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Earl Derr Biggers

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Beschreibung

In 'Inside the Lines', Earl Derr Biggers masterfully intertwines elements of mystery and romance within the framework of a compelling narrative that explores themes of disguise, deception, and the enigmatic nature of identity. Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century American society, the novel employs a rich, descriptive literary style, reminiscent of the era's fascination with espionage and international intrigue. Biggers crafts a plot that dances between the conventions of romance and the thrill of detective fiction, allowing readers to embark on a suspenseful journey filled with unexpected twists and nuanced character development. Earl Derr Biggers, known primarily for creating the iconic character Charlie Chan, was deeply influenced by his experiences in a rapidly changing America, brimming with cultural conflict and a growing interest in global interconnectedness. His background in journalism and the arts imbued him with a keen understanding of the human condition and societal complexities, both of which play integral roles in 'Inside the Lines'. Biggers' ability to convey universal themes through relatable characters reflects his commitment to exploring morality in the face of societal expectations. This novel is highly recommended for readers who appreciate a classic tale enriched with intrigue and romance. 'Inside the Lines' not only showcases Biggers' narrative prowess but also invites reflection on identity and the facades we construct in our lives. Enthusiasts of early 20th-century literature and fans of mysteries will find this work a captivating addition to their collections. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

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Earl Derr Biggers

Inside the Lines

Enriched edition. A Tale of Espionage, Intrigue, and Romance in World War I
In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.
Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Lydia Marchmont
Edited and published by Good Press, 2022
EAN 4066338051301

Table of Contents

Introduction
Synopsis (Selection)
Historical Context
Inside the Lines
Analysis
Reflection
Memorable Quotes

Introduction

Table of Contents

Borders define nations, but in Earl Derr Biggers’s Inside the Lines, the real battle is waged where loyalties blur and secrets move in the shadows.

Inside the Lines is a work of suspense by Earl Derr Biggers, published in the mid-1910s during his early career and before the Charlie Chan novels that later made him widely known. Emerging from a period marked by heightened international tension, it belongs to the broader tradition of espionage-inflected storytelling that flourished in that era. The book’s atmosphere reflects an age of watchfulness and uncertainty, where civilian life intersects uneasily with military vigilance. Readers will find a narrative shaped by the anxieties of the early twentieth century, attentive to shifting identities, coded intentions, and the risks of trust.

Without venturing into spoilers, the premise turns on ordinary-seeming people drawn into a web of surveillance, countermeasures, and concealed motives. Social spaces—salons, corridors, and public rooms—become testing grounds for truth and deception, while private encounters carry stakes far beyond personal feeling. The result is a taut, accessible story that offers suspense without forsaking humanity, inviting readers to parse gestures and silences as carefully as any overt clue. Biggers crafts an experience that balances intrigue with moments of warmth, shaping a cat-and-mouse contest whose tension grows from character, circumstance, and the dangers inherent in being seen—or overlooked—at the wrong moment.

Stylistically, the novel favors brisk pacing and lucid prose, with an emphasis on dialogue and observation that keeps the action close to the surface of everyday behavior. Biggers’s approach highlights how information travels through rumor, implication, and performance, turning conversation into a battleground as consequential as any physical confrontation. Scenes unfold with theatrical clarity, built around entrances, exits, and revealing asides, yet the narration retains the flexibility of fiction, shifting focus to illuminate motive and misdirection. Readers can expect carefully staged encounters, a steady accumulation of pressure, and a tone that moves fluidly between lightness, suspense, and the sober gravity of consequence.

Several themes give the book enduring interest. It explores the ethics of loyalty when personal attachments conflict with public duty, and it interrogates how identities are assumed, tested, and sometimes weaponized. The title’s metaphor resonates throughout: lines are borders, orders, and limits—but also the social scripts people learn to play. Inside those lines, truth and falsehood mingle, and the cost of misreading can be severe. The novel further considers the fragile boundary between vigilance and paranoia, asking how a community preserves safety without surrendering its civility. In this way, it probes the uneasy coexistence of hospitality and suspicion under conditions of heightened alert.

