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 Miss Boland contemplated with frankly estimating glance the lithe figure and the now alert countenance of Mr. Henry Harrington, and then allowed her blue eyes to kindle and her long red lips to assume curves of humor. "He certainly has slandered you, else my eyes deceive me," she assured, her clear orbs looking at the moment as if they could never have deceived her in all her life. "I see no sign of decrepit age at all. Don't mind; Charlie always was a dumbbell."

Somehow it did Henry a ridiculous amount of good to hear Charlie called a dumbbell by this beautiful creature—yes, she was beautiful; he conceded that—and himself by inference an alert and intelligent person. Her fingers had clasped his in a perfectly cordial American handshake and he was taking in the details of the picture, noting especially a certain exquisite taste which manifested itself in the perfect harmony of her sport rig.

Very chic, she was, all in white, from the dashing brim of the silk sport hat to the sheen of sculptured ankles and the dainty toes of spotless kid. A peaches-and-cream complexion contrasted rather joyously with masses of wavy dark hair exhibiting a faint bronze tinge.

The next observation Harrington recorded was the perfection of detail within this ensemble; not a glossy hair awry, that fetching hat not one degree aslant from its most insouciant angle; not a hint of disharmony anywhere in that immaculate exterior which Miss Billie Boland presented to him—so completely gratifying to his every sense of the esthetic that the skeptical young man was rather knocked out over having encountered it so unexpectedly.

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 Yet, humorously, the real knock-out was that Miss Boland's appearance did not actually present that exquisite perfection which Henry Harrington's surprised eyes thought they saw. Men are always secing in women's faces things that are not there. Henry Harrington had begun to see such things in his second glance at Billie Boland.

"I may have been war-jaded, a cynic even—all those things Clayton called me," he was moved to flatter boldly, "when I talked to him this morning, but most certainly I am not now."

Miss Boland's smile brightened further and she began to view the young man with signs of more than passing interest.

"Henry is by way of being a struggling lawyer," bantered Charlie; but the gracious Miss Boland frowned at the banter. She seemed by now instinctively to have sensed in the lined face and deeply illumined eyes of Harrington that here was no twin of Charlie Clayton's to talk nothings to, but a man to be serious with and to whom it was worth revealing that she could be serious also.

"It is nice to struggle," she declared, gravely tactful, the violet blue eyes steady in their approving—approving, then searching. "You are ambitious, Mr. Harrington—or,"—she lifted her brows and smiled intimately—"you do not need to be?"

"Need to be! Yes, indeed, Miss Boland; if you imply an inquiry as to whether I am possessed of boundless wealth," Henry confessed honestly, strangely anxious to follow her exact mood. "But I am neither ambitious nor industrious, and I have not felt any great need to be since"

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 Like the extinguishing of a light, the approval faded out of the blue searching eyes, and the perfectly arched brows were knitted slightly. "Oh, I think every one ought to be both of those things," Miss Billie interrupted earnestly. "Especially when there is so much need for them just now. I have no patience with a peace-time slacker, any more than the war-time kind. I have come home from a world half-paralyzed, and"

For a moment a shadow, as of an unpleasant memory, seemed to invade and darken her eyes, and Harrington was interested to note that the girl had not been where and doing what she had been in Europe without acquiring some serious notions herself. Clayton, he saw, had misrepresented Billie to a certain extent. She was not all frivolous, not by any means, and being John Boland's daughter, why, of course, she saw things in the large, and probably could talk of them that way. The concluding part of her observation, swiftly and spontaneously uttered, confirmed this: "And Europe," she went on, "is starving in soul because it is hungry in body! It's hungry in body because it has half lost the will to work. The need of the world today, as I see it, is for men that can put it to work—create work for it to do, I mean—revive commerce, industry—that sort of thing."

Henry was almost awed; but Charlie chaffed: "There spoke her father, Henry, Old Two Blades; no drones in his hive."

The girl mocked a frown and was just menacing Charlie with her fan when the violin emitted a preliminary squeak and Joe Morley, claiming his dance, swept the vivacious and expertly articulate Miss Boland from

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 before Harrington's face with only time for ejaculated partings; but it seemed to Harrington that her eyes said something about hoping to see him soon again.

"Fast worker, Billie, but don't mind that," consoled Charlie blindly. "It's her way. She's got you cardindexed right now as a dud."

"For which I could murder you," growled Harrington; yet wondered if she really did have him indexed as a dud.

Clayton laughed at the mischief he thought he had made. "She'll not rest till you confess ambitions and go to work at them," he prophesied gleefully. "She'll make you run for the legislature. She'll ride you whip and spur; but she's charming about it. You can't get mad at her."

"Get mad at her!" Henry ejaculated incomprehensibly, and felt an immediate need for privacy and reanalysis.

Worming out of the club house, he made for a lonely bit of sward high upon Pigeon Point.

"The girl isn't like what I thought she'd be," he had been explaining to himself as he strode along. "That's why she's so stimulating to think about."

When he had gained the Point and flung himself breast down upon the grass, he found the solitude conducive to meditation.

He was in rather a dotty mood for him. "Her eyes were blue, weren't they?" he asked the greensward. It did not answer. "Her hair was brown and wavy, I'm sure of that," he whispered to a dandelion. "Her complexion, as I remember, was kind of pink and white, lots of pink sometimes and lots of creamy white at others." His enthusiasm grew by the bits that memory

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 fed it. "Every feature perfect Exquisite, by George! Exquisite!" was his completed judgment.

Not a criticism occurred to him.

"If I could ever be interested in a woman again, it would be some woman like Miss Boland," he conceded, as being loftily fair with himself; and then, from remembering how she looked, he passed on to remembering things she had said.

Peace-time slacker!' There's a phrase for you. Ouch!" Henry sat up abruptly. "She plugged me dead center with that. Or—did she?" He paused to ponder, but presently was on the move in a sort of brown study, down over the hill, across the golf links by the most direct route and headed for the parking grounds where any number of opportunities to ride downtown would present themselves.

