“The five high officials remained perfectly impassive, but the two stenographers seemed somewhat taken by surprise, and one of them whispered, ‘Did you say fifteen seconds, sir?’

“‘He said seventeen,’ growled Sir John Pendergest, in a voice that seemed to come out of a sepulchre.

“‘Who sighted the gun?’

“‘I did, sir.’

“‘Why did not the regular gunner do that?’

“‘He did, sir, but I also took observations, and raised the muzzle .000327 of an inch.’

“‘Was your gunner inaccurate, then, to that extent?’

“‘No, sir, but I had weighed the ammunition, and found it short by two ounces and thirty-seven grains.’

“I must not bore you with all the questions and answers. I merely give these as samples. They questioned me about the recoil, the action of the gun, the state of this, that and the other after firing, and luckily I was able to answer to a dot every query put to me. At the finish one of the judges asked me to give in my own words my opinion of the gun. Admiral Sir John glared at him as he put this question, for of course to any expert the answers I had furnished, all taken together, gave an accurate verdict on the gun, assuming my statements to have been correct, which I maintain they were. However, as Sir John made no verbal comment, I offered my opinion as tersely as I could.

“‘Thank you, Lieutenant Drummond,’ rumbled Sir John in his deep voice, as if he were pronouncing sentence, and, my testimony completed, the Committee rose.

“I was out in the street before Billy Richardson overtook me, and then he called himself to my attention by a resounding slap on the shoulder.

“‘Alan, my boy,’ he cried, ‘you have done yourself proud. Your fortune’s made.’

“‘As how?’ I asked, shaking him by the hand.

“‘Why, we’ve been for weeks holding an inquiry on this blessed gun, and the question is whether or not a lot more of them are to be made. You know what an opinionated beast Old Grouch is. Well, my boy, you have corroborated his opinion of the gun in every detail. He is such a brow-beating, tyrannical brute that the rest of the Committee would rather like to go against him if they dared, but you have put a spoke in their wheel. Why, Sir John never said “thank you” to a human being since he was born until twenty-seven minutes and fifteen seconds after eleven this morning, as you would have put it,’ and at the time of writing this letter this surmise of Billy’s appears to be justified, for the tape in the club just now announced that the Committee has unanimously decided in favor of the gun, and adds that this is regarded as a triumph for the chairman, Admiral Sir John Pendergest, with various letters after his name.

“Dear Miss Amhurst, this letter, as I feared, has turned out intolerably long, and like our first conversation, it is all about myself. But then, you see, you are the only one on the other side of the water to whom I have confided my selfish worries, and I believe you to be so kind-hearted that I am sure you will not censure me for this once exceeding the limits of friendly correspondence. Having been deeply depressed during all the previous long days, the sudden reaction urges me to go out into Pall Mall, fling my cap in the air, and whoop, which action is quite evidently a remnant of my former cow-boy aspirations. Truth to tell, the Russian business seems already forgotten, except by my stout old Captain on the ‘Consternation,’ or my Uncle. The strenuous Sir John has had me haled across the ocean merely to give testimony, lasting about thirty-five minutes, when with a little patience he might have waited till the ‘Consternation’ herself arrived, or else have cabled for us to try the gun at Bar Harbor. I suppose, however, that after my unfortunate contretemps with Russia our government was afraid I’d chip a corner off the United States, and that they’d have to pay for it. So perhaps after all it was greater economy to bring me across on the liner ‘Enthusiana.’

“By the way, I learned yesterday that the ‘Consternation’ has been ordered home, and so I expect to see Jack Lamont before many days are past. The ship will be paid off at Portsmouth, and then I suppose he and I will have our freedom for six months. I am rather looking forward to Jack’s cooking me some weird but tasteful Russian dishes when we reach his blacksmith’s shop in St. Petersburg. If I get on in Russia as I hope and expect, I shall spend the rest of my leave over in the States. I saw very little indeed of that great country, and am extremely anxious to see more. When one is on duty aboard ship one can only take very short excursions ashore. I should like to visit Niagara. It seems ridiculous that one should have been all along the American coast from Canada to New York, and never have got far enough inland to view the great Falls.