Contemporary readers may find the book’s concerns strikingly relevant. Questions about surveillance, misinformation, and the pressures of national allegiance continue to animate public life. Inside the Lines captures the psychological strain of living with partial knowledge, the temptation to draw swift conclusions, and the moral ambiguity of actions taken in the name of security. Its suspense grows not only from external dangers but also from the intimate calculations people make under scrutiny. The novel invites reflection on how fear can distort attention, how trust is earned—and lost—and how integrity is maintained when nearly every act is legible as both sign and strategy.

As an early work by Biggers, Inside the Lines demonstrates his command of momentum and scene while foregrounding character-driven tension over spectacle. It offers a compact, absorbing gateway into the period’s suspense fiction, delivering a reading experience that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. Enter with patience and curiosity: the novel rewards close attention to tone, posture, and subtext, the subtle places where its most decisive moves occur. Without revealing destinations, one can say that the journey maps the intricate space between duty and desire, drawing readers into the places where lines are most rigid—and where they are most likely to be crossed.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

Set at the outbreak of the First World War, Inside the Lines unfolds at the British stronghold of Gibraltar, the narrow gate to the Mediterranean. Steamers crowd the roads, military patrols tighten routines, and the Hotel Splendid becomes a crossroads for officers, diplomats, and civilians seeking safe passage. Among them is Jane Gerson, an American buyer stranded by the sudden conflict, determined to return home yet drawn into the charged atmosphere of alarms and restrictions. Biggers frames the stage with watch lists, searchlights, and whispered rumors of German activity offshore, emphasizing how everyday travel turns precarious once war converts coasts and harbors into guarded frontiers.

Checking into the hotel, Jane encounters a varied company whose purposes are not always clear. British staff officers drift through the lounge, a neutral journalist collects gossip, and an elegant European known as Sophia Valeska attracts notice with her poise and connections. Notices about restricted zones and curfew appear in the lobby. Letters are censored, luggage handled under watch, and even casual conversations carry weight. The novel establishes that Gibraltar’s value lies not only in guns but in information, and that a single credential confers access to the inner areas of the fortress. In this controlled environment, chance meetings begin to feel intentional.

An officer newly arrived on the Rock, presented as Captain Woodhouse, becomes an immediate point of interest. He carries sealed papers requesting technical access to signal installations that govern the movement of ships. The commandant’s staff review his references while their naval counterparts calculate risks, underscoring a bureaucracy straining to stay alert without paralyzing operations. Jane, observing from the periphery, notes small inconsistencies that could be harmless or meaningful, the kind of ambiguity that surveillance breeds. The question of identity, passes, and rightful authority grows central to the situation, as each document, uniform, and salute may either confirm duty or mask intrusion.

Minor irregularities soon form a pattern: a misplaced pass, a key unaccounted for, a launch requesting fuel at odd hours, and a light seen where blackouts are mandated. A message, left anonymously among Jane’s belongings, warns of a traitor inside the lines, implicating someone with access. Reluctant to play a role, she nevertheless informs the authorities, repeating only what she can state plainly. The response is procedural rather than theatrical: lists are checked, sentries questioned, and safe rooms sealed. The narrative keeps attention on practical measures, showing how espionage often proceeds by exploiting habits as much as by daring acts.

Security tightens across the fortress. The harbor’s boom defenses are tested, the wireless office restricts traffic, and coded signals are monitored from the headlands. British intelligence suspects an attempt to direct hostile forces toward scheduled sailings or to disrupt convoy assembly, aims that require precise, timely information. Jane is asked to remain available for further questions, a civilian witness now aligned with official caution. Sophia Valeska’s movements attract scrutiny as she uses charm and plausible errands to traverse public spaces. Meanwhile, Woodhouse’s requests press against the limits of trust. Each errand, visit, or errant whisper becomes a potential lever.