"There he goes now," said a voice upon the clubhouse veranda; and John Boland—Old Two Blades himself—fastidiously dressed as always, but with rugged strength in every line of him, lifted his large head with its domed forehead, its triangle face with recessed eyes, long sharp nose, clamped lips and spiked and knobbed chin and gazed, at least mildly interested, where Henry Harrington, with that free, marching stride which would be his through life, spurned the gravel under his heels.

"He's a clean-looking young man," conceded Old Two Blades. "I've always noticed that about him. Any bad habits?"

"Probably," said Judge Allen drily, "but he's got a great way with a jury or a witness!"

"Good at handling people, heh?" roused J. B., with no effort now to conceal a sudden access of interest;

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 for "handling people" was the secret of all his achievements. He was a great manipulator of the plastic souls of men. Drivers, he could hire in job lots: but leaders!. . . why, if this Henry Harrington now were a genius at kneading and molding the human will? . . . Old Two Blades gaped and stared.

"The best I ever saw at handling a jury," affirmed Judge Allen with conviction. "He has dished Scanlon a couple of times."

Scanlon was the head of the legal department for Boland General.

"Um! Yes," remembered Old Two Blades; "I think Scanlon has mentioned him to me—thought we had better find something for him to do maybe." The caverned eyes began to be set covetously upon the receding figure of this young man.

"Why," ejaculated Mr. Boland suddenly, "if he has all this peculiar kind of ability, and since he's not identified very much with anything in particular, why, he might be the very man to" The eager utterance suspended itself as abruptly as if Old Two Blades had bitten his tongue.

"Yes—yes?" Judge Allen bent his impressive snowwhite head low to receive the confidence; but he never got it. The Boland lips had tightened and the Boland mind went off into executive session with itself on a project so important that he had never yet discussed it with a single soul—one of the largest projects his mind, accustomed to great visions, had ever contemplated.

Within a few minutes he turned from Judge Allen and beckoned Scanlon to him—Scanlon, huge, fat and competent, who like the rest of the cabinet of Boland

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 General was in evidence around the country club this afternoon. In brief whispered words to his Chief Counsel, Mr. Boland set inquiry on foot with regard to the character and characteristics of Henry Harrington, inquiries the answers to which must be made known to the chief executive this very night, so urgent was his interest.

Thus rapidly were things coming on for Henry Harrington; but Henry did not know this at all. He rode downtown in the Doulton automobile and barely conscious enough of his surroundings to note with relief as he stepped out of the car that Hornblower was gone from his lumber pile and that his audience had dispersed, all except a little knot which clustered curiously about the plat on the billboard, and other scattered groups on street corners round.

Lightly Harrington bounded up the steps to his office, but once within it halted with an expression like surprise. The place looked all at once small and mean. Dust and even fly specks abounded. Little dumps of cigarette ashes appeared among the litter of legal documents upon his desk. He must have noticed these things before; but they had not offended him then. Now all at once they did.

"Little stuff," he blurted, glancing at the documentary miscellany, and began to tell himself things. "Have to get some real business in. . . . Have to make money. . . . Got to have a car. . . . Got to have a nice-looking office. . . . Got to have—oh, a lot of things!" And Henry's hands swept out in a widely inclusive gesture.

This was the first time that he had said to himself that he had to have rich clients; yet not that he began

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 to think at the same time of his humbler ones with any sort of disdain. "No, thank God!" And he seized and thumbed those documents. Beloved cases! They represented, each one of them, a cause in which his instinctive passion for justice had been enlisted.

"Justice!" he breathed reverently and was in rather an exalted state. Yielding to this exaltation he turned to the Code and to the oath which he had taken upon his admission to the bar.

"That's it," he exclaimed, and thumped the page in his enthusiasm. "That's my job. I've been lazy; that's what's been the matter with me. I took the little cases and as few as I could. I'm going after the big ones now and as many as I can get. Not that I'll turn my back on the little fellows either. But—hooray!" He stood up and stretched himself. It was great to feel he was getting into the fight again—the really worth-while fight to make the biggest and most useful man of himself that he could.

Clayton had prophesied to him that some day he would wake up with a bump, and, lo, he had done it in that self-same day, and the feeling was wonderful! Glorious! No peace-time slacker he, from this on! If only—if only this waking up were real and as worthy as it seemed. . . for he was still unaware that he had been subtly changed, that one single touch of the personality of Miss Billie Boland had wrought a mysterious alchemy in him. He thought it was something she had said, not something that she was, which had so stimulated him.

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 there was no one there to suggest it, he merely stood a moment rubbing his eyes, as if to make sure that these new and glowing aspirations of his were not the fantastic colorings of a dream, when there came to his ear a shuffle of quick steps in the hall outside followed by importunate pounding upon the door.

To Henry's surprise it was Hornblower again; but an utterly different Hornblower; the bombastic egotism, the sullen resentment of the morning were both gone. The man's face was ashy, his cheeks fallen, his lips trembling and slobbering, as he staggered through the door with a look of terrible fright in his small piggish eyes.

"Henry, for God's sake!" he groaned, almost falling as he clutched at the arm of Harrington. "Those damned fools are going to croak me! Gaylord and his bunch! For God's sake, don't let 'em do it, Henry; don't!"

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ARRINGTON gazed at this agitated mass of human being, his expression one of supreme disgust.

"I warned you," he shrugged irritably. "Why do you come back to me?"

"Because you are the only man that don't fly off the handle," urged the shivering hulk. "You can stop 'em. Nobody else can. They're coming—they're coming after me now!" he howled, fear-stricken eyes rolling wildly as a thunder of feet began on the stairs.

"You're not worth saving, Hornblower," Harrington denounced sharply; "but come on! I won't let them hurt you."

The huge cowering shyster held back but Henry seized him contemptuously by a fat wrist and dragged his protesting bulk behind him through the door and out to the head of the stairs as the mob came storming up. It was headed by Gaylord, by Schuler and by George Hughes, president of the State Bank, two blocks down. The faces of all three were angry and determined, like the mass of features framed in behind them on the stair.