“Russia is rather dilatory in her methods, but I surely should know within two or three weeks whether I am going to succeed or not. If not, then there is no use in waiting there. I shall try to persuade the Prince to accompany me to America. During the weeks I am waiting in St. Petersburg I shall continually impress upon him the utter futility of a life which has not investigated the great electrical power plant at Niagara Falls. And then he is interested in the educational system of the United States. While we were going to the station early that morning he told me that the United States educational system must be the most wonderful in the world, because he found that your friend, Miss Katherine Kempt, knew more about electricity, metallurgy, natural philosophy and a great number of other things he is interested in, than all the ladies he has met in Europe put together. He thinks that’s the right sort of education for girls, and all this rather astonished me, because, although your friend was most charming, she said nothing during my very short acquaintance with her to lead me to suspect that she had received a scientific training.

“Dear Miss Amhurst, I am looking every day for a letter from you, but none has yet been received by the Admiralty, who, when they get one, will forward it to whatever part of the world I happen to be in.”

CHAPTER VIII —“WHEN JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME”

A SUMMER hotel that boasts a thousand acres of forest, more or less, which serve the purposes of a back-yard, affords its guests, even if all its multitude of rooms are occupied, at least one spot for each visitor to regard as his or her favorite nook. So large an extent of woodland successfully defies landscape gardening. It insists on being left alone, and its very immensity raises a financial barrier against trimly-kept gravel walks. There were plenty of landscape garden walks in the immediate vicinity of the hotel, and some of them ambitiously penetrated into the woods, relapsing from the civilization of beaten gravel into a primitive thicket trail, which, however, always led to some celebrated bit of picturesqueness: a waterfall, or a pulpit rock upstanding like a tower, or the fancied resemblance of a human face carved by Nature from the cliff, or a view-point jutting out over the deep chasm of the valley, which usually supported a rustic summer house or pavilion where unknown names were carved on the woodwork—the last resort of the undistinguished to achieve immortality by means of a jack-knife.

Dorothy discovered a little Eden of her own, to which no discernible covert-way led, for it was not conspicuous enough to obtain mention in the little gratis guide which the hotel furnished—a pamphlet on coated paper filled with half-tone engravings, and half-extravagant eulogies of what it proclaimed to be, an earthly paradise, with the rates by the day or week given on the cover page to show on what terms this paradise might be enjoyed.

Dorothy’s bower was green, and cool, and crystal, the ruggedness of the rocks softened by the wealth of foliage. A very limpid spring, high up and out of sight among the leaves, sent its waters tinkling down the face of the cliff, ever filling a crystal-clear lakelet at the foot, which yet was never full. Velvety and beautiful as was the moss surrounding this pond, it was nevertheless too damp to form an acceptable couch for a human being, unless that human being were brave enough to risk the rheumatic inconveniences which followed Rip Van Winkle’s long sleep in these very regions, so Dorothy always carried with her from the hotel a feather-weight, spider’s-web hammock, which she deftly slung between two saplings, their light suppleness giving an almost pneumatic effect to this fairy net spread in a fairy glen; and here the young woman swayed luxuriously in the relaxing delights of an indolence still too new to have become commonplace or wearisome.

She always expected to read a great deal in the hammock, but often the book slipped unnoticed to the moss, and she lay looking upward at the little discs of blue sky visible through the checkering maze of green leaves. One afternoon, deserted by the latest piece of fictional literature, marked in plain figures on the paper cover that protected the cloth binding, one dollar and a half, but sold at the department stores for one dollar and eight cents, Dorothy lay half-hypnotized by the twinkling of the green leaves above her, when she heard a sweet voice singing a rollicking song of the Civil War, and so knew that Katherine was thus heralding her approach.

“‘When Johnny comes marching home again,
                   Hurrah! Hurrah!
    We’ll give him a hearty welcome then,
                   Hurrah! Hurrah!
    The men will cheer, the boys will shout,
    The ladies they will all turn out,
    And we’ll all feel gay
         When Johnny comes marching home.’”

Dorothy went still further back into the history of her country, and gave a faint imitation of an Indian war-whoop, to let the oncomer know she was welcome, and presently Katherine burst impetuously through the dense undergrowth.

“So here you are, Miss Laziness,” she cried.

“Here I am, Miss Energy, or shall I call you Miss-applied Energy? Katherine, you have walked so fast that you are quite red in the face.”

