Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in order. The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but white as a flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to smile.... Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the queens of the elder drama--a queen of stirring destiny, whose personal history was all interpenetrated with national life, and whom some pretender had caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was like Talliaferro. “We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he began. “You know, some of the older of the British correspondents have dared to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you. Why did you disappoint us so?” “I did not want anything done for him--that would be done on my account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do--as his heritage is mine. I only ask you to think--not that anything can extenuate--but I want you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.” “We all understand that--even those who do not understand _all_ that happened.” “The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might be mine--not Japan’s, not Russia’s!” He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception, but she raised her hand. “You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said tensely. “I have had much time to think--to see it all! You are very good--all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.” “You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.” “When you take the field--all of you, wherever you go--watch and listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the truth--tell him to come to me!” Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army, shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest he forget his war.... “And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude. “And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom time--buried him for money--the man who opened the veins of their Empire!” The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails.... By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a procession of them. They were playing soldier--marching very erect and proudly, with sticks for guns.