A mob! A murderous mob, headed by first citizens, in broad daylight, hot and unashamed!

"We're going to hang the " announced the banker.

"He deserves it," agreed Henry fiercely. "Clear the stair! I'll bring him down."

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 The fluid mind of the mob welcomed an addition to its leadership, shouting with raucous joy to those outside:

"Henry's bringing him down! Henry Harrington's bringing him!"

Once upon the curb, Henry appeared to note the convenient juxtaposition of that lumber pile and the cross-arm of the electric light pole.

"Henry! Henry! Are you throwing me down?" bleated Hornblower, hanging back.

"Shut up," said Harrington, and twisting the arm he held, he shoved the bulk of the man ahead of him toward the lumber pile. The crowd jeered and hooted.

Hornblower, losing faith in Harrington's ability to save him if he still planned to, flung himself on the attorney's shoulders. "There's something I got to tell you, Henry—if they're going to bump me off like this!" he panted. "Something important—it'll make you rich, Henry; it'll make a lot of things right that don't seem that way now. Stall, Henry, stall! I got to have time to think!"

But Harrington's features wore the solemn mask of one upon a determined business bent. "Get up there!" he commanded, impelling Hornblower at the lumber pile.

"Time! I got to have time to think, Henry!" Hornblower wailed as Henry stepped up beside him. "Don't let 'em croak me like this—not before I tell you what this town has got a right to know."

But Harrington dared not take his mind off the mob. Its passion was too hot. One slip and he would lose his slight ascendancy. Already Gaylord, Schuler, Hughes and others had clambered on the lumber pile. They were engaged in throwing the yellow line of the sisal

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 rope over the arm of the telegraph pole and a minute later a score of men were fighting for a hold upon the end as it fell into the crowd. Henry, one hand protectingly upon Hornblower's shoulder, lifted the other in an appeal for silence.

"Men!" His trained voice rang out high and sharp as it had upon parade grounds and marches.

The crowd ceased its mouthing for an instant and would have listened to him at least briefly but that Schuler, who was too impatient, struck off Henry's protecting hand from Hornblower's shoulder; at the same moment Gaylord flung the noose about the mountebank's neck.

At this interference Henry's face went white. His steel-gray eyes became two gleams of wrath and his left hand straightened with a snap that brought his clenched fist in violent contact with the point of Gaylord's jaw. The president of the First National dropped as if he had been shot, while Harrington snatched the noose from the neck of Hornblower and in impulsive defiance flung it over his own head.

"Now," he challenged hotly, "you fools! If you want to hang anybody hang me! There are fifty hands on that rope out there," he dared, "if you've got as much nerve as you think you have, swing me up!"

But the crowd did not want to hang Henry Harrington. The swaying bight of the rope slackened rather than tightened.

But the leaders on the lumber pile were not to be balked.

"Damn you, Harrington!" muttered the astounded Schuler, and was reaching to snatch off the noose when over the heads of all there rasped a new voice of

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 command—a voice that all the three towns were accustomed to obey.

Unnoticed the open automobile of John Boland, moving slowly down the street, had become imbedded like an island amid the eddies of humanity, with its occupants perforce amazed spectators of what was taking place. The magnate was standing up now beside his driver indignantly erect.

"What are you about, my friends and neighbors, fellow townsmen!" he shouted, words fair enough but with a timbre of rebuke in them before which the maddest paused. "Do you want to smirch the reputation of the whole country?" Mr. Boland's reproach was keen. "Do you want to dignify this scalawag's hypocritical claims?

"If he has unsettled any titles in his wicked and foolish talk this afternoon, hanging him wouldn't quiet them. Only the courts can do that—and they will do it, my friends, never fear. Have faith in the law! Let us show our right to the protection of law by showing our respect for the law."

Harrington had checked them; but Mr. Boland shamed them. By long habit, his townspeople saw as he wished them to see.

For five minutes his reproofs and reproaches flowed on, until the heads of the leaders were bowed like naughty children.

Henry, caught with the rope about his neck, felt suddenly the biggest fool of all. He flung the noose from him quickly and turned upon Hornblower. "Go, you muck!" he said sternly. "And go fast!"

But some dregs of manliness had been stirred up from the bottom of Hornblower's nature.

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 "You saved me," he gulped hoarsely. "Boland didn't. He's as big a faker as I am and bigger, only there's a nut streak in me that keeps me from getting away with it the way he does. Look at him now—bluff you all—bluff you to a standstill. But some day I'll get the truth out. I would have told it to you this morning if you'd gone partners with me. I would have screamed it to 'em all before I'd let 'em—let 'em croak me," and his eyes rolled fearsomely toward the noose still hanging empty from the cross-arm. "But now," he gloated craftily, "now the brainstorm is over and I don't have to tell anybody till I get good and ready."

Henry was freshly indignant. "Go, you miserable faker," he rasped, "before I lose my self-control and kick you."

"Hard words, Henry," complained Hornblower, "when a man's trying to be grateful to you for saving his life. Just for that you'll be the last man I'll tell, Henry, the very last; and the time'll come when you'd rather have something on John Boland than on any man in the world. See if it don't! Then you'll think of it and ask me on your bended knees and damned if I know whether I'll tell you even then—unless it's to save your neck, the way you saved mine today."

"The buzzard!" summed up Henry, as he watched the man clamber down and waddle off, then was flushed with confusion to see that Mr. Boland was beckoning to him. When he discovered that Miss Billie Boland and her mother were upon the back seat of the car and must also have been witnesses of what had occurred, he blushed the deeper.

Yet once he arrived at the side of the automobile, nothing in their reception of him tended to increase the

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 young man's sense of shame. On the contrary, the ladies, white-faced, rather devoured him with their eyes at the same time that they murmured inarticulate expressions of admiration.

