ors they
avoided the huns by some miracle--one of Brisson's customary
miracles--but another little company of Americans and English was
halted and detained, and one harmless Yankee among them was arrested
and packed off to a hun prison.

Also, a large and nervous party of fugitives of mixed nationalities
and professions--consuls, charges, attaches, and innocent, agitated
citizens--was summarily grabbed and ordered into indefinite limbo.

But Brisson's daily miracles continued to materialise, even in the
land of the Finn. By train, by sleigh, by boat, his quartette
floundered along toward safety, and finally emerged from the white
hell of the Red people into the sub-arctic sun--Estridge with
painfully scanty luggage, Palla Dumont with none at all, Ilse
Westgard carrying only her Cossack saddle-bags, and Brisson with his
damning papers still sewed inside his clothes, and owing Estridge ten
dollars for not getting murdered.

They all had become excellent comrades during those anxious days of
hunger, fatigue and common peril, but they were also a little tired of
one another, as becomes all friends when subjected to compulsory
companionship for an unreasonable period.

And even when one is beginning to fall in love, one can become
surfeited with the beloved under such circumstances.

Besides, Estridge's budding sentiment for Ilse Westgard, and her
wholesome and girlish inclination for him, suffered an early chill.
For the poor child had acquired trench pets from the Cossacks, and had
passed on a few to Estridge, with whom she had been constantly seated
on the front seat.

Being the frankest thing in Russia, she told him with tears in her
blue eyes; and they had a most horrid time of it before they came
finally to a sanitary plant erected to attend to such matters.

Episodes of that sort discourage sentiment; so does cold, hunger and
discomfort incident on sardine-like promiscuousness.

Nobody in the party desired to know more than they already knew
concerning anybody else. In fact, there was little more to know,
privacy being impossible. And the ever instinctive hostility of the
two sexes, always and irrevocably latent, became vaguely apparent at
moments.

Common danger swept it away at times; but reaction gradually revealed
again what is born under the human skin--the paradox called
sex-antipathy. And yet the men in the party would not have hesitated
to sacrifice their lives in defence of these women, nor would