Lieutenant Mungo Sheaves, aide to the Officer Administrating Government on Malta, had set before Whitehall an architecture of discontent: among the police force, the University students, the civil service, the Dockyard workers. Behind it all lurked "the Doctor"; organizer, civil engineer: E. Mizzi. A bogeyman to Major General Hunter-Blair, the OAG, Stencil guessed; but found it took him an effort to see Mizzi as anything but a busy man-of-policy, agile, Machiavellian, a trifle old-fashioned, who'd managed to last as far as 1919. For a survival like that Stencil could only feel a wistful pride. His good friend Porpentine - twenty years ago in Egypt - hadn't he been the same sort? Belonged to a time where which side a man was on didn't matter: only the state of opposition itself, the tests of virtue, the cricket game? Stencil may have come in on the tail end.

It must be shock, fine: even Stencil could feel shock. Ten million dead and twice that wounded if nothing else. "But we reach a point," he'd thought of telling Carruthers-Pillow, "we old campaigners, when the habits of the past become too strong. Where we can say, and believe, that this abattoir, but lately bankrupt, was fundamentally no different from the Franco-Prussian conflict, the Sudanese wars, even the Crimea. It is perhaps a delusion - say a convenience - necessary to our line of work. But more honorable surely than this loathsome weakness of retreat into dreams: pastel visions of disarmament, a League, a universal law. Ten million dead. Gas. Passchendaele. Let that be now a large figure, now a chemical formula, now an historical account. But dear lord, not the Nameless Horror, the sudden prodigy sprung on a world unaware. We all saw it. There was no innovation, no special breach of nature, or suspension of familiar principles. If it came as any surprise to the public then their own blindness is the Great Tragedy, hardly the war itself."

On route to Valletta - the steamer to Syracuse, the week of lying doggo in a waterfront tavern till Mehemet's xebec arrived; all the way across a Mediterranean whose teeming history and full depth he could not feel, nor try, nor afford to try to feel, old Stencil had had it out with himself. Mehemet had helped.

"You're old," the skipper mused over his nightly hashish. "I am old, the world is old; but the world changes always; we, only so far. It's no secret, what sort of change this is. Both the world and we, M. Stencil, began to die from the moment of birth. Your game is politics which I don't pretend to understand. But it seems that these -" he shrugged - "noisy attempts to devise political happiness: new forms of government, new ways to arrange the fields and workshops; aren't they like the sailor I saw off Bizerte in 1324." Stencil chuckled. Mehemet's recurring lament was for a world taken from him. He belonged to the trade routes of the Middle, Ages. According to the yarn he had in fact sailed the xebec through a rift in time's fabric, pursued then among the Aegean Islands by a Tuscan corsair which mysteriously dropped from sight. But it was the same sea and not until docking at Rhodes did Mehemet learn of his displacement. And since had forsaken land for a Mediterranean which thank Allah would never change. Whatever his true nostalgia he reckoned by the Moslem calendar not only in conversation but also in logs and account books; though the religion and perhaps the birthright he'd let pass years ago.

"Slung on a stage over the gunwale of an old felucca, the Peri. A storm had just passed, rushing away toward the land in a great slope of clouds; already turning yellowish from the desert. The sea there is the color of Damascus plums; and how quiet. Sun was going down; not a beautiful sunset, more a gradual darkening of the air and that storm's mountainside. The Peri had been damaged, we hove to alongside and hailed her master. No reply. Only the sailor - I never saw his face - one of your fellahin who abandon the land like a restless husband and then grumble for the rest of their term afloat. It's the strongest marriage in the world. This one wore a kind of loincloth and a rag round his head for the sun which was almost gone. After we'd shouted in every dialect we had among us, he replied in Tuareg: 'The master is gone, the crew is gone, I am here and I am painting the ship.' It was true: he was painting the ship. She'd been damaged, not a load line in sight, and a bad list. 'Come aboard,' we told him, 'night is nearly on us and you cannot swim to land.' He never answered, merely continued dipping the brush in his earthen jar and slapping it smoothly on the Peri's creaking sides. What color? It looked gray but the air was dark. This felucca would never again see the sun. Finally I told the helmsman to swing our ship round and continue on course. I watched the fellah until it was too dark: becoming smaller, inching closer to the sea with every swell but never slackening his pace. A peasant with all his uptorn roots showing, alone on the sea at nightfall, painting the side of a sinking ship."