"I am sincerely grateful to you for a very heroic act, Harrington," announced Mr. Boland, his voice still ringing with something of the excitement which had been in it when he made his speech. "You saved our people from a terrible thing—terrible!"

"I only did what it occurred to me to do at the moment," stammered Harrington, perceiving that this first speech which John Boland had ever addressed to him personally was exactly in keeping with his conception of the man—big, frank, self-contained, honorable and far-seeing. "I am afraid I must have appeared very ridiculous."

"Ridiculous? I should say not!" gasped Mrs. Boland, whose full bosom was still billowing like a sea.

"You were won-der-ful!" glowed Billie, color coming again into her cheeks, and she gave Henry a full-orbed glance.

"I was right," he said to himself; "her eyes are blue!" All the world had blurred save only this vision directly in front of him.

"You did what only a brave and resourceful man would have dared to do," insisted Mr. Boland. "Furthermore, you appear to have been the one person who saw this preposterous scalawag in a true perspective of absolute unimportance. That shows a cool mind and a penetrating one, Mr. Harrington. You make me feel that Boland General has been overlooking something." For the first time his thin lips relaxed into a tolerable approach to a dry and benevolent smile.

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 Henry, hearing only vaguely, heard enough to know he should contrive a modest smile himself and essayed to do so.

"Guess we could make a place for Mr. Harrington at our little family dinner party tonight, mother, couldn't we?" the magnate inquired over his shoulder. "You met Mr. Harrington at the club, Billie? I have been hearing some pretty fine things about Mr. Harrington this afternoon from Judge Allen, and what we have just seen makes me feel that we've been kind of behindhand in getting acquainted."

"Why, of course," intervened Billie, her lips taking on a wilful expression; "Mr. Harrington must come to the dinner and stay for my party—if he will forgive the tardiness and informality of our invitation." The expression of appeal with which the beautiful eyes lighted, under those so perfectly arched brows, made Harrington feel that he would forgive anything from them.

"I—I should be delighted, of course," beamed Henry, seeing no one but Billie.

"We dine at seven," announced Mrs. Boland, from somewhere off on the distant edge of the world.

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UT why—why did they invite me?" Harrington kept asking himself as he went up the hill. "Probably just tact. Saw I was all fussed up and wanted to make me feel right about it. Decent, I'll say," and Henry experienced a very grateful feeling. "And lucky for me!" he gulped.

But the curiosity in his mind which swallowed all others had to do with Billie, and he was glad he had had the courage to get into evening dress himself when she burst on his vision, wearing some shimmering white stuff with an overtone of pink in its coloring; thus imparting an iridescence to the garment which fell away from her gleaming shoulders in classic but form-revealing folds to a train that curved about her dainty silver-shod feet.

Upon the shoes were buckles of green jade, and in the young lady's hand was a bizarre fan of feathers, long, narrow and oddly curled, dyed as green as the jade, while an are of green stones flashed where they nestled in the loose masses of hair. The green of the stones wrought a faint harmony with the green of the fan; at the same time it brought out that bronze tinge in her silky coils, and thus seemed to lengthen this fascinating effect of iridescence.

Even the light-filled eyes were iridescent; and when they welcomed Henry with an unfeigned cordiality they kindled a glow in his soul that was iridescent also.

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 But just then Mr. Boland, behind a tombstone-like expanse of white shirt-front, loomed tall, immaculate, benign, and assumed a host's possession of his guest.

"Know 'em all, don't you?" he inquired, contemplating the roomful with a sort of paternal pride. Henry bestowed a general bow and smiled. In part, this was an inner smile due to the discovery that when Old Two Blades said "family dinner-party" he meant his business family—the heads of his subsidiary corporations and their wives—for these appeared to make up the guest-list.

Yes; Harrington knew them all. There, for instance, was Scanlon, heavy-shouldered, heavy-jawed and tenacious—a coarse, ill-schooled man, out of whom Henry had taken a fall or two in court. There was Quackenbaugh, head of the manufacturing end, who, thin and wiry, gave an impression of astuteness and also of tenacity. And there were the others, Pierce and Manning and Rudolph, and so on.

After such casual presentation the first mark of distinct favor came when Old Two Blades wilfully winnowed Henry out of the crush and showed him over the house—Humboldt House, Henry had understood that it was called—which was rather pretentious, of course; but then, the house was pretentious. During the ten minutes thus consumed his host was revealed to him as an amiable soul, utterly without swank, who asked Henry homely questions—where he was born, who his parents were and what; and kept up this flow of kindly but keenly penetrative interrogation until dinner was announced.

Harrington, observing that Clayton was not present at this intimate family dinner, felt an absurd glow

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 of triumph in the fact. Not one of that group who had made their boast this day was here, while he was—sitting at Miss Billie's right hand, and able to look forward with vivid anticipation to a real acquaintance-making chat with her sometime after dinner. But a little to his discomfiture, flocks of young people began to arrive for dancing before the dessert was off the table. Here they came—Clayton, Spaulding, Underwood, every eligible and half-eligible in the community, piling in, bubbling with hilarity, breaking up that certain sense of privacy which even the large dinner-party had allowed, and snatching Billie out of his reach.

When the music started Henry experienced a lonely feeling. He had been flung into a serious mood, while these dancing dervishes of young people were frivolous; they were even frivolous about the affair of the afternoon; referring to it as Gaylord's necktie party and frankly congratulating Henry upon his part in it, whereas in the dinner table conversation it had been a subject noticeably taboo.

He stood smoking and looking on, in the party and not of it. He saw the older and heavier women lapse back into corners and members of Boland General drift out probably for a smoke or a chat upon the wide verandas; he saw Mr. Boland go off with Scanlon and after a bit Scanlon come and beckon Quackenbaugh; and he sensed vaguely that amidst all this blare of music and scrape of syncopated feet, with excited laughter and buzz of talk, the business, the great never-sleeping business of Boland General was moving steadily on.