“It isn’t exertion, it’s vexation. Dorothy, I have had a perfectly terrible time. It is the anxiety regarding the proper discipline of parents that is spoiling the nervous system of American children. Train them up in the way they should go, and when they are old they do depart from it. There’s nothing more awful than to own parents who think they possess a sense of humor. Thank goodness mother has none!”

“Then it is your father who has been misbehaving?”

“Of course it is. He treats the most serious problem of a woman’s life as if it were the latest thing in ‘Life.’”

Dorothy sat up in the hammock.

“The most important problem? That means a proposal. Goodness gracious, Kate, is that insurance man back here again?”

“What insurance man?”

“Oh, heartless and heart-breaking Katherine, is there another? Sit here in the hammock beside me, and tell me all about it.”

“No, thank you,” refused Katherine. “I weigh more than you, and I cannot risk my neck through the collapse of that bit of gossamer. I must take care of myself for his sake.”

“Then it is the life insurance man whose interests you are consulting? Have you taken out a policy with him?”

“Dear me, you are nearly as bad as father, but not quite so funny. You are referring to Mr. Henderson, I presume. A most delightful companion for a dance, but, my dear Dorothy, life is not all glided out to the measures of a Strauss waltz.”

“True; quite undisputable, Kate, and them sentiments do you credit. Who is the man?”

“The human soul,” continued Katherine seriously, “aspires to higher things than the society columns of the New York Sunday papers, and the frivolous chatter of an overheated ball-room.”

“Again you score, Kate, and are rising higher and higher in my estimation. I see it all now. Those solemn utterances of yours point directly toward Hugh Miller’s ‘Old Red Sandstone’ and works of that sort, and now I remember your singing ‘When Johnny comes marching home.’ I therefore take it that Jack Lamont has arrived.”

“He has not.”

“Then he has written to you?”

“He has not.”

“Oh, well, I give it up. Tell me the tragedy your own way.”

For answer Katherine withdrew her hands from behind her, and offered to her friend a sheet of paper she had been holding. Dorothy saw blazoned on the top of it a coat-of-arms, and underneath it, written in words of the most formal nature, was the information that Prince Ivan Lermontoff presented his warmest regards to Captain Kempt, U.S.N., retired, and begged permission to pay his addresses to the Captain’s daughter Katherine. Dorothy looked up from the document, and her friend said calmly:

“You see, they need another Katherine in Russia.”

“I hope she won’t be like a former one, if all I’ve read of her is true. This letter was sent to your father, then?”

“It was, and he seems to regard it as a huge joke. Said he was going to cable his consent, and as the ‘Consternation’ has sailed away, he would try to pick her up by wireless telegraphy, and secure the young man that way: suggests that I shall have a lot of new photographs taken, so that he can hand them out to the reporters when they call for particulars. Sees in his mind’s eye, he says, a huge black-lettered heading in the evening papers: ‘A Russian Prince captures one of our fairest daughters,’ and then insultingly hinted that perhaps, after all, it was better not to use my picture, as it might not bear out the ‘fair daughter’ fiction of the heading.”

“Yes, Kate, I can see that such treatment of a vital subject must have been very provoking.”

“Provoking? I should say it was! He pretended he was going to tack this letter up on the notice-board in the hall of the hotel, so that every one might know what guests of distinction the Matterhorn House held. But the most exasperating feature of the situation is that this letter has been lying for days and days at our cottage in Bar Harbor. I am quite certain that I left instructions for letters to be forwarded, but, as nothing came, I telegraphed yesterday to the people who have taken our house, and now a whole heap of belated correspondence has arrived, with a note from our tenant saying he did not know our address. You will see at the bottom of the note that the Prince asks my father to communicate with him by sending a reply to the ‘Consternation’ at New York, but now the ‘Consternation’ has sailed for England, and poor John must have waited and waited in vain.”

“Write care of the ‘Consternation’ in England.”

“But Jack told me that the ‘Consternation’ paid off as soon as she arrived, and probably he will have gone to Russia.”

“If you address him at the Admiralty in London, the letter will be forwarded wherever he happens to be.”

“How do you know?”

“I have heard that such is the case.”

“But you’re not sure, and I want to be certain.”

“Are you really in love with him, Kate?”