"Am I only getting old?" Stencil wondered. "Perhaps past the time I can change with the world."

"The only change is toward death," repeated Mehemet cheerfully. "Early and late we are in decay." The helmsman began to sing a monotonous, Levantine lanterloo. There were no stars and the sea was hushed. Stencil refused hashish and filled his pipe with a respectable English blend; lit up, puffed, began: "Which way does it go? As a youth I believed in social progress because I saw chances for personal progress of my own. Today, at age sixty, having gone as far as I'm about to go, I see nothing but a dead end for myself, and if you're right, for my society as well. But then: suppose Sidney Stencil has remained constant after all - suppose instead sometime between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle - blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether fatal. This is how the public, you know, see the late war. As a new and rare disease which has now been cured and conquered for ever."

"Is old age a disease?" Mehemet asked. "The body slows down, machines wear out, planets falter and loop, sun and stars gutter and smoke. Why say a disease? Only to bring it down to a size you can look at and feel comfortable?"

"Because we do paint the side of some Peri or other, don't we. We call it society. A new coat of paint; don't you see? She can't change her own color."

"No more than the pustules of smallpox have anything to do with death. A new complexion, a new coat of paint."

"Of course," said Stencil, thinking of something else, "of course we would all prefer to die of old age . . ."

The Armageddon had swept past, the professionals who'd survived had received no blessing, no gift of tongues. Despite all attempts to cut its career short the tough old earth would take its own time in dying and would die of old age.

Then Mehemet told him of Mara.

"Another of your women."

"Ha, ha. Indeed. Maltese for woman."

"Of course."

"She is - if you care for the word - a spirit, constrained to live in Xaghriet Mewwija. The inhabited plain; the peninsula whose tip is Valletta her domain. She nursed the shipwrecked St. Paul - as Nausicaa and Odysseus - taught love to every invader from Phoenician to French. Perhaps even to the English, though the legend loses respectability after Napoleon. She was from all evidence a perfectly historical personage, like St. Agatha, another of the island's minor saints.

"Now the Great Siege was after my time, but legend - one of them - says that she once had access to the entire island and the waters as far as the fishing banks off Lampedusa. The fishing fleets would always lie to there in the shape of a carob pod, her proper symbol. Early in your 1585, at any rate, two privateers, Giou and Romegas, captured a Turkish galleon belonging to the chief eunuch of the Imperial Seraglio. In retaliation Mara was taken prisoner on one of her jaunts to Lampedusa by the corsair Dragut, and brought back to Constantinople. Soon as the ship had passed the invisible circle centered at Xaghriet Mewwija with Lampedusa on the rim, she fell into a strange trance, from which neither caresses nor tortures could rouse her. At length, having lost their own figurehead in a collision with a Sicilian ragusy the week before, the Turks lashed Mara to the bowsprit and that was how she entered Constantinople: a living figurehead. On drawing near to that city, blinding yellow and dun under a clear sky, she was heard to awake and cry: "Lejl, hekk ikun." Night, so be it. The Turks thought she was raving. Or blind.

"They brought her to the serail into the presence of the Sultan. Now she never was pictured as a raving beauty. She shows up as a number of goddesses, minor deities. Disguise is one of her attributes. But one curious thing about those images: jar ornaments, friezes, sculptures, no matter: she's always tall, slim, small-breasted and bellied. No matter what the prevalent fashion in females, she remains constant. In her face is always a slight bow to the nose, a wide spacing of the eyes, which are small. No one you'd turn to watch on the street. But she was a teacher of love after all. Only pupils of love need be beautiful.

"She pleased the Sultan. Perhaps she made the effort. But was installed somehow as a concubine about the time La Vallette back on her island was blocking the creek between Senglea and St. Angelo with an iron chain and poisoning the springs in the Marsa plain with hemp and arsenic. Once in the seraglio she proceeded to raise hell. She'd always been attributed magical talents. Perhaps the carob pod - she's often depicted holding one - had something to do with it. Wand, scepter. Perhaps too, some kind of fertility goddess - do I embarrass your Anglo-Saxon nerves? - though it is a quaint, hermaphrodite sort of deity.

