But the matter of our departure was settled. Knowing that Papa would be greatly relieved to have us farther away from the battle-front, I was ready enough to go, and next morning set to work to close up the greater part of the house. Julie promised to stay with Eugénie as long as she had the courage.

"She can go to her family in Epernay whenever she wants," Eugénie said, indifferently, seeming quite ready to remain entirely alone if the need arose.

The whole of Friday I spent indoors, putting things away, covering furniture, packing linen and doing a hundred other things. By nightfall I was so tired that I dropped off to sleep almost as quickly as my head touched the pillow.

But the next morning, when I awoke, the grim noises of the battle, which had been raging continuously, seemed more intense, and I listened, for a time, sick at heart. The threat against the cathedral was always in my mind, and I was relieved to note that the explosions were not in that direction. Perhaps, after all, even the Boches would spare it.

Grandpère went out that day as usual. accompanied him to the front door to say good-by, and we stood a moment in silence. The artillery of both sides was more constant than I had ever heard it, and there seemed a breathlessness in the air like that which often precedes a thunder-storm. I noted that Grandpère was preoccupied; and, as I kissed him, he kept an arm about me for a moment.

"I shall feel easier when thou art out of Rheims, my dear," he remarked, then with a smile, hurried off.

That was all he said, but it left me with a sense of oncoming danger. Again there. was a tightening of my heart-strings, and I thought of my papa and of all the brave men of France, many of whom must be dying amid this storm of bursting shells.

But these things we did not permit our minds to dwell upon. To do so would have sapped our courage, and we had need of every bit we possessed. I busied myself to the utmost; but try as I would to keep

my attention upon what I was doing, I would catch myself listening to the dreadful noises that seemed, this day, to surpass anything that I had experienced theretofore. Nor could I rid myself of the feeling that something appalling was about to happen.

The morning passed very slowly. Grandpère came in to déjeuner more silent than usual, and went away again immediately after. I continued with my tasks, striving to free my mind from this unexplainable anxiety, but with little success. Eugénie went about her work with tight lips, talking of nothing but the packing or scolding poor Julie.

As the afternoon wore on, the crashing explosions came nearer, and I no longer tried to convince myself that the Germans were confining their fire to the battle-line. "I believe they are shelling the city, Eugénie!" I cried out at last.

"Maybe," she muttered. "We cannot help it, Mademoiselle."

This was true, of course; but her answer was not consoling nor did it encourage conversation, and for a time I was silent.

Then, in the midst of a very hurricane of explosions, Madame Garnier came in, pale with terror.

"They are blowing up the cathedral!" she cried, tears running down her cheeks. "They are raining shell after shell upon it. To-morrow there will be no Cathedral de Notre Dame in Rheims."

What I had been dreading all day had come to pass. The bitter things that Eugénie had said of the Boches were proving true. Nothing was sacred to them. They spared neither the peasant's hut nor the most beautiful building in the world. With a pang of sorrow, I remembered the carven figure of my dear Sainte Jeanne. Would I never kneel before it again? A sudden hot anger filled me and, without a word to any one of my purpose, I hastened down the stairs, vowing to myself that, come what might, the image I so loved should be saved. A moment later I was in the street running toward the great cathedral.

CHAPTER VII

"PASTURES NEW"

WHEN Fen first awoke he was puzzled by a dominant throbbing sound. Then he realized that it was the engine, and saw the pale river-banks slipping past the port-hole. And his first thought was not one of excitement, that he should be once more outward bound, but of desolation, that he should not see Siddereticus again. The impression of the evening before was still very strong, and he longed to be able to stop Larry's ceaseless babble about the picnic. At breakfast, Jackson, the colored steward, approached Fen, holding a small package rather gingerly.

