s beside Clavering with high head
and sparkling eyes, her arms swinging like a schoolboy's. It was
evident even to him, who had waited for her anxiously, that she had
rubbed a sponge over her memory. She was in high spirits and looked as
if she had not a care in the world.

There was a soft mist of green on the trees of the wood, a few birds
had already migrated northward, their own world-old wireless having
warned them of the early awakening of spring after an unusually mild
winter, and they were singing their matins.

She did not seem inclined for more than desultory conversation, but she
had the gift of making silence eloquent, and Clavering, his fears
banished, although by no means at peace, gave himself up to the
pleasure of the moment. They walked briskly for several miles, then
had their breakfast at a roadside inn; and both were so hungry that
they talked even less than before. But there was little need for words
between them; the current was too strong, and both were merely vital
beings to whom companionship and healthy exercise were the highest good
at the moment.

During the long walk back to the ferry she talked with a certain
excitement. But it was all of the woods of Austria, the carefully
tended woods with their leaping stags, their winding paths where no
trolley-cars over-laden with commuters rushed shrieking by, their
enchanting vistas with a green lake at the end, or a monastery, or a
castle on a lofty rock. She told him of the river Inn roaring through
its gorges, with its solitary mills, its clustered old villages huddled
at the foot of the heavy silent woods and forgotten by the world. The
millers were all old men now, no doubt, and the poor villages inhabited
only by women and children. Or blinded and broken men who had dragged
themselves back from the war to exist where they once had given life
and energy to that quiet valley of the Inn. If this made her sad for a
moment it was purely an impersonal sadness, and when they parted on the
New York side of the ferry Clavering had forgotten his doubts and went
back to his work with a light heart and an untroubled mind.

The play was almost finished, and its chances for swift production were
far greater than is usually the case with the new adventurer into the
most inhospitable of all fields of artistic endeavor. Adrian Hogarth,
who had a play on Broadway every year, and Edwin Scores, who had
recently exchanged the esteem of the few for the