Personal ties complicate the impersonal logic of security. Jane and Woodhouse speak more than circumstances require, finding in each other confidence and reserve. Their conversations blend courtesy with veiled inquiry, touching on duty, national allegiance, and the desire to keep ordinary life intact amid upheaval. Sophia engages Jane with friendly overtures that blur social ease and strategic testing. A senior intelligence officer stages interviews designed to unsettle, probing memories for inconsistencies. The story emphasizes how espionage thrives on human nature—sympathy, pride, and fear—just as much as on machinery. Trust emerges as both a moral choice and an operational variable.

Events accelerate with overlapping feints and countermeasures. A suspected tampering at the telephone exchange prompts a sweep, while a courier’s packet goes missing before reappearing intact, deepening uncertainty. A candidate for arrest seems convenient yet not quite convincing. The narrative details forged credentials, switched uniforms, and a technical manual whose marginal marks resemble a code keyed to harbor buoys and searchlight sectors. With the fleet’s timetable approaching, the British command must decide whether to reopen access for efficiency or lock down further at the cost of delay. The phrase inside the lines comes to signify both safety and exposure.

The climax gathers around a night of low clouds, shifting winds, and guarded shorelines. Signals, whether genuine or deceptive, threaten to convey decisive information to enemies offshore. The race centers on control of a vantage point whose lights could guide or mislead ships at sea. Jane’s role becomes active rather than observational, requiring quick judgments under pressure without full knowledge of every design. Loyalties that have been opaque clarify through action, not confession. Without detailing outcomes, the sequence underscores how a few minutes, a single shuttered lamp, or a diverted message can alter the track of larger events.

In the aftermath, the fortress accounts for what nearly occurred, recognizing both the effectiveness and the limits of its precautions. The narrative concludes with restrained acknowledgments rather than triumphal notes, emphasizing lessons about vigilance, discretion, and the responsibilities of neutrality. For Jane, the experience confirms that civilian life cannot stand entirely apart from the hidden contests of wartime. For authorities, it illustrates that procedures must be paired with perceptive reading of people. Inside the Lines thus blends romance and intrigue into a compact study of how identity, access, and choice intersect when the front is invisible yet everywhere.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Earl Derr Biggers’s Inside the Lines is set in the opening months of the First World War, largely within and around the British fortress of Gibraltar and aboard ships traversing the Western Mediterranean. The time frame, circa 1914–1915, is marked by immediate mobilization, naval vigilance, and the policing of strategic chokepoints. Gibraltar, a British possession since the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), functioned as both a refueling station and a surveillance hub. Biggers uses this militarized, cosmopolitan outpost—teeming with soldiers, sailors, civilians, and suspected agents—to dramatize the tense intersections of imperial security, international shipping, and the precarious status of neutrals in a world sliding into total war.

The outbreak of the First World War followed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, triggering alliance obligations through July and early August. Germany invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914, prompting the United Kingdom to declare war the same day. British mobilization secured naval strongholds from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. In this climate, ports and fortresses like Gibraltar tightened surveillance, rationed access, and scrutinized travelers. Inside the Lines situates personal intrigue within that historical cascade, using the war’s first months—when identities and loyalties were under acute suspicion—to explore the precarious movement of people and information under emergency rule.

Gibraltar’s strategic role in 1914–1915 was to control the gateway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, protecting shipping lanes to Egypt, the Suez Canal (opened 1869), and imperial lifelines to India. The Admiralty’s Mediterranean dispositions relied on Gibraltar for coaling, repairs, and communications; it hosted wireless stations and signal intelligence posts that watched enemy shipping and suspected couriers. British patrols and convoy staging (formalized later in 1917) were anticipated by early-war protective routines. Biggers exploits this geography: the fortress and nearby waters become pressure vessels where naval timetables, secrecy, and civilian presence collide, mirroring how strategic chokepoints concentrated wartime anxiety, surveillance, and the opportunities that spies sought to exploit.

Espionage and counter-espionage expanded rapidly after 1909, when Britain created the Secret Service Bureau—MI5 (domestic) under Vernon Kell and the foreign branch that evolved into MI6 under Mansfield Smith-Cumming. After war began, Parliament enacted the Aliens Restriction Act (5 August 1914) and the Defence of the Realm Act, DORA (8 August 1914), granting sweeping powers: curfews, censorship, and detention of enemy aliens. The Admiralty’s Room 40, established in October 1914, exploited wireless intercepts and captured codebooks to monitor German naval communications. Early spy cases, notably Karl Hans Lody—tried and executed at the Tower of London on 6 November 1914—shaped public fears. Inside the Lines channels these realities: coded messages, clandestine wireless, and the ambiguous status of foreigners drive its plot, while fortress authorities embody the new security state.

