CHAPTER XXV

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_ Sonia had the air of one steeped in an almost ecstatic content. On her return from the roof garden she had exchanged her wonderful gown for a white silk negligee, and her headdress of pearls for a quaint little cap. She was stretched upon a sofa drawn before the wide-flung French windows of her little sitting-room at the Ritz-Carlton, a salon decorated in pink and white, and filled almost to overflowing with the roses which she loved. By her side, in an easy chair which she had pressed him to draw up to her couch, sat Lutchester.

"This," she murmured, "is one of the evenings which I adore. I have no work, no engagements--just one friend with whom to talk. My fine clothes have done. I am myself," she added, stretching out her arms. "I have my cigarettes, my iced sherbet, and the lights and murmur of the city there below to soothe me. And you to talk with me, my friend. What are you thinking of me--that I am a little animal who loves comfort too much, eh?"

Lutchester smiled.

"We all love comfort," he replied. "Some of us are franker than others about it."

She made a little grimace.

"Comfort! It is my own word, but what a word! It is luxury I worship--luxury--and a friend. Is that, perhaps, another word too slight, eh?"

He met the provocative gleam of her eyes with a smile of amusement.

"You are just the same child, Sonia," he remarked. "Neither climate nor country, nor the few passing years, can change you."

"It is you who have grown older and sterner," she pouted. "It is you who have lost the gift of living to-day as though to-morrow were not. There was a time, was there not, John, when you did not care to sit always so far away?"

She laid her hand--ringless, over-manicured, but delicately white---- upon his. He smoothed it gently.

"You see, Sonia," he sighed, "troubles have come that harden the hearts even of the gayest of us."

She frowned.

"You are not going to remind me--" she began.

"If I reminded you of anything, Sonia," he interrupted, "I would remind you that you are a Frenchwoman."

She stretched out her hand restlessly and took one of the Russian cigarettes from a bowl by her side.

"You are not, by any chance, going to talk seriously, dear John?"

"I am," he assured her, "very seriously."

"Oh, la, la!" she laughed. "You, my dear, gay companion, you who have shaken the bells all your life, you are going to talk seriously! And to-night, when we meet again after so long. Ah, well, why should I be surprised?" she went on, with a pout.

"You have changed. When one looks into your face, one sees the difference. But to me, of all people in the world! Why talk seriously to me! I am just Sonia, the gipsy nightingale. I know nothing of serious things."

"You carry one very serious secret in your heart," he told her gravely, "one little pain which must sometimes stab you. You are a Frenchwoman, and yet--"

Lutchester paused for a moment. Sonia, too, seemed suddenly to have awakened into a state of tense and vivid emotion. The cigarette burned away between her fingers. Her great eyes were fixed upon Lutchester. There was something almost like fear in their questioning depths.

"Finish! Finish!" she insisted. "Continue!"

"And yet," he went on, "your very dear friend, the friend for whose sake you are here in America, is your country's enemy."

She raised herself a little upon the couch.

"That is not true," she declared furiously. "Maurice loves France. His heart aches for the misery that has come upon her. It is your country only which he hates. If France had but possessed the courage to stand by herself, to resist when England forced her friendship upon her, none of this tragedy would ever have happened. Maurice has told me so himself. France could have peace today, peace at her own price."

"There is no peace which would leave France with a soul, save the peace which follows victory," Lutchester replied sternly.

She crushed her cigarette nervously in her fingers, threw it away, and lit another.

"I will not talk of these things with you," she cried. "It was not for this that you sought me out, eh? Tell me at once? Were these the thoughts you had in your mind when you sent your little note?--when you chose to show yourself once more in my life?"

For the first time of his own accord, he drew his chair a little nearer to hers. He took her hand. She gave him both unresistingly.

"Listen, dear Sonia," he said, "it is true that I am a changed man. I am older than when we met last, and there are the other things. You remember the Chateau d'Albert?"

"Of course!" she murmured. "And the young Duc d'Albert's wonderful house party. We all motored there from Paris. You and I were together! You have forgotten that, eh?"