“Of course I am. You know that very well, and I don’t want any stupid misapprehension to arise at the beginning, such as allows a silly author to carry on his story to the four-hundredth page of such trash as this,” and she gently touched with her toe the unoffending volume which lay on the ground beneath the hammock.

“Then why not adopt your father’s suggestion, and cable? It isn’t you who are cabling, you know.”

“I couldn’t consent to that. It would look as if we were in a hurry, wouldn’t it?”

“Then let me cable.”

“You? To whom?”

“Hand me up that despised book, Kate, and I’ll write my cablegram on the fly-leaf. If you approve of the message, I’ll go to the hotel, and send it at once.”

Katherine gave her the book, and lent the little silver pencil which hung jingling, with other trinkets, on the chain at her belt. Dorothy scribbled a note, tore out the fly-leaf, and presented it to Katherine, who read:

“Alan Drummond, Bluewater Club, Pall Mall, London. Tell Lamont that his letter to Captain Kempt was delayed, and did not reach the Captain until to-day. Captain Kempt’s reply will be sent under cover to you at your club. Arrange for forwarding if you leave England.

“Dorothy Amhurst.”

When Katherine finished reading she looked up at her friend, and exclaimed: “Well!” giving that one word a meaning deep as the clear pool on whose borders she stood.

Dorothy’s face reddened as if the sinking western sun was shining full upon it.

“You write to one another, then?”

“Yes.”

“And is it a case of—”

“No; friendship.”

“Sure it is nothing more than that?”

Dorothy shook her head.

“Dorothy, you are a brick; that’s what you are. You will do anything to help a friend in trouble.”

Dorothy smiled.

“I have so few friends that whatever I can do for them will not greatly tax any capabilities I may possess.”

“Nevertheless, Dorothy, I thoroughly appreciate what you have done. You did not wish any one to know you were corresponding with him, and yet you never hesitated a moment when you saw I was anxious.”

“Indeed, Kate, there was nothing to conceal. Ours is a very ordinary exchange of letters. I have only had two: one at Bar Harbor a few days after he left, and another longer one since we came to the hotel, written from England.”

“Did the last one go to Bar Harbor, too? How came you to receive it when we did not get ours?”

“It did not go to Bar Harbor. I gave him the address of my lawyers in New York, and they forwarded it to me here. Lieutenant Drummond was ordered home by some one who had authority to do so, and received the message while he was sitting with me on the night of the ball. He had got into trouble with Russia. There had been an investigation, and he was acquitted. I saw that he was rather worried over the order home and I expressed my sympathy as well as I could, hoping everything would turn out for the best. He asked if he might write and let me know the outcome, and, being interested, I quite willingly gave him permission, and my address. The letter I received was all about a committee meeting at the Admiralty in which he took part. He wrote to me from the club in Pall Mall to which I have addressed this cablegram.”

There was a sly dimple in Katherine’s cheeks as she listened to this straightforward explanation, and the faintest possible suspicion of a smile flickered at the corner of her mouth. She murmured, rather than sang:

“‘A pair of lovesick maidens we.’”

“One, if you please,” interrupted Dorothy.

“‘Lovesick all against our will—‘”

“Only one.”

“‘Twenty years hence we shan’t be A pair of lovesick maidens still.’”

“I am pleased to note,” said Dorothy demurely, “that the letter written by the Prince to your father has brought you back to the Gilbert and Sullivan plane again, although in this fairy glen you should quote from Iolanthe rather than from Patience.”

“Yes, Dot, this spot might do for a cove in the ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ only we’re too far from the sea. But, to return to the matter in hand, I don’t think there will be any need to send that cablegram. I don’t like the idea of a cablegram, anyhow. I will return to the hotel, and dictate to my frivolous father a serious composition quite as stately and formal as that received from the Prince. He will address it and seal it, and then if you are kind enough to enclose it in the next letter you send to Lieutenant Drummond, it will be sure to reach Jack Lamont ultimately.”

Dorothy sprang from the hammock to the ground.

“Oh,” she cried eagerly, “I’ll go into the hotel with you and write my letter at once.”

Katherine smiled, took her by the arm, and said:

“You’re a dear girl, Dorothy. I’ll race you to the hotel, as soon as we are through this thicket.”

