had given her a chance to turn their talk. Though he had his arm again about her, she tantalized him with questions—personal questions, indeed, about himself, but about himself far away. She asked him about Paris, about his passage and about the ocean steamer.
He could not return her satisfactorily to her feeling for him—or what he had imagined to be her feeling for him—of their first minutes.
"What's on your mind?" he complained, finally. "Think somebody'll come in?"
"No; but I'm expected at the office."
"Get it off your mind. Kiss me."
"I've got to close it."
"You've got to get into less clothes, too," said Lew, objecting with his hands to her office dress. "We're going to dinner; then I'll dance with you! Dance with you!" he emphasized, kissing her.
She had lied about the office; she did not have to close it; no one had waited for her; no one had known where she had gone. Her little lie, however, helped her to regain the street where she bought another paper and read of the men on the mast. Their situation had not changed; slowly and in the order of their strength, the men must die this night while the world watched them.
Ellen longed to be in the throng on the shore; it would be terrible to stand there, actually seeing and able to do nothing; but the throng about the bonfires, and those going in and out of the little church, were her own people. She longed to stand with her own; she longed for escape from New York this night.
She longed, that meant, to dodge again Lew Alban; but