But he had no patience with business just now—not much with anything but one. He marked where a slim

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 and shimmering radiance moved with Louis Spaulding through the eccentricities of a fox-trot and bided his time—his time for finding out what this sudden turmoil within him was all about anyhow.

He was still biding, and impatiently, when Mr. Boland reappeared. His manner had undergone a distinct change since before dinner. His approval was no longer guarded. He beamed upon Henry this time and slipping an arm through his with familiar friendliness, piloted him off, acutely wondering, to a room he called his den, although it was larger than Henry's office. Upon entry Quackenbaugh and Scanlon were discovered with a blueprint map between them, upon a massive table of Flemish oak.

"There is simply no other place for the mill," affirmed Quackenbaugh, and thumped a particular section of the map with his long bony finger.

"It's just like you fellows," grumbled Scanlon, "to go and pick out the only piece of land on the whole west shore of the Basin that we haven't got title to, and then say it's the one spot in the world for your darned old shingle mill."

"It's a simple matter enough to buy the island," insisted Quackenbaugh, rebukingly.

"By thunder, it may not be," averred Scanlon with emphasis. "This Siwash has got a U. S. patent issued to him not six months ago for war service, and some of these Indians are darned stubborn about their land. They get a superstition about it. I tell you we might have a devil of a time trying to get that fellow to give up."

Thus far the conversation had got while Mr. Boland paused before his desk, opened a solid gold cigar box

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 and extended it to Henry with a grave ceremonial air. Henry accepted a perfecto in the same spirit and as his host struck a match, reflected that this was the first time a multimillionaire had ever furnished him with a light. He was, moreover, too human not to experience a few other quick and pleasant reflections.

As Mr. Boland, after two satisfactory puffs of his own weed, whiffed out the match, his eyes shot one arresting glance to where Quackenbaugh and Scanlon were talking. Their voices were instantly hushed. Instantly, too, Henry knew, without turning to see, that they were rolling up their map and going elsewhere to continue their debate.

"Be seated, Harrington," said Mr. Boland graciously, and Henry found himself sinking into the arms of an upholstered leather chair that clasped his figure about and held his body in suspense with a luxury of comfort of which he had never before conceived. At the same time the young man saw how the unctuous glow of a soul, which knew within itself that it meant exceedingly well to all the world, had softened and hallowed all those traces of a hard-bitten life, which had been etched, as if with acid, into the face of Old Two Blades.

"I hope you're sentimental, Harrington."

"Reasonably so, I trust," smiled Henry.

"Then we can start right off," announced Mr. Boland comfortably, and became at once intimate and confidential. "I want to talk to you about a tribe of Indians—or what's left of one—and Indians are rather a sentiment with me."

Indians? Henry was instantly disappointed. He had been hoping Mr. Boland was going to offer him

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 some legal business—Mr. Boland, the biggest client of them all!

"You look at a Siwash," Old Two Blades was going on, with the unconscious directness of his kind, "and he isn't much to gaze on; but they owned all this country once. And I tell you I've got a sentimental feeling for 'em. They ought to be protected. Right now there's a bunch of them up on Shell Point that are in danger of being robbed."

Henry started slightly, recalling that this was exactly what Miss Marceau had been saying.

"They're hard up," explained Old Two Blades. "Their land is valuable, but not to them. Some day when the tribe is hungry and discouraged a white man is going to come along and skin them out of it—buy it for a song—land that might be immensely valuable some time."

"But," Henry's legal mind observed, "there could be no danger of their being inveigled into a bad sale unless the Indian agent could be corrupted."

Old Two Blades shook his head. "Not corrupted; oh, not likely," he averred gravely. "But—swayed in his judgment, let us say. Take that miscreant, Hornblower, now," he instanced, "where that fellow is not too well-known his line of talk is very persuasive. He might convince an Indian agent of most anything; or, let us say, a commissioner of Indian affairs, as far away as Washington, for while that scalawag lives the man is potentially dangerous."

Old Two Blades said this almost as if he regretted the necessity of having saved the wretch's life, and it struck Henry that Mr. Boland was vaguely, distantly apprehensive about Hornblower, which seemed too bad,

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 for he was liking the great business genius more and more.

"However"—with a lift in his voice the magnate switched back his thought—"I've been thinking up a scheme to protect those Indians."

"Yes?" inquired Henry, leaning forward eagerly, thinking with amusement of Miss Marceau's absurd fears, yet discovering that her appeal had somehow laid in his mind a foundation of very genuine interest in the welfare of these Indians.

"Of course, I'll manage to make the project pay somehow," Mr. Boland hastened to qualify, "—make it contribute its quota to the prosperity of us all at the same time we're doing the poor devils good."

Harrington found himself nodding instant acquiescence. He was a trifle suspicious of pure philanthropies.

"My idea is to buy the land myself—before somebody else does." Old Two Blades plumped this sentence out, his whole expression one of the modest consciousness of superior virtue, then elaborated: "My plan, in order to keep 'em from squandering their principal, is to pay for the land in Liberty bonds to be held in trust by the Government. There's a lot of the land and comparatively few of the Siwashes and just the interest would, according to my figures, allow seventy-five dollars a month per Indian, big or little, and with the Government re-investing for him, it would protect him and his children's children as long as they lived."

"Why, that would be fabulous luxury for most of those Siwashes," glowed Henry, enthusiasm kindling in part because of Miss Marceau, in part because of Billie Boland, and in part because of growing admiration for her father.

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 "Of course, it's a big project, you understand," cautioned Mr. Boland gravely. "It's a big project. Several millions involved!"

Henry was properly impressed. "The real difficulty, Mr. Boland, if you permit me to suggest," he said, "will be in gaining the confidence of the Indians themselves. They're a suspicious lot, as far as my observation goes; if they get stubborn it would be all off."

"Which is exactly where you come in, Harrington," announced Mr. Boland with a sudden and significant lowering of his voice. "Judge Allen tells me you've been active for some of those young fellows, getting citizenship papers and allotments for them. Had some of them in your platoon overseas, I believe? Come to understand the Indian character pretty well, I suppose?"