The German U-boat campaign reshaped maritime warfare. U-9’s sinking of HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy on 22 September 1914, and the torpedoing of RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 with 1,198 dead (including 128 Americans), demonstrated the reach and terror of submarines. In the Mediterranean, U-boats menaced troopships and merchantmen bound for Egypt and the Dardanelles; merchant raiders and minelaying added risk at choke points. British responses included Q-ships, tighter patrols, and routing discipline. Biggers’s narrative draws its tension from this maritime peril: ships passing “inside the lines” near Gibraltar become potential targets, and the novel treats information leakage—routes, cargoes, schedules—as the decisive weapon submarines needed to strike.

United States neutrality, proclaimed by President Woodrow Wilson on 19 August 1914, framed American travelers and businessmen abroad as observers and, at times, unwitting participants in wartime tensions. Domestic debates escalated after the Lusitania note; Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned on 9 June 1915 over Wilson’s hardening stance. German agents conducted sabotage in North America—most infamously the Black Tom explosion in New Jersey on 30 July 1916—fueling transatlantic suspicion. Inside the Lines reflects this neutral vantage: American characters navigate British regulations, German intrigue, and moral ambiguity, embodying the era’s tension between formal neutrality and inevitable entanglement when personal ties, commerce, and security imperatives collided.

Wartime social control shaped everyday life in British strongpoints. DORA empowered censors to restrict newspapers, letters, and wireless transmissions; coastal and fortress zones enforced permits and photography bans. Britain interned enemy aliens, with camps such as Knockaloe on the Isle of Man holding tens of thousands from 1914 onward. Propaganda coordinated by Wellington House sought to influence neutral opinion, especially in the United States. Women’s wartime work expanded—nursing through the Voluntary Aid Detachment and British Red Cross, and administrative roles in war offices. Biggers uses hotel lobbies, officers’ messes, and telegraph rooms as stages where class, gender, and nationality intersect, showing how polite society masks surveillance and how civilian routines become instruments of state security.

As a social and political critique, Inside the Lines exposes the costs of emergency rule: curtailed liberties under DORA, ethnic profiling, and the ease with which fear licenses overreach. By staging deception among elites and travelers in a colonial fortress, the book interrogates imperial hierarchies and the presumption that class or nationality guarantees loyalty. It underscores the fragility of truth in a censored environment, where rumor outpaces evidence and bureaucracy can both protect and endanger. The novel’s Americans, Britons, and suspected Germans illustrate a broader indictment of militarized modernity—how technological networks, secrecy, and strategic geography can reduce individuals to instruments within the machinery of total war.

Inside the Lines

Main Table of Contents
I. — JANE GERSON, BUYER
II. — FROM THE WILHELMSTRASSE
III. — BILLY CAPPER AT PLAY
IV. — 32 QUEEN'S TERRACE
V. — A FERRET
VI. — A FUGITIVE
VII. — THE HOTEL SPLENDIDE
VIII. — CHAFF OF WAR
IX. — ROOM D
X. — A VISIT TO A LADY
XI. — A SPY IN THE SIGNAL. TOWER
XII. — HER COUNTRY'S EXAMPLE
XIII. — ENTER, A CIGARETTE
XIV. — THE CAPTAIN COMES TO. TEA
XV. — THE THIRD DEGREE
XVI. — THE PENDULUM OF FATE
XVII. — THREE-THIRTY A.M.
XVIII. — THE TRAP IS SPRUNG
XIX. — AT THE QUAY
THE END
"

I. — JANE GERSON, BUYER

Table of Contents

"I HAD two trunks—two, où est l'autre?"

