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to a few it would create permanent benefits and security and peace for multitudes, like the numerous small, frequently salutary, crimes, by which we effected the expansion of the United States.

If Mr. Wilson were to commission me to write, for use in schools, a new Machiavelli, the first sentence would be, "Never commit for temporary profit any crime of permanent evil effect." Of two crimes, choose the little one. It is a golden moment to induce France and England to give up their Chinese spheres of influence. Mr. Lansing even says that Mr. Balfour said that England is opposed to spheres of influence.

Negotiations might be slightly embarrassed by the fact that Russian revolutionists in eastern Siberia are now the subject of punitive expeditions by Japanese generals, and that the prestige of America in the far East during the last few weeks has become about equivalent to that of the hairy Aino. It is the duty of rulers to overcome difficulties or circumvent them, and not, at the first hint of opposition, to take cover in the shelter of some great crime.

European dominion of Asian peoples has here and there been beneficent. The French diverted the King of Annam from boiling his wives for lunch, and the English stopped King Thebaw from

roasting his wives in curry; but there is grave doubt as to whether Burma is better off than it was.

In the nineteenth century we called ourselves Caucasians, and talked about the white man's burden, and firmly pretended to believe that everybody would be improved by accepting our rulership. One of the many benefits resulting from the Great War and our great victory is that we have learned modesty. We have learned that we are not able to put our own houses in order, and that most of us are savages without even a veneer of morals. No Frenchman or Englishman any longer pretends that it will be for the benefit of any other human being to be ruled over by him any more than by Sir John Hawkins or Leopold II. If he now plans for conquest and mandatories, he says frankly it is because he needs the money.

In the nineteenth century we devised the partition of China, pretending that it was in the interest of progress. We now doubt whether peace or progress will ever again be our portion. Our highest ambition should be, the highest achievement of our statesmanship would be, to leave eastern Asia as happy as it was before it knew us. Our brightest Oriental dream should be of Japan and China, expanding each into its own vacant spaces, and growing rich as peaceably as the United States and Canada.

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"Oho, you virtuous pretty ladies! What all you value is such matters as those cups' "

H, but they are beyond all praise," said Cynthia Allonby, enraptured, "and certainly you should have presented them to the queen."

"Her Majesty already possesses a cup of that ware," replied Lord Pevensey. "It was one of her New Year's gifts from Robert Cecil. Hers is, I believe, not quite so fine as either of yours; but, then, they tell me, there is not the like of this pair in England, nor indeed on the hither side of Cataia."

He set the two pieces of Chinese pottery upon the shelves in the south corner of the room. These cups were of that sea-green tint called celadon, with a very wonderful glow and radiance. Such oddities were the last vogue at court in this year of grace 1593, and Cynthia could not but speculate as to what monstrous sum Lord Pevensey had paid for this, his latest gift to her.

Now he turned, smiling, a really superb creature in his blue and gold.

"I had to-day another message from the queen."

"George," Cynthia said, with fond concern, "it frightens me to see you thus foolhardy in tempting alike the queen's anger and the plague."

"Eh, as goes the plague, it spares nine out of ten," he answered lightly. "The queen, I grant you, is another pair of sleeves, for an irritated Tudor spares nobody."

But Cynthia Allonby kept silence and did not exactly smile while she appraised her famous young kinsman. She was flattered by, and a little afraid of, the gay self-confidence which led anybody to take such chances. Two

weeks ago it was that the painted, terrible old queen had named Lord Pevensey to go straightway into France, where, rumor had it, King Henry was preparing to renounce the reformed religion and making his peace with the pope; and for two weeks Pevensey had lingered, on one pretense or another, at his house in London, with the plague creeping about the city like an invisible, incalculable flame, and the queen asking questions at Windsor. Every day Pevensey came to the Marquis of Falmouth's lodging at Deptford, and every day Lord Pevensey pointed out to the marquis's daughter that Pevensey did not intend to go into France, for nobody could foretell how long a stay, as a bachelor. Certainly it was all very flattering.

"Yes, and you would be an excellent match," said Cynthia, aloud, "if that were all. And yet, what must I reasonably expect in marrying, sir, the famous Earl of Pevensey?"

"A great deal of love and petting, my dear. And if there were anything else to which you had a fancy, I would get it for you."

Her glance went to those lovely cups and lingered fondly.

"Yes, dear Master Generosity, if it could be purchased or manufactured, you would get it for me."

"If it exists, I will get it for you," he declared.

"I think that it exists, but I am not learned enough to know what it is. George, if I married you, I would have money and fine clothes and soft hours, and many lackeys to wait on me, and honor from all men. And you would be kind to me, I know, when you re

turned from the day's work at Windsor or Holyrood or the Louvre. But do you not see that I would always be to you only a rather costly luxury, like those cups, which the queen's minister could afford to keep for his hours of leisure?", He answered:

"You are all in all to me. You know it. Oh, very well do you know and abuse your power, you adorable and lovely baggage, who have kept me dancing attendance for a fortnight without ever giving me an honest yes or no. Yet I may no longer shirk the queen's business; no, not even to amuse you, my dear."

"You said you had heard from heragain?"

"I had this morning my orders, under Gloriana's own fair hand, either to depart to-morrow into France or else to come to-morrow to Windsor. I need not say that in the circumstances I consider France the more wholesome."

Now the girl's voice was hurt and wistful.

"So for the thousandth time is it proven the queen's business means more to you than I do. Yes, certainly it is just as I said, George."

He observed, unruffled:

"My dear, I scent unreason. This is a high matter. If the French King compounds with Rome, it means war for Protestant England. Even you must see that."

