These two did not pretend to speak at the last. The Horse-killer took on the look (his gray eyes were cold and immutable as corner stones, anyway) as if he would spur over a sea of dead men’s faces to get a big tale and a free cable. It would not have been so bad except that the London papers, coming in now with the first cables of the correspondents, showed a consistent garbling and distortion of their reports. Home writers occupied miles of space, placed Togo along with Lord Nelson, and Mutsuhito with Gladstone--a deep planned, conscienceless campaign of fact-mutilation for the extolling of Japanese character and mettle. New York, young in war-handling, was inclined to follow London’s diplomatic lead, against the reports of her own men. February and March ended before the first batch of the British correspondents were informed that they could take the field with Kuroki’s first army. Feeney and Finacune remained in the billiard-room that last night at the Imperial, long after the rest had gone. These two men had pulled apart from the others in pulling together--the most florid with the dullest of writers; the showiest with the deepest. It had been an evening of rousing festivity. Possibly because these two had drunk less than the others; or possibly because their hopes for the field had been prolonged and mangled for such a length of time that they could not sleep now until they were actually booming down the Tokaido, Feeney and Finacune were billiarding idly after one o’clock in the morning and cooling the fever of the night’s stronger spirits with long, chilled glasses of soda, lightly flavored with Rhenish wine. Jerry Cardinegh had come down for a moment early in the evening for a word of parting. For days none had seen him below; and only a few of his older friends were admitted to the big, dim room, overlooking the park of the Government buildings--where a woman lived and moved, lost to light and darkness, and struggled every inch with the swift encroachments of the inevitable. Noreen’s father relied upon her, as upon air and a place to lie. God knows what vitality he drew from the strong fountains of her life to sustain his last days.