The grinning customs guard lifted his shoulders to his ears and spread out his palms. "Mais, mamselle—"

"Don't you 'mais' me, sir! I had two trunks—deux troncs—when I got aboard that wabbly old boat at Dover this morning, and I'm not going to budge from this wharf until I find the other one. Where did you learn your French, anyway? Can't you understand when I speak your language?"

The girl plumped herself down on top of the unhasped trunk and folded her arms truculently. With a quizzical smile, the customs guard looked down into her brown eyes, smoldering dangerously now, and began all over again his speech of explanation.

"Wagon-lit?" She caught a familiar word. "Mais oui; that's where I want to go—aboard your wagon-lit, for Paris. Voilà!"—the girl carefully gave the word three syllables—"mon ticket pour Paree!" She opened her patent-leather reticule, rummaged furiously therein, brought out a handkerchief, a tiny mirror, a packet of rice papers, and at last a folded and punched ticket. This she displayed with a triumphant flourish.

"Voilà! II dit 'Miss Jane Gerson'; that's me—moi-même, I mean. And il dit 'deux troncs'; now you can't go behind that, can you? Where is that other trunk?"

A whistle shrilled back beyond the swinging doors of the station. Folk in the customs shed began a hasty gathering together of parcels and shawl straps, and a general exodus toward the train sheds commenced. The girl on the trunk looked appealingly about her; nothing but bustle and confusion; no Samaritan to turn aside and rescue a fair traveler fallen among customs guards. Her eyes filled with trouble, and for an instant her reliant mouth broke its line of determination; the lower lip quivered suspiciously. Even the guard started to walk away.

"Oh, oh, please don't go!" Jane Gerson was on her feet, and her hands shot out in an impulsive appeal. "Oh, dear; maybe I forgot to tip you. Here, attende au secours, if you'll only find that other trunk before the train—"

"Pardon; but if I may be of any assistance—"

Miss Gerson turned. A tallish, old-young-looking man, in a gray lounge suit, stood heels together and bent stiffly in a bow. Nothing of the beau or the boulevardier about his face or manner. Miss Gerson accepted his intervention as heaven-sent.

"Oh, thank you ever so much! The guard, you see, doesn't understand good French. I just can't make him understand that one of my trunks is missing. And the train for Paris—"

Already the stranger was rattling incisive French at the guard. That official bowed low, and, with hands and lips, gave rapid explanation. The man in the gray lounge suit turned to the girl.

"A little misunderstanding, Miss—ah—"

"Gerson—Jane Gerson, of New York," she promptly supplied.

"A little misunderstanding, Miss Gerson. The customs guard says your other trunk has already been examined, passed, and placed on the baggage van. He was trying to tell you that it would be necessary for you to permit a porter to take this trunk to the train before time for starting. With your permission—"

The stranger turned and halloed to a porter, who came running. Miss Gerson had the trunk locked and strapped in no time, and it was on the shoulders of the porter.

"You have very little time, Miss Gerson. The train will be making a start directly. If I might—ah—pilot you through the station to the proper train shed. I am not presuming?"

"You are very kind," she answered hurriedly.

They set off, the providential Samaritan in the lead. Through the waiting-room and on to a broad platform, almost deserted, they went. A guard's whistle shrilled. The stranger tucked a helping hand under Jane Gerson's arm to steady her in the sharp sprint down a long aisle between tracks to where the Paris train stood. It began to move before they had reached its mid-length. A guard threw open a carriage door, in they hopped, and with a rattle of chains and banging of buffers the Express du Nord was off on its arrow flight from Calais to the capital.

The carriage, which was of the second class, was comfortably filled. Miss Gerson stumbled over the feet of a puffy Fleming nearest the door, was launched into the lap of a comfortably upholstered widow on the opposite seat, ricochetted back to jam an elbow into a French gentleman's spread newspaper, and finally was catapulted into a vacant space next to the window on the carriage's far side. She giggled, tucked the skirts of her pearl-gray duster about heir, righted the chic sailor hat on her chestnut-brown head, and patted a stray wisp of hair back into place. Her meteor flight into and through the carriage disturbed her not a whit.