She replied sadly:

"Yes, even I! Oh, certainly, my Lord, even a half-witted child of seventeen can perceive as much as that."

"I was not speaking of half-witted persons, as I remember. Well, it chances that I am honored by the friendship of our gallant Béarnais, and am supposed to have some claim upon him, thanks to my good fortune last year in saving his life from the assassin Barrière. It chances that I may perhaps become, under Providence, the instrument of preserving my fellowcountrymen from much grief and trumpet-sounding and throat-cutting. Instead of pursuing that chance two weeks ago as was my duty, I have dangled at your apron-strings in the vain hope of softening the most variable and hardest heart in the world.

Now, clearly, I have not the right to do that any longer."

She admired the ennobled, the slightly rapt look which, she knew, denoted that George Bulmer was doing his duty as he saw it, even in her disappointment.

"No, you have not the right. You are wedded to your statecraft, to your patriotism, to your self-advancement, or christen it what you will. You are wedded, at all events, to your man's business. You have not the time for such trifles as giving a maid that foolish and lovely sort of wooing to which every maid looks forward in her heart of hearts. Indeed, for you to take a wife at all would be a kind of infidelity. Why, do you not see, George, even now, that the woman you marry will always come second to your real love?"

"In my heart, dear sophist, you will always come first. But it is not permitted that any loyal gentleman devote every hour of his life to sighing and making sonnets, and to the general solacing of a maid's loneliness in this dull little Deptford. Nor would you, I am sure, desire me to do so."

"I hardly know what I desire," she told him, ruefully. "But I know that when you talk of your man's busness, I am lonely and chilled and far away from you. And I know that I cannot understand more than half your fine, high notions about duty and patriotism and serving England and so on," the girl declared, and she flung wide her lovely little hands in a despairing gesture. "I admire you, sir, when you talk of England. It makes you handsomer —yes, even handsomer—somehow. But all the while I am remembering that England is just an ordinary island inhabitate by a number of ordinary persons, for the most of whom I have no particular feeling one way or the other."

Pevensey looked at her for a while with queer tenderness. Then he smiled.

"No, I could not quite make you understand, my dear. But, ah, why fuddle that quaint little brain by trying to understand such matters as lie without your realm? For a woman's kingdom is the home, my dear, and her throne is in the heart of her husband."

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"All this is but another way of saying your lordship would have us cups upon a shelf," she pointed out, "in readiness for your leisure."

He shrugged, said "Nonsense!" and began more lightly to talk of other matters. Thus and thus he would do in France, such and such trinkets he would fetch back, "as toys for the most whimsical, the loveliest, and the most obstinate child in all the world," he phrazed it. And they would be married, Pevensey declared, in September; nor, he gaily said, did he propose to have any further argument about it. Children should be seen-the proverb was dusty, but it particularly applied to pretty children.

Cynthia let him talk. She was just a little afraid of his self-confidence, and of this tall nobleman's habit of getting what he wanted in the end; but she dispiritedly felt that Pevensey had failed her. He treated her as a silly infant, and his want of her even in that capacity was a secondary matter; he was going into France, for all his petting talk, and was leaving her to shift as she best might until he could spare the time to resume his love-making.

Now, when Pevensey had gone, the room seemed darkened by the withdrawal of so much magnificence. Cynthia watched from the window as the tall earl rode away with three handsomely clad retainers. The sunset turned the dust raised by their horses' hoofs into a sort of golden haze. Yes, George was very fine and admirable; no doubt of it: even so, there was relief in the reflection that for a month or two she was rid of him.

Turning, she faced a lean, disheveled man, who stood by the Magdalen tapestry scratching his chin. He had unquiet, bright eyes, this out-at-elbows poet whom a marquis's daughter was pleased to patronize, and his red hair to-day was unpardonably touzled. Nor were his manners beyond reproach, for now, without saying anything, he, too, went to the window. He dragged one foot a little as he walked.

"So my Lord Pevensey departs!" he said. "Oho! and hark to Deptford! Now all the oafs in the corn-market are

cheering this bulwark of Protestant England, this rising young hero of a people with no nonsense about them." "And Master Marlowe is pleased to return, after a five-days' round of taverns and bad women! Oh, but I have heard tales of you!" And Cynthia raised a reproving forefinger.

"True tales, no doubt." He shrugged, then sprawled in the high leather-covered chair which Pevensey had just vacated. "Lacking the moon he vainly cried for, the child learns to content himself with a penny whistle."

"Ah, but," the girl said, smiling, "the moon is very far away, too far to hear the sound of human crying; and besides, as I remember it, the moon was never a very amorous goddess." "Just so,' he answered. "Also she was called Cynthia, and she, too, was beautiful."

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"Yet is it the heart that cries to me, my poet," she asked him softly, "or just the lips?"

"Oh, both of them, most beautiful and inaccessible of goddesses." Then Marlowe leaned toward her, laughing, and shaking that disreputable red head. "Still, you are very foolish in your latest incarnation to be wasting your rays upon carpet earls who will not outwear a century. Were modesty not my failing, I could name somebody who will last longer. Yes, and, if but I lacked that plaguy virtue, I would advise you to go a gipsying with that nameless somebody, so that two manikins might snatch their little share of the big things that are eternal, just as the butterfly fares intrepidly and joyously, with the sun for his torch-boy, through a universe wherein thought cannot estimate the unimportance of a butterfly, and wherein not even the chaste moon is very important. Yes, certainly I would advise you to have done with this vanity of courts and masques, of satins and fans and fiddles, this dallying with tinsels and bright vapors; and very movingly I would exhort you to seek out Arcadia, traveling hand in hand with that still nameless somebody-" And of a sudden Kit Marlowe began to sing:

"Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove

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