on't you look out for Sylvia? I'm going
back on the ambulance. If you'll find somebody to drive my machine,
I wish you would take Sylvia back. No, I don't want you to drive,
Stephen--if you don't mind. Get that machinist, please. I'm rattled, and
I don't want you to drive."

Leila lay on the stretcher, her bloodless face upturned to the stars.
Beyond, under a blanket, something else lay very still on the lawn.

Plank beckoned a policeman, and whispered to him.

Then, far away in the darkness, a distant clamour grew on the night air,
nearer, nearer.

Plank, standing beside the stretcher, raised his head, listening to the
ambulance arriving at full speed.

CHAPTER XV THE ENEMY LISTENS

In September, her marriage to Siward excitingly imminent, Sylvia
had been seized with a passion for wholesale renunciation and rigid
self-chastisement. All that had been so materially desirable to her in
life, all that she had heretofore worshipped, in and belonging to her
own world, she now denied. Down went the miniature golden calf from the
altar in her private shrine, its tiny crashing fall making considerable
racket throughout her world, and the planets and satellites adjacent to
that section of the social system which she had long been expected to
dominate.

The spectacle of their youthful ruler-elect in sackcloth as the future
bride of a business man had more than disconcerted them. The amazing
announcement of Quarrier's engagement to Agatha Caithness stupefied the
elect, rendering in one harrowing instant null and void the thousand
petty plans and plots, intrigues and schemes, upon which future social
constructions on the social structure had been based.

The grief and amazement of Major Belwether, already distracted by his
non-participation, through his own fault, in Plank's consolidation
of Amalgamated with Inter-County, was pitiable to the verge of the
unpleasant. Like panic-stricken rabbits, his thoughts ran in circles,
and he skipped in their wake, scurrying from Quarrier to Harrington,
from Harrington to Plank, from Plank to Siward, in distracted hope of
recovering his equilibrium and squatting safely somewhere in somebody's
luxuriantly perpetual cabbage-patch. He even squeezed under the fence
and hopped humbly about old Peter Caithness, who suddenly assumed
monumental proportions among those who had so long tolerated him.

But Quarrier coldly drove him away and the increasing crowds besieging
poor, bewildered o