CHAPTER IX —IN RUSSIA

THE next letter Dorothy received bore Russian stamps, and was dated at the black-smith’s shop, Bolshoi Prospect, St. Petersburg. After a few preliminaries, which need not be set down here, Drummond continued:

“The day after Jack arrived in London, there being nothing whatever to detain him in England, we set off together for St. Petersburg, and are now domiciled above his blacksmith shop. We are not on the fashionable side of the river, but our street is wide, and a very short walk brings us to a bridge which, being crossed, allows us to wander among palaces if we are so disposed. We have been here only four days, yet a good deal has already been accomplished. The influence of the Prince has smoothed my path for me. Yesterday I had an audience with a very important personage in the Foreign Office, and to-day I have seen an officer of high rank in the navy. The Prince warns me to mention no names, because letters, even to a young lady, are sometimes opened before they reach the person to whom they are addressed. These officials who have been kind enough to receive me are gentlemen so polished that I feel quite uncouth in their presence. I am a little shaky in my French, and feared that my knowledge of that language might not carry me through, but both of these officials speak English much better than I do, and they seemed rather pleased I had voluntarily visited St. Petersburg to explain that no discourtesy was meant in the action I had so unfortunately taken on the Baltic, and they gave me their warmest assurances they would do what they could to ease the tension between our respective countries. It seems that my business here will be finished much sooner than I expected, and then I am off on the quickest steamer for New York, in the hope of seeing Niagara Falls. I have met with one disappointment, however. Jack says he cannot possibly accompany me to the United States. I have failed to arouse in him the faintest interest about the electric works at Niagara. He insists that he is on the verge of a most important discovery, the nature of which he does not confide in me. I think he is working too hard, for he is looking quite haggard and overdone, but that is always the way with him. He throws himself heart and soul into any difficulty that confronts him, and works practically night and day until he has solved it.

“Yesterday he gave the whole street a fright. I had just returned from the Foreign Office, and had gone upstairs to my room, when there occurred an explosion that shook the building from cellar to roof, and sent the windows of our blacksmith’s shop rattling into the street. Jack had a most narrow escape, but is unhurt, although that fine beard of his was badly singed. He has had it shaved off, and now sports merely a mustache, looking quite like a man from New York. You wouldn’t recognize him if you met him on Broadway. The carpenters and glaziers are at work to-day repairing the damage. I told Jack that if this sort of thing kept on I’d be compelled to patronize another hotel, but he says it won’t happen again. It seems he was trying to combine two substances by adding a third, and, as I understood him, the mixing took place with unexpected suddenness. He has endeavored to explain to me the reaction, as he calls it, which occurred, but I seem to have no head for chemistry, and besides, if I am to be blown through the roof some of these days it will be no consolation to me when I come down upon the pavement outside to know accurately the different elements which contributed to my elevation. Jack is very patient in trying to instruct me, but he could not resist the temptation of making me ashamed by saying that your friend, Miss Katherine Kempt, would have known at once the full particulars of the reaction. Indeed, he says, she warned him of the disaster, by marking a passage in a book she gave him which foreshadowed this very thing. She must be a most remarkable young woman, and it shows how stupid I am that I did not in the least appreciate this fact when in her company.”

The next letter was received a week later. He was getting on swimmingly, both at the Foreign Office and at the Russian Admiralty. All the officials he had met were most courteous and anxious to advance his interests. He wrote about the misapprehensions held in England regarding Russia, and expressed his resolve to do what he could when he returned to remove these false impressions.