"Soon - a matter of weeks - the Sultan noticed a certain coldness infecting each of his nightly companions; a reluctance, a lack of talent. Also a change in attitude among the eunuchs. Almost - how to say it - smug and keeping a bad secret of it. Nothing he could establish definitely; and so like most unreasonable men with suspicions he had certain girls and eunuchs tortured horribly. All protested innocence, showed honest fear to the last twist of the neck, the last upward thrust of the iron spike. And yet it progressed. Spies reported that shy concubines who had once paced with ladylike steps - limited by a slim chain between the ankles - and downcast eyes now smiled and flirted promiscuously with the eunuchs, and the eunuchs - horror! - flirted back. Girls left to themselves would suddenly leap on one another with fierce caresses; on occasion make loud abandoned love before the scandalized eyes of the Sultan's agents.

"At length it occurred to His Ghostly Magnificence, nearly out of his mind with jealousy, to call in the sorceress Mara. Standing before him in a shift fashioned of tigermoth wings she faced the Imperial dais with a wicked smile. The Imperial retainers were charmed.

"'Woman,' began the Sultan.

"She raised a hand, 'I have done it all,' she recited sweetly: 'taught your wives to love their own bodies, showed them the luxury of a woman's love; restored potency to your eunuchs so that they may enjoy one another as well as the three hundred perfumed, female beasts of your harem.'

"Bewildered at such ready confession, his tender Moslem sensibilities outraged by the epidemic of perversion she'd unleashed upon his domestic repose, the Sultan made what is a fatal mistake with any woman: he decided to argue. Jolted into a rare sarcasm he explained to her, as to an idiot, why eunuchs cannot have sexual intercourse.

"Her smile never fading, her voice placid as before, Mara replied: 'I have provided them with the means."

"So confidently did she speak that the Sultan began to feel the first groundswell of an atavistic terror. Oh, at last he knew: he was in the presence of a witch.

"Back home the Turks, led by Dragut and the pashas Piali and Mustafa, had laid siege to Malta. You know generally how it went. They occupied Xaghriet Mewwija, took Fort St. Elmo, and began their assault on Notabile, Borgo - today that's Vittoriosa - and Senglea, where La Vallette and the Knights were making their final stand.

"Now after St. Elmo had fallen, Mustafa (possibly in sorrow for Dragut, killed in that encounter by a stone cannonball) had also launched a grisly offensive on the morale of the Knights. He beheaded their slaughtered brethren, tied the corpses to planks and floated them into the Grand Harbour. Imagine being on sunrise watch and seeing the dawn touch those ex-comrades-in-arms, belly up and crowding the water: death's flotilla.

"One of the great mysteries about the Siege is why, when the Turks outnumbered the invested Knights, when the days of the besieged were numbered on a single hand, when Borgo and thus Malta were almost in the same hand - Mustafa's - why should they suddenly pull up and retreat, hoist anchor and leave the island?

"History says because of a rumor. Don Garcia de Toledo, viceroy of Sicily, was on route with forty-eight galleys. Pompeo Colonna and twelve hundred men, sent by the Pope to relieve La Vallette, eventually reached Gozo. But somehow the Turks got hold of intelligence that twenty thousand troops had landed at Melleha Bay and were on route to Notabile. General retreat was ordered; church bells all over Xaghriet Mewwija began to ring; the people thronged the streets, cheering. The Turks fled, embarked and sailed away to the southeast forever. History attributes it all to bad reconnaissance.

"But the truth is this: the words were spoken directly to Mustafa by the head of the Sultan himself. The witch Mara had sent him into a kind of mesmeric trance; detached his head and put it into the Dardanelles, where some miraculous set and drift - who knows all the currents, all the things which happen in this sea? - sent it on a collision course with Malta. There is a song written by a latter-day jongleur named Falconiere. No Renaissance had ever touched him; he resided at the Auberge of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre at the time of the Siege. You know the sort of poet who can fall into belief in any fashionable cult, current philosophy, new-found foreign superstition. This one fell into belief and possibly love for Mara. Even distinguished himself on the ramparts of Borgo, braining four Janissaries with his lute before someone handed him a sword. She was, you see, his Lady."

Mehemet recited: Fleeing the mistral, fleeing the sun's hot lash, Serene in scalloped waves, and sculptured sky The head feels no rain, fears no pitchy night, As o'er this ancient sea it races stars, Empty but for a dozen fatal words, Charmed by Mara, Mara my only love . . .

There follows an apostrophe to Mara."

Stencil nodded sagely, trying to fill in with Spanish cognates.

