The Wings of the Morning. Louis Tracy

fancies, but his iron will for once failed, and he pitched headlong downwards into darkness.

      When he recovered the girl's left arm was round his neck. For one blissful instant he nestled there contentedly. He looked into her eyes and saw that she was crying. A gust of anger rose within him that he should be the cause of those tears.

      "Damn!" he said, and tried to rise.

      "Oh! are you better?" Her lips quivered pitifully.

      "Yes. What happened? Did I faint?"

      "Drink this."

      She held a cup to his mouth and he obediently strove to swallow the contents. It was champagne. After the first spasm of terror, and when the application of water to his face failed to restore consciousness, Iris had knocked the head off the bottle of champagne.

      He quickly revived. Nature had only given him a warning that he was overdrawing his resources. He was deeply humiliated. He did not conceive the truth, that only a strong man could do all that he had done and live. For thirty-six hours he had not slept. During part of the time he fought with wilder beasts than they knew at Ephesus. The long exposure to the sun, the mental strain of his foreboding that the charming girl whose life depended upon him might be exposed to even worse dangers than any yet encountered, the physical labor he had undergone, the irksome restraint he strove to place upon his conduct and utterances—all these things culminated in utter relaxation when the water touched his heated skin.

      But he was really very much annoyed. A powerful man always is annoyed when forced to yield. The revelation of a limit to human endurance infuriates him. A woman invariably thinks that the man should be scolded, by way of tonic.

      "How could you frighten me so?" demanded Iris, hysterically. "You must have felt that you were working too hard. You made me rest. Why didn't you rest yourself?"

      He looked at her wistfully. This collapse must not happen again, for her sake. These two said more with eyes than lips. She withdrew her arm; her face and neck crimsoned.

      "There," she said with compelled cheerfulness. "You are all right now. Finish the wine."

      He emptied the tin. It gave him new life. "I always thought," he answered gravely, "that champagne was worth its weight in gold under certain conditions. These are the conditions."

      Iris reflected, with elastic rebound from despair to relief, that men in the lower ranks of life do not usually form theories on the expensive virtues of the wine of France. But her mind was suddenly occupied by a fresh disaster.

      "Good gracious!" she cried. "The ham is ruined."

      It was burnt black. She prepared a fresh supply. When it was ready, Jenks was himself again. They ate in silence, and shared the remains of the bottle. The man idly wondered what was the plat du jour at the Savoy that evening. He remembered that the last time he was there he had called for Jambon de York aux épinards and half a pint of Heidseck.

      "Coelum non animum mutant, qui trans mare currant," he thought. By a queer trick of memory he could recall the very page in Horace where this philosophical line occurs. It was in the eleventh epistle of the first book. A smile illumined his tired face.

      Iris was watchful. She had never in her life cooked even a potato or boiled an egg. The ham was her first attempt.

      "My cooking amuses you?" she demanded suspiciously.

      "It gratifies every sense," he murmured. "There is but one thing needful to complete my happiness."

      "And that is?"

      "Permission to smoke."

      "Smoke what?"

      He produced a steel box, tightly closed, and a pipe, "I will answer you in Byron's words," he said—