“Of course,” he went on, “no American or Englishman can support or justify the repressive measures so often carried out ruthlessly by the Russian police. Still, even these may be exaggerated, for the police have to deal with a people very much different from our own. It is rather curious that at this moment I am in vague trouble concerning the police. I am sure this place is watched, and I am also almost certain that my friend Jack is being shadowed. He dresses like a workman; his grimy blouse would delight the heart of his friend Tolstoi, but he is known to be a Prince, and I think the authorities imagine he is playing up to the laboring class, whom they despise. I lay it all to that unfortunate explosion, which gathered the police about us as if they had sprung from the ground. There was an official examination, of course, and Jack explained, apparently to everybody’s satisfaction, exactly how he came to make the mistake that resulted in the loss of his beard and his windows. I don’t know exactly how to describe the feeling of uneasiness which has come over me. At first sight this city did not strike me as so very much different from New York or London, and meeting, as I did, so many refined gentlemen in high places, I had come to think St. Petersburg was after all very much like Paris, or Berlin, or Rome. But it is different, and the difference makes itself subtly felt, just as the air in some coast towns of Britain is relaxing, and in others bracing. In these towns a man doesn’t notice the effect at first, but later on he begins to feel it, and so it is here in St. Petersburg. Great numbers of workmen pass down our street. They all seem to know who the Prince is, and the first days we were here, they saluted him with a deference which I supposed was due to his rank, in spite of the greasy clothes he wore. Since the explosion an indefinable change has come over these workmen. They salute the Prince still when we meet them on the street, but there is in their attitude a certain sly sympathy, if I may so term it; a bond of camaraderie which is implied in their manner rather than expressed. Jack says this is all fancy on my part, but I don’t think it is. These men imagine that Prince Ivan Lermontoff, who lives among them and dresses like them, is concocting some explosive which may yet rid them of the tyrants who make their lives so unsafe. All this would not matter, but what does matter is the chemical reaction, as I believe Jack would term it, which has taken place among the authorities. The authorities undoubtedly have their spies among the working-men, and know well what they are thinking about and talking about. I do not believe they were satisfied with the explanations Jack gave regarding the disaster. I have tried to impress upon Jack that he must be more careful in walking about the town, and I have tried to persuade him, after work, to dress like the gentleman he is, but he laughs at my fears, and assures me that I have gone from one extreme to the other in my opinion of St. Petersburg. First I thought it was like all other capitals; now I have swung too far in the other direction. He says the police of St. Petersburg would not dare arrest him, but I’m not so sure of that. A number of things occur to me, as usual, too late. Russia, with her perfect secret service system, must know that Prince Lermontoff has been serving in the British Navy. They know he returned to St. Petersburg, avoids all his old friends, and is brought to their notice by an inexplicable explosion, and they must be well aware, also, that he is in the company of the man who fired the shell at the rock in the Baltic, and that he himself served on the offending cruiser.

“As to my own affairs, I must say they are progressing slowly but satisfactorily; nevertheless, if Jack would leave St. Petersburg, and come with me to London or New York, where he could carry on his experiments quite as well, or even better than here, I should depart at once, even if I jeopardized my own prospects.”

The next letter, some time later, began:

“Your two charming notes to me arrived here together. It is very kind of you to write to a poor exile and cheer him in his banishment. I should like to see that dell where you have swung your hammock. Beware of Hendrick Hudson’s men, so delightfully written of by Washington Irving. If they offer you anything to drink, don’t you take it. Think how disastrous it would be to all your friends if you went to sleep in that hammock for twenty years. It’s the Catskills I want to see now rather than Niagara Falls. Your second letter containing the note from Captain Kempt to Jack was at once delivered to him. What on earth has the genial Captain written to effect such a transformation in my friend? He came to me that evening clothed in his right mind; in evening rig-out, with his decorations upon it, commanded me to get into my dinner togs, took me in a carriage across the river to the best restaurant St. Petersburg affords, and there we had a champagne dinner in which he drank to America and all things American. Whether it was the enthusiasm produced by Captain Kempt’s communication, or the effect of the champagne, I do not know, but he has reconsidered his determination not to return to the United States, and very soon we set out together for the west.

“I shall be glad to get out of this place. We were followed to the restaurant, I am certain, and I am equally certain that at the next table two police spies were seated, and these two shadowed us in a cab until we reached our blacksmith’s shop. It is a humiliating confession to make, but somehow the atmosphere of this place has got on my nerves, and I shall be glad to turn my back on it. Jack pooh-poohs the idea that he is in any danger. Even the Governor of St. Petersburg, he says, dare not lay a finger on him, and as for the Chief of Police, he pours scorn on that powerful official. He scouts the idea that he is being watched, and all-in-all is quite humorous at my expense, saying that my state of mind is more fitting for a schoolgirl than for a stalwart man over six feet in height. One consolation is that Jack now has become as keen for America as I am. I expect that the interview arranged for me to-morrow with a great government official will settle my own business finally one way or another. A while ago I was confident of success, but the repeated delays have made me less optimistic now, although the gentle courtesy of those in high places remains undiminished.