"Apparently," Mehemet concluded, "the head returned to Constantinople and its owner, the sly Mara meanwhile having slipped aboard a friendly galiot, disguised as a cabin boy. Back in Valletta at last she appeared in a vision to La Vallette, greeting him with the words "Shalom aleikum."

The joke being that shalom is Hebrew for peace and also the root for the Greek Salome, who beheaded St. John.

"Beware of Mara," the old sailor said then. "Guardian spirit of Xaghriet Mewwija. Whoever or whatever sees to such things condemned her to haunt the inhabited plain, as punishment for her show at Constantinople. About as useful as clapping any faithless wife in a chastity belt.

"She's restless. She will find ways to reach out from Valletta, a city named after a man, but of feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like the mons Veneris - you see? It is a chastity belt. But there are more ways than one to consummation, as she proved to the Sultan."

Now sprinting from the taxi through the rain to his hotel, Stencil did indeed feel a tug. Not so much at his loins - there had been company enough in Syracuse to anaesthetize that for a while - as at the wizened adolescent he was always apt to turn into: A little later, scrunched. up in an undersize tub, Stencil sang. It was a tune, in fact, from his "music-hall" days before the war, and primarily a way to relax: Every night to the Dog and Bell Young Stencil loved to go To dance on the tables and shout and sing And give 'is pals a show.

His little wife would stay to home 'Er 'eart all filled wiv pain But the next night sharp at a quarter to six 'E'd be down to the pub again. Until That one fine evening in the monf of May He announced to all as came wivin 'is sight You must get along wivout me boys I'm through wiv rowdiness and noise.

Cause Stencil's going 'ome tonight; [In palmier days a chorus of junior F.O. operatives would enter here singing]: 'Ere, wot's this? Wot's the matter wiv Stencil?

Wot's the reason for such a change of 'eart?

[To which Stencil would answer]: Gather round me closely lads And I the most forlorn of cads Will tell you all ere I depart: [Refrain]

I've just become the father to a bouncing baby boy And Herbert blithering Stencil is 'is name.

'E's a card And treats me wiv regard Though I 'awe to change 'is nappies all the same.

I don't know where we got the time to make 'im, Cause I've been coming 'ome drunk most every night, But 'e's cute and fat as a kidney pie And looks like 'is ma and that is why Stencil's going 'ome tonight (Just ask the milkman) Stencil's going 'ome tonight.

Out of the tub, dry, back in tweeds, Stencil stood at the window, looking out idly at the night.

At length came a knock at the door. It would be Maijstral. A quick twitch of eyeballs about the room to check for loose papers, anything compromising. Then to the door to admit the shipfitter who'd been described to him as looking like a stunted oak. Maijstral stood there neither aggressive nor humble, merely existing: whitening hair, unkempt mustaches. A nervous tic in the man's upper lip made the food particles trapped there vibrate disturbingly.

"He comes of noble family," Mehemet had revealed sadly. Stencil fell into the trap, asking which family. "Della Torre," Mehemet replied. Delatore, informer.

"What of the Dockyard people," Stencil asked.

"They will attack the Chronicle." (A grievance stemming from the strike of 1917; the newspaper had published a letter condemning the strike, but had given no equal time for a reply.) "There was a meeting a few minutes ago." Maijstral gave him a brief digest. Stencil knew all the objections. Workers from England got a colonial allowance: local yardbirds received only normal wages. Most would like to emigrate, after hearing glowing reports from the Maltese Labour Carps and other crews from abroad of higher pay outside Malta. But the rumor had started, somehow, that the government was refusing passports to keep workers on the island, against any future requirement. "What else can they do but emigrate?" Maijstral digressed: "With the war the number of Dockyard workers swelled to three times what it was before. Now, with Armistice, they're already laying off. There are only so many jobs here outside the Dockyard. Not enough to keep everyone eating."

Stencil wanted to ask: if you sympathize, why inform? He had used informers as a journeyman his tools and had never tried to understand their motives. Usually he supposed it was no more than a personal grudge, a desire for revenge. But he'd seen them before, torn: committed to some program or other, and still helping along its defeat. Would Maijstral be there in the van of the mob storming the Daily Malta Chronicle? Stencil did want to ask why, but could hardly. It being none of his affair.

Maijstral told him all he knew and left, expressionless as before. Stencil lit a pipe, consulted a map of Valletta, and five minutes later was strolling sprightly down Strada Reale, trailing Maijstral.

