"Not to-night, thanks," she said. "I've a lot of work to do before I go to bed."

"When shall I see you again?" I asked.

She held out a small gloved hand.

"You won't. It's good-bye."

"But why?"

"It's war _a outrance_."

"That's no concern of mine."

"Exactly. Those that are not with me are against me."

I offered a bribe in the form of matches and a cigarette.

"Don't you have an armistice even for tea?" I asked.

She shook her head provokingly.

"Joyce," I said, "when you were five, I had every reason, justification and opportunity for slapping you. I refrained. Now when I think of my wasted chances...."

"You can come to tea any time. Seraph'll give you the address."

"That's a better frame of mind," I said, as I hailed a taxi and put the two women inside it.

"It won't be an armistice," she called back over her shoulder.

"It'll have to be. I bring peace wherever I go."

"I shall convert you."

"If there's any conversion...."

"When are you coming?" she interrupted.

"Not for a day or two," I answered regretfully. "I'm spending Whitsun with the Rodens."

Joyce shook my hand in silence through the window of the taxi, and then abruptly congratulated me.

"What on?" I asked.

"Your week-end party. How perfectly glorious!"

"Why?"

"You're going to be in at the death," she answered, as the taxi jerked itself epileptically away from the kerb.

CHAPTER II

SUPPER WITH A MYSTIC

"I can look into your soul. D'you know what I see...? ...

I see your soul."--JOHN MASEFIELD, "The Tragedy of Nan."

I stood absent-mindedly staring at the back of the taxi till it disappeared down Pall Mall and the Seraph brought me to earth with an invitation to supper.

"...if it won't be too much of an anti-climax to have supper with me alone," I heard him murmuring.

At that moment I wanted to stride away to the Park, tramp up and down by myself, and think--think calmly, think savagely, try every fashion of thinking.

"To be quite candid," I said, as I linked arms and turned in the direction of the Club, "if you nailed me down like a Strasburg goose, I don't believe you could fill me fuller than you've already done at dinner."

"Let me bear you company, then. It'll keep you from thinking. Wait a minute; I want to have this prescription made up."

I followed him into a chemist's shop and waited patiently while a powerful soporific was compounded. I have myself subsisted too many years on heroic remedies to retain the average Englishman's horror of what he calls "drugs." At the same time I do not like to see boys of six and twenty playing with toys as dangerous as the Seraph's little grey-white powders; nor do I like to see them so much as feeling the need.

"Under advice?" I asked, as we came out into the street.

"Originally. I don't need it often, but I'm rather unsettled to-night."

He had been restless throughout the play, and the hand that paid for the powders had trembled more than was necessary.

"You were all right at dinner," I said.

"That was some time ago," he answered.

"Everything went off admirably; there's been nothing to worry you."

"Reaction," he muttered abruptly, as we mounted the steps of the Club.

Supper was a gloomy meal, as we ate in silence and had the whole huge dining-room to ourselves. I ought not to complain or be surprised, as silence was the Seraph's normal state, and my mind was far too full of other things to discuss the ordinary banalities of the day. With the arrival of the cigars, however, I began to feel unsociable, and told him to talk to me.

"What about?" he asked.

"Anything."

"There's only one thing you're thinking about at the moment."

"Oh?"

"You're thinking of the past three months generally, and the past three hours in particular."