all about
the mysterious messages and the phenomena that accompanied them. He
enlarged upon Pax's benignant intentions and the great problems
presented by the proposed interference of the United States Government
in Continental affairs, but Bennie swept them aside. The great thing, to
his mind, was to find and get into communication with Pax.

"Ah! How he must feel! The greatest achievement of all time!" cried
Hooker radiantly. "How ecstatically happy! Earth blossoming like the
rose! Well-watered valleys where deserts were before. War abolished,
poverty, disease! Who can it be? Curie? No; she's bottled in Paris.
Posky, Langham, Varanelli--it can't be any one of those fellows. It
beats me! Some Hindoo or Jap maybe, but never Hiroshito! Now we must get
to him right away. So much to talk over." He walked round the room,
blundering into things, dizzy with the thought that his great dream had
come true. Suddenly he swept everything off the table on to the floor
and kicked his heels in the air.

"Hooray!" he shouted, dancing round the room like a freshman. "Hooray!
Now I can take a holiday. And come to think of it, I'm as hungry as a
brontosaurus!"

That night Thornton returned to Washington and was at the White House by
nine o'clock the following day.

"It's all straight," he told the President. "The honestest man in the
United States has said so."

XI

The moon rose over sleeping Paris, silvering the silent reaches of the
Seine, flooding the deserted streets with mellow light, yet gently
retouching all the disfigurements of the siege. No lights illuminated
the cafes, no taxis dashed along the boulevards, no crowds loitered in
the Place de l'Opera or the Place Vendome. Yet save for these facts it
might have been the Paris of old time, unvisited by hunger, misery, or
death. The curfew had sounded. Every citizen had long since gone within,
extinguished his lights, and locked his door. Safe in the knowledge that
the Germans' second advance had been finally met and effectually blocked
sixty miles outside the walls, and that an armistice had been declared
to go into effect at midnight, Paris slumbered peacefully.

Beyond the pellet-strewn fields and glacis of the second line of defence
the invader, after a series of terrific onslaughts, had paused,
retreated a few miles and intrenched himself, there to wait until the
starving city should capitulate. For four months he had waited, yet
Paris gave no sign of surrend