As for the Samaritan, he stood uncertainly in the narrow cross aisle, swaying to the swing of the carriage and reconnoitering seating possibilities. There was a place, a very narrow one, next to the fat Fleming; also there was a vacant place next to Jane Gerson. The Samaritan caught the girl's glance in his indecision, read in it something frankly comradely, and chose the seat beside her.

"Very good of you, I'm sure," he murmured. "I did not wish to presume—"

"You're not," the girl assured, and there was something so fresh, so ingenuous, in the tone and the level glance of her brown eyes that the Samaritan felt all at once distinctly satisfied with the cast of fortune that had thrown him in the way of a distressed traveler. He sat down with a lifting of the checkered Alpine hat he wore and a stiff little bow from the waist.

"If I may, Miss Gerson—I am Captain Woodhouse, of the signal service."

"Oh!" The girl let slip a little gasp—the meed of admiration the feminine heart always pays to shoulder straps. "Signal service; that means the army?"

"His majesty's service; yes. Miss Gerson."

"You are, of course, off duty?" she suggested, with the faintest possible tinge of regret at the absence of the stripes and buttons that spell "soldier" with the woman.

"You might say so, Miss Gerson. Egypt—the Nile country is my station. I am on my way back there after a bit of a vacation at home—London I mean, of course."

She stole a quick side glance at the face of her companion. A soldier's face it was, lean and school-hardened and competent. Lines about the eyes and mouth—the stamp of the sun and the imprint of the habit to command—had taken from Captain Woodhouse's features something of freshness and youth, though giving in return the index of inflexible will and lust for achievement. His smooth lips were a bit thin, Jane Gerson thought, and the outshooting chin, almost squared at the angles, marked Captain Woodhouse as anything but a trifler or a flirt. She was satisfied that nothing of presumption or forwardness on the part of this hard-molded chap from Egypt would give her cause to regret her unconventional offer of friendship.

Captain Woodhouse, in his turn, had made a satisfying, though covert, appraisal of his traveling companion by means of a narrow mirror inset above the baggage rack over the opposite seat. Trim and petite of figure, which was just a shade under the average for height and plumpness; a small head set sturdily on a round smooth neck; face the very embodiment of independence and self-confidence, with its brown eyes wide apart, its high brow under the parting waves of golden chestnut, broad humorous mouth, and tiny nose slightly nibbed upward: Miss Up-to-the-Minute New York, indeed! From the cocked red feather in her hat to the dainty spatted boots Jane Gerson appeared in Woodhouse's eyes a perfect, virile, vividly alive American girl. He'd met her kind before; had seen them browbeating bazaar merchants in Cairo and riding desert donkeys like strong young queens. The type appealed to him.

The first stiffness of informal meeting wore away speedily. The girl tactfully directed the channel of conversation into lines familiar to Woodhouse. What was Egypt like; who owned the Pyramids, and why didn't the owners plant a park around them and charge admittance? Didn't he think Rameses and all those other old Pharaohs had the right idea in advertising—putting up stone billboards to last all time? The questions came crisp and startling; Woodhouse found himself chuckling at the shrewd incisiveness of them. Rameses an advertiser and the Pyramids stone hoardings to carry all those old boys' fame through the ages! He'd never looked on them in that light before.

"I say, Miss Gerson, you'd make an excellent business person, now, really," the captain voiced his admiration.

"Just cable that at my expense to old Pop Hildebrand, of Hildebrand's department store, New York," she flashed back at him. "I'm trying to convince him of just that very thing."

"Really, now; a department shop! What, may I ask, do you have to do for—ah—Pop Hildebrand?"

"Oh, I'm his foreign buyer," Jane answered, with a conscious note of pride. "I'm over here to buy gowns for the winter season, you see. Paul Poiret—Worth—Paquin; you've heard of those wonderful people, of course?"

"Can't say I have," the captain confessed, with a rueful smile into the girl's brown eyes.

"Then you've never bought a Worth?" she challenged. "For if you had you'd not forget the name—or the price—very soon."