"For you, Massa Fen," said the man. "Dis mawnin' early come a black manblack man wid a black mus-tash, and one ob dem fezzies on. He said, 'Gib dis to young Fen Effendi,-he know.' I say, 'I ain't offended nobuddy.' But I tuk dis yer little passel, though I done distrus' sech a lookin' man. I thought mebbe-" "That's quite enough, Jackson," said Mrs. Norvell, from behind the coffee-urn. "'Scuse me, missis, 'scuse me!" muttered Jackson, withdrawing, "Jest 'splainin'-"

Fen tucked the package beside him, whither the eyes of his cousins followed it.

"Is it from your Djinn? Aren't you going to even look at it?" they demanded in chorus.

"I know perfitly well what's in it," said Fen, imperturbably.

The first moment he was alone, however, he opened the parcel, which contained, sure enough, the little black box with the blue figure in it-quite whole again. There was also a little slip of thin paper, on which was printed in round black letters, quite easy to read:

"HIS NAME IS THOTH. AMONG OTHER THINGS, HE IS GOD OF MAGIC."

Meanwhile, the engines churned on

steadily, and the monotonous Nile banks slipped as steadily astern.

The amulet certainly fulfilled its mission during the days which followed, since Sally and Larry were present almost all the time.

But sometimes Fen grew very tired, watching their boundless energy and listening to their far from inspiring conversation with each other. Very often he longed to be alone with Siddereticus; and often, when Larry was asleep, he talked to Thoth, whom he had installed on a little shelf beside his bed.

When at last the yacht left the Nile, and, having touched at Alexandria for supplies, breasted out once more into the Mediterranean, Fen gave up all hope of seeing again his dear Djinn, whom he somehow thought of as being inseparable from Egypt. The bracing sting of the sea wind and the sight of the high, blue waves running past was very welcome after the sluggish Nile and the heat of the Egyptian sun. Fen grew a little stronger, and a faint color tinged his cheeks.

The weather was unusually fair, and day followed blue day as the yacht passed Crete, skifted up the Grecian coast, and went through the Strait of Otranto into the Adriatic, bound for Venice. There was the usual monotonous routine of a sea voyage. Sally and Larry played hopscotch on the deck and climbed into places where they were n't allowed to climb; while Mrs. Norvell read or sewed under the awning beside Fen. They did not talk a great deal.

"He always seems to be so perfectly contented with his own thoughts that I rather hate to intrude on them," she told her husband. "He sits for hours looking out to sea without moving a muscle, and then suddenly turns around and looks right through me, and asks some extraordinary question."

She was often puzzled by her son, and because she had never learned to touch the responsive chords in him, she really understood him very little.

"He's such an un-get-at-able person, somehow," she complained to his father.

Then one evening, just at sunset, they entered the Porto di Lido, threading among the outer islands, and came to anchor in the great lagoon. Far off, outlined against the saffron sky, lay Venice, with its tumbled silhouette of domes and campaniles. Lights were coming out in clusters along the water-front, and glancing here and there across the shimmering lagoon.

Fen begged so hard to sit up a little later than usual that he was allowed to stay on deck until the sunset glow had faded and the sky had paled and then deepened to dusk.

"It's a much beautifuller place to look at than Egypt," he thought as he fell asleep. "Oh, if Siddereticus were only here to tell me things-he makes everything be diff'rent, somehow."

It was the next afternoon that Sally dropped breathless into a chair beside Fen. "Tell me about it, tell me all about everything-oh, please!" he begged. "Oh, I can't!" said Sally. "Oh, it was wonderful-you can't even imagine it, Fen! Most all the streets are water, and we went around in one of those boatthings what 's-their-names?—gondolas; and Larry wants to live there always, so 's he can fish out of the windows."

Larry, appearing over the side just then, spoke for himself.

"Really, you could, you know, Fen. Just hang a line out of the window and catch fishes. An' you 'd have to stand on the door-step an' call a boat, 'stead of a taxi. Would n't it be fun, though?"

"But tell me all about it," pleaded their cousin, "everything you saw."

