ut it away, and to his own added
nothing but his love.

6

Jane got that letter in Easter week. It was a fine warm day, and she,
walking across Green Park, met Juke, who had been lunching with a bishop
to meet an elderly princess who had read his book.

'She said, "I'm afraid you're sadly satirical, Mr. Juke,'" he told Jane.
'She did really. And I'm to preach at Sandringham one Sunday. Yes, to the
Family. Tell Gideon that, will you. He'll be so disgusted. But what a
chance! Life at St. Anne's is going to be full of chances of slanging the
rich, that's one thing about it.'

'Oh, you're going to take it, then?'

'Probably. I've not written to accept yet, so don't pass it on.'

'I'm glad. It's much more amusing to accept things, even livings. It'll
be lovely: you'll be all among the clubs and theatres and the idle rich;
much gayer than Covent Garden.'

'Oh, gayer,' said Juke.

They came out into Birdcage Walk, and there was a man selling the
_Evening Hustle_, Lord Pinkerton's evening paper.

'Bloody massacres,' he was observing with a kind of absent-minded
happiness. 'Bloody massacres in Russia, Ireland, Armenia, and the
Punjab.... British journalist assassinated near Odessa.'

And there it was, too, in big black letters on the _Evening Hustle_
placard:--

'DIVORCE OF A PEERESS.

'MURDER OF BRITISH JOURNALIST IN RUSSIA-LATE WIRE FROM GATWICK.'

They bought the paper, to see who the British journalist was. His murder
was in a little paragraph on the front page.

'Mr. Arthur Gideon, a well-known British journalist' ... first beaten
nearly to death by White soldiery, because he was, entirely in vain,
defending some poor Jewish family from their wrath ... then found by
Bolshevists and disposed of ... somehow ... because he was an
Englishman....

7

A placard for the press. A placard for the Potter press. Had he thought
of that at the last, and died in the bitterness of that paradox? Murdered
by both sides, being of neither, but merely a seeker after fact. Killed
in the quest for truth and the war against verbiage and cant, and, in the
end, a placard for the press which hated the one and lived by the other.
_Had_ he thought of that as he broke under the last strain of pain? Or,
merely, 'These damned brutes. White or Red, there's nothing to choose ...
nothing to choose ...'

Anyhow, it was over, that quest of his, and nothing remained but the
placard which coupled his defeat with the peeress's divorce.