This was normal precaution. Of course, a certain double standard was at work; the feeling being "If he will inform for me he will also inform against me."

Ahead Maijstral now turned left, away from the lights of the main thoroughfare; down the hill toward Strada Stretta. Here were the borders of this city's Disreputable Quarter; Stencil looked around without much curiosity. It was all the same. What a warped idea of cities one got in this occupation! If no record of this century should survive except the personal logs of F.O. operatives, the historians of the future must reconstruct a curious landscape indeed.

Massive public buildings with characterless facades; networks of streets from which the civilian populace seems mysteriously absent. An aseptic administrative world, surrounded by an outlying vandal-country of twisting lanes, houses of prostitution, taverns; ill-lit except for rendezvous points, which stand out like sequins on an old and misused ball-gown.

"If there is any political moral to be found in this world," Stencil once wrote in his journal, "it is that we carry on the business of this century with an intolerable double vision. Right and Left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets by manipulated mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future.

"What of the real present the men-of-no-politics, the once-respectable Golden Mean? Obsolete; in any case, lost sight of. In a West of such extremes we can expect, at the very least, a highly 'alienated' populace within not many more years."

Strada Stretta; Strait Street. A passage meant, one felt, to be choked with mobs. Such was nearly the case: early evening had brought to it sailors ashore from H.M.S. Egmont and smaller men-o-war; seamen from Greek, Italian and North African merchantmen; and a supporting cast of shoeshine boys, pimps, hawkers of trinkets, confections, dirty pictures. Such were the topological deformities of this street that one seemed to walk through a succession of musichall stages, each demarcated by a curve or slope, each with a different set and acting company but all for the same low entertainment. Stencil, old soft-shoe artist, felt quite at home.

But he increased his pace through the thickening crowds; noticing with some anxiety that Maijstral had begun to disappear more and more frequently is the surgings of white and blue ahead.

To his right he became aware of a persistent image, flickering in and out of his field of vision. Tall, black, somehow conical. He risked a sidewise glance. What seemed to be a Greek pope or parish priest had been keeping abreast of him for some time. What was a man of God doing in this territory? Seeking perhaps to reclaim souls; but their glances touched and Stencil saw no merciful intention there.

"Chaire," muttered the priest.

"Chaire, Papa," said Stencil out of the side of his mouth, and tried to push ahead. He was restrained by the pope's ringed hand.

"One moment, Sidney," said the voice. "Come over here, out of this mob."

That voice was damned familiar. "Maijstral is going to the John Bull," said the pope. "We can catch up with him later." They proceeded down an alley to a small courtyard. In the center was a cistern, its rim adorned with a dark sunburst of sewage.

"Presto change-ho," and off came the holy man's black beard and calotte.

"Demivolt, you've grown crude in your old age. What sort of low comedy is this? What's the matter with Whitehall?"

"They're all right," sang Demivolt, hopping clumsily about the courtyard. "You're as much a surprise to me, you know."

"What about Moffit," Stencil said. "As long as they're staging a reunion of the Florence crew."

"Moffit caught it in Belgrade. I thought you'd heard." Demivolt removed the soutane and rolled his paraphernalia in it. Underneath he wore a suit of English tweed. After quickly recombing his hair and twirling his mustache, he looked no different from the Demivolt Stencil had last seen in '99. Except for more gray in the hair, a few more lines in the face.

"God knows who all they've sent to Valletta," said Demivolt cheerfully, as they returned to the street. "I suspect it's only another fad - F.O. gets these fits, you know. Like a spa or watering place. The Fashionable Place To Go seems to be different every season."

"Don't look at me. I have only a hint what's up. The natives here are as we say, restless. This chap Fairing - R.C. priest, Jesuit I suspect - thinks there will be a blood bath before very long."

"Yes, I've seen Fairing. If his paycheck is coming out of the same pocket as ours, he shows it not."

"Oh I doubt, I doubt," Stencil said vaguely, wanting to talk about old times.

"Maijstral always sits out in front; we'll go across the street." They took seats at the Cafe Phoenicia, Stencil with his back to the street. Briefly, over Barcelona beer each filled the other in on the two decades between the Vheissu affair and here, voices monotone against the measured frenzy of the street.

"Odd how paths cross."

Stencil nodded.

"Are we meant to keep tabs on one another? Or were we meant to meet."