"I can't," insisted Sally; "there was such a lot,-lots of old palaces and churches and things, simply heaps of 'em!"

"Siddereticus could tell me," thought Fen, wistfully.

There followed a week fraught with

exciting expeditions ashore for the active members of the party, and with fruitless questioning for Fen, who was forced to content himself with the sight of the lagoon, busy with plying barges and gondolas and bright with orange-painted sails.. And just too far away to distinguish anything clearly, Venice lay like the opalescent mirage of a fairy city.

Late one afternoon a big yawl, her shining sails spread like wings to the fresh breeze, stooped into the lagoon and anchored at some distance from the yacht. Norvell's attention was momentarily drawn to her, as she was unlike the other sailing-craft in the harbor.

"Looks like an American boat," he said, marine-glass in hand. "Wonder how she got here?" He did not waste much time or thought over the problem, however, and the yawl was quickly forgotten, almost lost to sight among the shipping of which the lagoon was full.

"You really must go to bed, my dear," said Fen's mother, "Here 's Father now -he'll carry you down."

"Please," begged Fen, "Just a few minutes more! I-I feel as if it was sort of special, to-night. The lights are so nice-an' please, if you don't mind, I 'd rather be all alone."

"Well," said his mother, "five minutes -but not more than that. Is n't it queer, Hal?" she added, as she walked toward the bow with her husband. "I never heard of children wanting to be alone to watch things, the way he does."

A dark figure slipped quietly into a chair beside Fen, and a low voice remarked:

"I came to kiss you good-night, mio caro."

"Oh, oh!" whispered Fen. "I did n't think it would really work! The lights were so lovely, an' everything was so still, an' I just held the amulet an' said, 'Come, dear Siddereticus' over an' over-an' you did come! I wanted you so awfully," he said, with just the shadow of a break in his voice.

"Of course I came!" said Siddereticus, blithely, "You never can tell what amulets

will do. But I think your five minutes are nearly gone."

"How did you know about a five minutes?" said Fen. "You are n't going, are you? Oh, I want you so to tell me all about Venice things.'

"Not to-night. I could n't tell you, anyway. You have to see it."

Fen's lip quivered a little. "But I could n't," he faltered, "Oh I did think you could tell me!"

"I came to carry you to bed," said Siddereticus, as he gathered Fen into his arms, "not to talk about Venice."

"It seems, now, as if you had n't ever been away," murmured the little boy, his head against the Djinn's broad shoulder.

Fen's chair was empty when his mother and father returned to it, and for a moment they were dumfounded.

"I suppose Mammy took him," said Norvell; and then, all at once, "Upon my word, Thornton, is it you?"

"Even I-Siddereticus," said a tall figure that loomed toward them out of the dusk.

"THEN I have your consent, Mrs. Norvell?" Thornton asked, as he stood ready to take his leave, some little time later.

lunch-time came with no sign of him, and Fen was disconsolate. It was immediately after luncheon, and four bells had just struck, when there was some little commotion at the yacht's side. The next instant Siddereticus stood on the deck, clad in white, with a red sash and striped Nea

"Well-yes," she replied, "I really don't see how it could do any harm, as you speak of it, though I never should have thought of it as possible; and it 's really too kind of you, Mr.-er-Siddereticus."

CHAPTER VIII

THE MIRACLE

ALL the next morning Fen waited and watched for Siddereticus. Every sound put him on the alert, thinking it might be some manifestation of the Djinn, but

politan cap. He swept Fen a low bow, and said: "Ho l'onore d'augurarle il buon giorno. Come sta da ieri in qua?" At which Sally and Larry, who were standing in awe at some distance, opened their eyes very wide indeed.

"Please don't," said Fen; "I like real talking better."

"I was just wishing you a good day and inquiring after your health," said Siddereticus, "The signor looks very nice to-day," he added, regarding the russet smock and the pathetically unworn tan shoes.