home, his lean, shadowed face all
automatic attention.

"Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
Sodom is smoking."

"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
his look submissively below.

"Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."

St. George nodded.

"You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
he anxiously put it.

Rollo stirred uneasily.

"There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
sir," he submitted hopefully.

"Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
suspect, Tyre is handy?"

"Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.

"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."

"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
mixed something horrid."

"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.

"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history,
that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafes
boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
space. Don't tell me--"

He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
distractingly natural.

"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"

"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
going to look in print. Think of Crass--digging for head-lines."

St. Geo