"Meant?" too quickly. "By Whitehall, of course."

"Of course."

As we get older we skew more toward the past. Stencil had thus become partially lost to the street and the yardbird across it. The ill-starred year in Florence - Demivolt having popped up again - now came back to him, each unpleasant detail quivering brightly in the dark room of his spy's memory. He hoped devoutly that Demivolt's appearance was merely chance; and not a signal for the reactivation of the same chaotic and Situational forces at work in Florence twenty years ago.

For Fairing's prediction of massacre, and its attendant politics, had all the earmarks of a Situation-in-the-process-of-becoming. He had changed none of his ideas on The Situation. Had even written an article, pseudonymous, and sent it to Punch: "The Situation as an N-Dimensional Mishmash." It was rejected.

"Short of examining the entire history of each individual participating;" Stencil wrote, "short of anatomizing each soul, what hope has anyone of understanding a Situation? It may be that the civil servants of the future will not be accredited unless they first receive a degree in brain surgery."

He indeed was visited by dreams in which he had shrunk to submicroscopic size and entered a brain, strolling in through some forehead's pore and into the cul-de-sac of a sweat gland. Struggling out of a jungle of capillaries there he would finally reach bone; down then through the skull, dura mater, arachnoid, pia mater to the fissure-floored sea of cerebrospinal fluid. And there he would float before final assault on the gray hemispheres: the soul.

Nodes of Ranvier, sheath of Schwann, vein of Galen; tiny Stencil wandered all night long among the silent, immense lightning bursts of nerve-impulses crossing a synapse; the waving dendrites, the nerve-autobahns chaining away to God knew where in receding clusters of end-bulbs. A stranger in this landscape, it never occurred to him to ask whose brain he was in. Perhaps his own. They were fever dreams: the kind where one is given an impossibly complex problem to solve, and keeps chasing dead ends, following random promises, frustrated at every turn, until the fever breaks.

Assume, then, a prospect of chaos in the streets, joined by every group on the island with a grudge. This would include nearly everyone but the OAG and his staff. Doubtless each would think only of his own immediate desires. But mob violence, like tourism, is a kind of communion. By its special magic a large number of lonely souls, however heterogeneous, can share the common property of opposition to what is. And like an epidemic or earthquake the politics of the street can overtake even the most stable-appearing of governments; like death it cuts through and gathers in all ranks of society.

- The poor would seek revenge against the millers, who allegedly profiteered in bread during the war.

- The civil servants would be out looking for a fairer shake: advance notice of open competition, higher salaries, no more racial discrimination.

- The tradesmen would want repeal of the Succession and Donation Duties Ordinance. This tax was meant to bring in 5000 pounds yearly; but the actual assessments amounted to 30,000 pounds.

- Bolshevists among the yardbirds could only be satisfied with the abolition of all private property, sacred or profane.

- The anti-colonial extremists would seek of course to sweep England from the Palace forever. Damn the consequences. Though probably Italy would enter on the next crest and be even harder to dislodge. There would be blood ties, then.

- The Abstentionists wanted a new constitution.

- The Mizzists - comprising three clubs: Giovine Malta, Dante Alighieri, Il Comitato Patriottico - sought (a) Italian hegemony in Malta, (b) aggrandizement for the leader, Dr. Enrico Mizzi.

- The Church - here perhaps Stencil's C. of E. stuffiness colored an otherwise objective view - wanted only what the Church always desires during times of political crisis. She awaited a Third Kingdom. Violent overthrow is a Christian phenomenon.

The matter of a Paraclete's coming, the comforter, the dove; the tongues of flame, the gift of tongues: Pentecost. Third Person of the Trinity. None of it was implausible to Stencil. The Father had come and gone. In political terms, the Father was the Prince; the single leader, the dynamic figure whose virtu used to be a determinant of history. This had degenerated to the Son, genius of the liberal love-feast which had produced 1848 and lately the overthrow of the Czars. What next? What Apocalypse?

Especially on Malta, a matriarchal island. Would the Paraclete be also a mother? Comforter, true. But what gift of communication could ever come from a woman . . .

Enough, lad, he told himself. You're in dangerous waters. Come out, come out.

"Don't turn around now," Demivolt broke in conversationally, "but it's she. At Maijstral's table."

When Stencil did turn around he saw only a vague figure in an evening cape, her face shadowed by an elaborate, probably Parisian bonnet.