"Gowns—and things are not in my line, Miss Gerson," he answered simply, and the girl caught herself feeling a secret elation. A man who didn't know gowns couldn't be very intimately acquainted with women. And—well—

"And this Hildebrand, he sends you over here alone just to buy pretties for New York's wonderful women?" the captain was saying. "Aren't you just a bit—ah—nervous to be over in this part of the world—alone?"

"Not in the least," the girl caught him up. "Not about the alone part, I should say. Maybe I am fidgety and sort of worried about making good on the job. This is my first trip—my very first as a buyer for Hildebrand. And, of course, if I should fall down—"

"Fall down?" Woodhouse echoed, mystified. The girl laughed, and struck her left wrist a smart blow with her gloved right hand.

"There I go again—slang; 'Vulgar American slang,' you'll call it. If I could only rattle off the French as easily as I do New Yorkese I'd be a wonder. I mean I'm afraid I won't make good."

"Oh!"

"But why should I worry about coming over alone?" Jane urged. "Lots of American girls come over here alone with an American flag pinned to their shirt-waists and wearing a Baedeker for a wrist watch. Nothing ever happens to them."

Captain Woodhouse looked out on the flying panorama of straw-thatched houses and fields heavy with green grain. He seemed to be balancing words. He glanced at the passenger across the aisle, a wizened little man, asleep. In a lowered voice he began:

"A woman alone—over here on the Continent at this time; why, I very much fear she will have great difficulties when the—ah—trouble comes."

"Trouble?" Jane's eyes were questioning.

"I do not wish to be an alarmist. Miss Gerson," Captain Woodhouse continued, hesitant. "Goodness knows we've had enough calamity shouters among the Unionists at home. But have you considered what you would do—how you would get back to America in case of—war?" The last word was almost a whisper.

"War?" she echoed. "Why, you don't mean all this talk in the papers is—"

"Is serious, yes," Woodhouse answered quietly. "Very serious."

"Why, Captain Woodhouse, I thought you had war talk every summer over here just as our papers are filled each spring with gossip about how Tesreau is going to jump to the Feds, or the Yanks are going to be sold. It's your regular midsummer outdoor sport over here, this stirring up the animals."

Woodhouse smiled, though his gray eyes were filled with something not mirth.

"I fear the animals are—stirred, as you say, too far this time," he resumed. "The assassination of the Archduke Ferd—"

"Yes, I remember I did read something about that in the papers at home. But archdukes and kings have been killed before, and no war came of it. In Mexico they murder a president before he has a chance to send out 'At home' cards."

"Europe is so different from Mexico," her companion continued, the lines of his face deepening. "I am afraid you over in the States do not know the dangerous politics here; you are so far away; you should thank God for that. You are not in a land where one man—or two or three—may say, 'We will now go to war,' and then you go, willy-nilly."

The seriousness of the captain's speech and the fear that he could not keep from his eyes sobered the girl. She looked out on the sun-drenched plains of Pas de Calais, where toy villages, hedged fields, and squat farmhouses lay all in order, established, seeming for all time in the comfortable doze of security. The plodding manikins in the fields, the slumberous oxen drawing the harrows amid the beet rows, pigeons circling over the straw hutches by the tracks' side—all this denied the possibility of war's corrosion.

"Don't you think everybody is suffering from a bad dream when they say there's to be fighting?" she queried. "Surely it is impossible that folks over here would all consent to destroy this." She waved toward the peaceful countryside.

"A bad dream, yes. But one that will end in a nightmare," he answered. "Tell me, Miss Gerson, when will you be through with your work in Paris, and on your way back to America?"

"Not for a month; that's sure. Maybe I'll be longer if I like the place."

Woodhouse pondered.

"A month. This is the tenth of July. I am afraid I say, Miss Gerson, please do not set me down for a meddler—this short acquaintance, and all that; but may I not urge on you that you finish your work in Paris and get back to England at least in two weeks?" The captain had turned, and was looking into the girl's eyes with an earnest intensity that startled her. "I can not tell you all I know, of course. I may not even know the truth, though I think I have a bit of it, right enough. But one of your sort—to be caught alone on this side of the water by the madness that is brewing! By George, I do not like to think of it!"