"Why, yes; I think I may say, Mr. Boland, I understand their psychology tolerably well," responded the young man somewhat guardedly.

"Undoubtedly you do and that's why I am going to put this whole matter in your hands," was announced by Mr. Boland, with quick, conclusive emphasis.

"The—the whole matter?" murmured Henry, a little breathless.

The manner of J. B. had been confidential and intimate from the first; now it became almost affectionate. He laid a hand upon the young man's arm. "People have a way of trusting you, Henry. That's what Judge Allen was telling me this afternoon. How fully I find myself trusting you, after a few brief contacts, I am revealing. I've no doubt you can get these Siwashes to trust you."

With those deep but kindly eyes beaming on him so

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 encouragingly, Henry had to admit frankly: "Yes; I believe I could, Mr. Boland. I am so completely sold to the project," he smiled, "that I think I could make a cigar-store Indian see it, let alone a real one. It's noble. It commands all my enthusiasm."

The tight features of Old Two Blades relaxed into another of his most approving smiles; but immediately his mind was scouting ahead once more. "The instant we get the Indians committed, the Agent and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs will have to be brought round. If you are as successful as I anticipate, I rather think I'll leave that up to you also.

"It's a long route—probably," Old Two Blades meditated over his Havana. "It might take us the best part of five or six years; but the project is worth the time." The long lips had clamped decisively.

Henry's eyes widened dizzily. Why, this was no brief relationship that was being proposed. It might call for years of his attention. It would stretch out into life. It might flow on and on. Subsidiary issues must develop and tie him up with other of the Boland projects; that is, if he were successful—if he could make good!

This which opened to him here and now in the seclusion of John Boland's den with dance music ringing in his ears, was probably the most momentous opportunity that life would ever bring to him. His soul rose at the prospect.

"Will you undertake this for me, Harrington?" Old Two Blades asked incisively.

"Mr. Boland, I will!"

Both men had risen.

"It's a bargain," said the older, offering his hand.

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 Henry took it and felt it clasp him like a hook of steel.

Obviously the conversation was near its end, yet nothing had been said about compensation; and Henry was keenly interested in that, for all at once he was becoming thrifty. Touched tonight by the glamor of riches he was beginning to want riches for himself.

"Scanlon will drop in upon you tomorrow and make whatever arrangements will be satisfactory to you," Mr. Boland suggested expansively, somewhat as if he read Henry's thoughts and recognized them as natural and commendable even.

"I hope he won't find me too—too mercenary," Henry smiled.

"Oh, we must all make money out of the transaction," laughed Mr. Boland, a low chuckling laugh that was characteristic of him, when he laughed at all; "Indians and all of us. It's to be a paying proposition for everybody."

Just at this satisfying moment Henry heard, thrillingly, the voice of Miss Boland calling him and turned to find her framed in the library door, still a vision of shimmering, iridescent beauty. She beckoned to him with her fan and then couched its green plumes diagonally across her breast, allowing the curled tips to touch her soft throat caressingly.

"I was just coming to rescue you from father," she beamed.

"It would be rescue to be snatched by you from the arms of an angel," Henry declared gallantly; "but your father and I seemed to get on amazingly well."

"Isn't that fine?" Miss Billie effervesced. "Father is such a good friend to a young man when he is a friend."

"Everybody seems kind in this house," responded

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 Henry with significance designed to be highly obvious. "Permit me," he said, and took the fan, feeling a most absurd impulse to caress her white chin with its curled velvety ends quite as she had been doing unconsciously when he came up. His nerves were all bounding; he was filled with a primitive exuberance. The dance was still on, the party was at its gayest but she had left them all to seek him. He felt boyish and irrepressible, likely to do any absurd thing. But he restrained that impulse about the fan.

"May I have the next dance?" he asked eagerly.

"And it's the very last," Miss Billie nodded, smiling benignly as a queen confers a favor. "Mother is sending the orchestra home early to protect my delicate constitution. I've been saving it for you because I felt father was taking an unfair advantage."

This sounded all so very delightful that Henry wasn't quite sure it wasn't a dream; yet knew that it was not for he was experiencing very real sensations as he took Miss Boland in his arms for the dance, real but rather unusual—feelings of reverence, feelings that he took hold of something immensely precious but immensely fragile. This sense of fragileness passed with the first contact of her supple body. She was not only a thing alive; she was strong; she stepped through the measures, the eccentric starts and stops, the gaits and gallops, of the modern dance with an elastic lightness which told its own story of perfect health and athletic vigor.

She was warmly radiant, disingenuously friendly and spontaneously happy. She was wonderful, she was glorious; but she was also mysterious. And he held all this mystery in his arms, close to him, rhythmic and

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 pulsing against him, and still it was insoluble. The beautiful face, animate under the spell of the music, seemed more beautiful still. When a single wisp of that bronze-brown hair fell down across a cheek, he wanted to kiss it away. He wanted to. Yet this want assured him definitely of nothing. He had seen many a cheek before that he had desired to kiss. He had never pretended to himself that he was past wanting to kiss a pretty girl.

"Do you golf?" she asked, when the dance was done and the party breaking up—face lighting like the child of the open air she was.

"A duffer's game," confessed Henry, breathing a little quickly, perhaps at the dance, perhaps at wondering if God was about to promise another contact with this fascinating young woman.

"Shall we find out what you mean by that, say, at ten tomorrow?" Billie smiled archly.

Henry's face kindled, then fell as he remembered an appointment to be made with Thomas Scanlon for some time tomorrow morning. "You forget that I am a poor struggler," he bantered; "that only this afternoon I was counseled to struggle hard and that ten is an hour when I should be in my office waiting for clients."

"You win!" the girl conceded with quick laughter, then let her eyes rove the room, saying: "I must fasten upon some idler or spend a lonely morning." But swiftly her glance came back to him and centered upon his with most devastating appeal. "Don't you—don't you think it might be well to—worth your while to idle just one more morning?" she coaxed, glance and tone together shooting Henry all to pieces inside.

