look so unhappy. I wish I could help you."

He laughed. "It's very dear of you to think of me, Lady Olivia-but the change is not in me. I've remained the same. It's your eyes that have grown so accustomed to the radiant gladness of a happy man that they expect the same in any old fossil on the beach."

"Now you make me feel utterly selfish," she cried. "How?"

"We oughtn't to look so absurdly happy. It's indecent."

"But it does one good," said he.

Triona entered with the tray, and administered whisky and soda to his guest.

"There! When you've drunk it you'll be ready to come to the Magical Isles with us, where the Lady of Ladies awaits you in an enchanted valley, with hybiscus in her hair."

The talk grew light, drifted inevitably into the details of their projected wanderings. The evening ended pleasantly. Olivia bade Olifant farewell, promising, as he would not go in search of her himself, to bring him back the perfect lady of the hybiscus crown. Triona accompanied him to the landing; and, while they stood awaiting the lift, Olifant said casually:

"I suppose you've got your passports?"

"Passports?" The young man knitted his brow in

some surprise. "Why, of course. That's to say, I've not bothered about them yet, but they'll be all right. Why do you ask?"

"You're Russian subjects. There may be difficulties. If there are, I know a man in the Foreign Office who may be of help."

The lift rose and the gates clashed open, and the attendant came out.

"Thanks very much," said Triona. "It's awfully good of you."

They shook hands, wished each other God-speed, and the cage went down, leaving Triona alone on the landing, gaping across the well of the lift.

He was aroused from a semi-stupor by Olivia's voice at the flat door.

"What on earth are you doing, darling?"

He realized that he must have been there some appreciable time. He turned with a laugh.

"I was interested in the mechanism of the lift; it has so many possibilities in fiction.”

She laughed. "Think of them to-morrow. It's time for good little novelists to go to bed."

But that night, while Olivia, blissfully unconscious of trouble, slept the happy sleep of innocence Alexis Triona did not close an eye.

Passports! He had not given them a thought. Any decent person was entitled to a passport. In the plenitude of his English content he had forgotten his fictitious Russian citizenship. To attest or even to support this claim there was no creature on God's earth. The details of his story of the torpedoed Swedish timber boat in which he had taken refuge would not bear official exam