"I lay in that orchard for two days," he went on grimly, "with a hole in my side and one leg pretty nearly done for. I saw things I can never forget, in those days, Sonia. D'Albert himself was killed. It was in that first mad rush. Of the Chateau there remains but four blackened walls."

"_Pauvre enfant_!" she murmured. "But you are well and strong again now, is it not so? You will not fight again, eh? You were never a soldier, dear friend."

"Just now," he confided, "I have other work to do. It is that other work which has brought me to America."

She drew him a little closer to her. Her eyes questioned him.

"There is, perhaps, now," she asked, "a woman in your life?"

"There is," he admitted.

She made a grimace.

"But how clumsy to tell me, even though I asked," she exclaimed. "What is she like? ... But no, I do not wish to hear of her! If she is all the world to you, why did you send me that little note? Why are you here?"

"Because we were once dear friends, Sonia," he said, "because I wish to save you from great trouble."

She shrank from him a little fearfully.

"What do you mean?"

"Sonia," he continued, with a note of sternness in his tone, "during the last two years you have gone back and forth between New York and Paris, six times. I do not think that you can make that journey again."

She was standing now, with one hand gripping the edge of the table.

"John! ... John! ... What do you mean?" she demanded, and this time her own voice was hard.

"I mean," he said, "that when you leave here for Paris you will be watched day and night. The moment you set foot upon French soil you will be arrested and searched. If anything is found upon you, such as a message from your friend in Washington--well, you know what it would mean. Can't you see, you foolish child, the risk you have been running? Would you care to be branded as a spy?--you, a daughter of France?"

She struck at him. Her lace sleeves had fallen back, and her white arm, with its little clenched fist, flashed through the twilight, aimlessly yet passionately.

"You dare to call me a spy! You, John?" she shrieked. "But it is horrible."

"It is the work of a spy," he told her gravely, "to bring a letter from any person in a friendly capital and deliver it to an enemy. That is what you have done, Sonia, many times since the beginning of the war, so far without detection. It is because you are Sonia that I have come to save you from doing it again."

She groped her way back to the couch. She threw herself upon it with her back towards him, her head buried in her hands.

"The letters are only between friends," she faltered. "They have nothing to do with the war."

"You may have believed that," Lutchester replied gently, "but it is not true. You have been made the bearer of confidential communications from the Austrian Embassy here to certain people in Paris whom we will not name. I have pledged my word, Sonia, that this shall cease."

She sprang to her feet. All the feline joy of her languorous ease seemed to have departed. She was quivering and nervous. She stood over her writing-table.

"A telegraph blank!" she exclaimed. "Quick! I will not see Maurice again. Oh, how I have suffered! This shall end it. See, I have written 'Good-by!' He will understand. If he comes, I will not see him. Ring the bell quickly. There--it is finished!"

A page-boy appeared, and she handed him the telegram. Then she turned a little pathetically to Lutchester.

"Maurice was foolish--very often foolish," she went on unsteadily, "but he has loved me, and a woman loves love so much. Now I shall be lonely. And yet, there is a great weight gone from my mind. Always I wondered about those letters. You will be my friend, John? You will not leave me all alone?"

He patted her hand.

"Dear Sonia," he whispered, "solitude is not the worst thing one has to bear, these days. Try and remember, won't you, that all the men who might have loved you are fighting for your country, one way or another."

"It is all so sad," she faltered, "and you--you are so stern and changed."

"It is with me only as it is with the whole world," he told her. "To-night, though, you have relieved me of one anxiety."

Her eyes once more were for a moment frightened.

"There was danger for poor little me?"

He nodded.

"It is past," he assured her.

"And it is you who have saved me," she murmured. "Ah, Mr. John," she added, as she walked with him to the door, "if ever there comes to me a lover, not for the days only but _pour la vie,_ I hope that he may be an Englishman like you, whom all the world trusts."

He laughed and raised her fingers to his lips.

"Over-faithful, you called us once," he reminded her.

"But that was when I was a child," she said, "and in days like these we are children no longer." _

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