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 "I—yes, on second thought, Miss Boland, I think I ought," he smiled.

"It's a date," confirmed Billie with a decisive nod, as accustomed always to have men defer their plans to hers. With a quick pressure of the hand she was gone from him and mingling among the departing guests.

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2 a blonde fall; the crown is decorated with embroidery and crape torsade. Cashmere shawl, with a very rich border.

We have, in addition, to give the following varieties of styles and dresses, selected from the latest Parisian fashions. Our report will be found full and accurate, Every variety of style worthy of note has been, and will be given in the Lady’s World of Fashion; and in each number, we shall give plates of the choicest styles.

Caps.—These are now of every form and variety, from the Puritan’s simple mode to the bonnet a Dubarry. There is one very pretty coiffure composed of black tulle and lace, plaited on the head in the form of a half-handkerchief, and falling on each side of the face in long aile lappets, interspersed with the sweet-pea in variegated colors, of velvet; then there is le bonnet griselle, with its pretty cocardes in satin, placed in a demi-circle over the crown, and that prettiest of all pretty coiffures— la Pompadour, consisting of gauffered lace or blonde, intermixed with pale pink or blue gauzes round the borders; and others too numerous to mention.

Bonnets.—Capotes are still much in fashion; they are in drawn satin, but quite in a new style—the satin being made to draw without the aid of runnings or whalebone, which, of course, adds much to the lightness of this capole; the head or crown very small and round, gives a new grace to this most charming bonnet. A capote in black velvet, lined with rose-colored velvet; the outside ornamented by a plume of black feathers, tipped with rose. The same style is very pretty in vert pre, and in flame color; these forms of capotes being much admired, both for being neglige, and at the same time perfectly elegant.

Walking Dresses.—A dress of Ottoman velvet; color vert chou, trimmed round the skirt with three fringed folds a bias; an echarpe-mantelet of the same stuff as the dress; trimmed with a flounce a pareil; hat of black lace, lined with pink satin, and decorated with a branch of small roses, placed very low on one side, Another dress is grey velvet, trimmed en tablier, with nœuds of silk cord; the ends terminated with small tassels of the same. A tight fitting corsage a point, decorated with nœuds, placed on each side of the body, descending from the shoulder, and forming a continuation of those on the skirt; the sleeves plaited. Another, also in green gros de Indes, trimmed round the skirt with three volantes of rich black lace; a corsage amazone, open in the front, and shewing the guimpe or nun’s stomacher worn underneath, and composed of India muslin, piped and trimmed with a double frilling of Valenciennes lace. ‘The sleeves long and plaited, and decorated with three rows of black lace.

Evening Dresses.—Dresses in embroidered muslin are most generally worn. They are trimmed alternately with inlet, embroidery, and lace, alternately arranged so as to perfect tablier; the body is made to correspond with a guimpe trimming; the sleeves plaited flat: another had three large tucks round the bottom of the jupe, headed with beautiful embroidery; the tucks having broad satin lilac ribbon run through them, and at the bottom of each tuck an inlet of lace; this is a costume well fitted for a young and pretty debutante: others, of heavier description are of black satin, with black velvet a bias, placed en chevrons down the front of the jupe, and having at the end of each cheveron a nœud of silk cord; the ends finished with small tassels; the body low, and trimmed in the same manner, with velvet; the lowest fold forming the stomacher; the sleeves plaited flat, and covered with chevrons, in velvet; these dresses have, generally, a very pretty girdle to fasten round the waist, made in lace or guimpe.

Canezous and Scarfs are much worn for demi-toilette; they are of plain muslin, simply embroidered on each side; trimmed tout autour, with points de malignes or applique.

Scarfs are much worn, not only without sleeves, but with them, and made in velvet, edged with a trimming en bias of a different color; there is none, however, to equal the satin en blue marine, which is trimmed all round with a kind of corded lace of the same shade of color, and lined with white satin,

Manteaux.—Velvet cloaks are worn much longer in the skirt than last winter, and mostly embroidered. For promenade, satin is preferred, being of a lighter material; these are generally trimmed round the border, with either velvet en bias, or in designs en relief piquee. Some are in gros des Indes, ornamented with guimpe trimmings, or embroidery, some with lace, and lined with satin, which is generally of the same color, as the exterior, except for an evening, and then they are generally doublee with white.

Spanish and Arabian Mantles or Pelisses are becoming a more favorite style of wraps for the Parisian elegantes than the simple cloak. One of these have appeared in Paris, made in le gourgouran; the trimmings down each side of the front consist of a puckering of the same, headed by a running pattern of cut velvet, en relief; a narrow light style of guimpe running round the edge of the cloak. Another in satin, the color aile de mouche; trimmed with three folds a bias, the same width; a row of black lace running alternately between each fold; the capuchon sleeves and manchettes, trimmed also with lace to match. They then have les Bournoss in all their perfection; some of them in cachemeir, lined with velvet or peluche; others, more simple, being merely embroidered in beautiful colors; these mantles are scarcely ever trimmed much, it being important that they should be as light as possible, to prevent the full dress underneath being crushed.

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HE nightly poker game was on at the Grizzly Club. Henry Harrington, a wildly excited young man, and feeling as if he could never sleep, had been glad to recall it. He met Clayton upon the stairs and, three and one-half hours tardy, the two edged into the game. Harrington was lucky as usual and by twothirty in the morning was some thirteen dollars ahead and gloating over Clayton, who was nearly as much behind, when into one of the absorbed silences of the play there echoed a distant reverberation. It boomed from somewhere outside, not very loudly, but very unmistakably—the detonation of high explosives.

"What was that?" asked Gallup, the grocery man, quick and nervous.

"Sounded like an explosion!" said Guy Getz, the butcher.

"Like blowing a safe to me!" imagined Charlie Clayton.

Gallup and Getz, who both had safes, sprang up; but Harrington was ahead of them at the window and, throwing it wide, stood peering down the empty silence of North Street to where that wide and solid-looking three-story brick structure which housed the administrative office of Boland General squatted in the darkness.

"It sounded down there to me," he remarked.

"Cash in, fellows!" demanded Gallup, who had been

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 banking. "I'm going to see what happened." But Harrington was the first to push his stack of chips across the green board and therefore the first to dash down the stairs. He arrived at the administration building after a run of two blocks, with the rest of the poker game trailing after, to find the torch-light of a lone policeman flashing amid the wreckage of a vault in the ground floor office of O. T. Morgan, land commissioner of Boland General, where homed the Edgewater Townsite Company, the Wahpeetah Townsite Company and all the wide range of the tax and title interests of Old Two Blades.

"I was right on their heels," croaked Policeman Ryan excitedly; "but they blew the wrong vault anyway. Only papers in this one."

But Harrington thought the litter of document-containers, huge record-books and rolls of maps scattered over the floor might be that created by eager hands, pulling them out, searching them over and making hasty selections before an imperative departure.

"Maybe they were after papers!" he divined.

"Hornblower!" ejaculated Guy Getz, without a moment's hesitation.

"You bet your life! You'd ought to have let us croaked him, Henry!" declared Phil Gallup.

"It might be Hornblower, of course," conceded Henry, glumly, and stood meditative, surveying and re-surveying the confusion, while excitement grew with each new arrival. Two or three night watchmen came in, another policeman and then Scott, the Chief of Police. Somebody telephoned O. T. Morgan and Cosby, head of Boland General's private detective force. Nobody touched anything. It lay as it fell for the small

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 town hawkshaws to arrange about finger-prints and search for clues.

When Cosby came in, and presently O. T. Morgan himself, half-dressed, Henry felt that any faint responsibility requiring his presence had ended. He was rather puzzled by it and wanted to get away by himself and think. There was such an awful lot of things for him to think about now anyway. So he made his way out of the group unnoticed and started for his hotel.

All told perhaps forty minutes had elapsed since the explosion. Thinking to save time, he started diagonally across the courthouse lawn, which was tree-studded and shrubbery-embroidered. "Hornblower? It would be like that devil—trying to throw a smoke-screen over the title issue by a theatrical stunt like this!" So he was speculating, none too conscious of immediate surroundings until he ran head on into an automobile, half-enveloped in the shrubbery. It was a touring car with the top up, lightless, but with its shape discernible in the faint glow of the stars, and the hood warm as if the engine had just been running.

"Funny place to park a car!" he had breathed in a startled undertone, when there came to his ears for the second time this night the sound of a low explosion.

"Another?" he ejaculated, nerves already tense, and as he did so the windows in the end of the courthouse nearest to him rattled mockingly.

"By George! That explosion was in there," he decided with sudden gravity, "and that's the Recorder's office on that end. Why, hell's bells! It must be Hornblower sure. Cute of his gang, I'll say—nervy, too—to come right over here and go to work in entire safety when they've got every policeman in the town hanging

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 perpetrator; questions of mitigation including expressions of regret or apologies; and the ability to ensure proper work practices in future. Although disciplinary policies will take such matters into account in various ways, such as by defining certain conduct to be minor, serious or gross misconduct or providing for a range of sanctions, the language and structure of the Ministerial Code do not reflect that ability to consider all relevant matters in deciding how to deal with conduct which falls within the description in paragraph 1.2.

57. The Prime Minister has indicated that for the purpose of this investigation, and any decision he may take, he is content to adopt the approach to bullying explained by the High Court in the FDA Case.

58. Accordingly, in obtaining evidence in this investigation and identifying potentially relevant material for the purpose of the Prime Minister's ultimate decision, I have focused my attention on the matters identified in the FDA Case, which include the following:

 * (1) The facts and context of the conduct of the DPM.

 * (2) The nature and (if relevant) seriousness of the conduct, including whether it was offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting, or was experienced as such, or was an abuse or misuse of power in ways that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.

 * (3) The reasons, understanding and intentions of the DPM.

 * (4) If relevant, questions of mitigation including expressions of regret or apologies.

 * (5) The ability to ensure proper work practices in future.

59. The first three such aspects have been my primary focus. I have also addressed the latter two in case they should be regarded as relevant by the Prime Minister.

60. While recognising that neither of the reports referred to here formed part of the analysis set out in the FDA Case, I have also found useful, for the purpose of making findings of fact, the distinction set out in the 2018 report of Dame Sue Owen DCB, "Review of Arrangements for Tackling Bullying, Harassment and Misconduct in the Civil Service", between 'abusive' behaviours, i.e. ones that are intended and specifically targeted, and 'abrasive' behaviours, i.e. personal styles, which feel like bullying (or other misconduct) to the individual, but are not intended to be so and where the perpetrator


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 round that pile of junk they made of Morgan's place."

Peering, he saw the hall of records entry door half open and from it there issued a sound as of someone coming out. "This car was for their getaway," he divined. "They'd have had a driver in it only they had to divide the gang and didn't want to trust too many people," he reasoned, and sank back into the gloom.

Yes, here they came—shuffling feet upon the stone steps and two dark forms blurred against the gray shadow of the building. Once the men were on the turf Henry lost the sound of footsteps and against the shrubbery background their figures were invisible until with startling suddenness their arrival at the car-side was announced by the tumbling of something heavy into the tonneau—heavy, like, for instance, a book of the deeds of Socatullo County.

It came to Henry like a flash that these men must be professional cracksmen and therefore tools only; that if this were a Hornblower enterprise, they and the other gang would report to him somewhere soon and it would be a gratifying piece of detective work to appear at the rendezvous and confront them all. He decided on the instant and twined his wiry form into the tire rack at the back, prepared to enjoy himself.

"Just one darned thing after another," he chuckled happily, as the car started with a jerk and a bump. "The night is still young."

The car was picking up fast and within a minute its springs were bounding wildly, with the tire rack flinging Henry recklessly hither and yon. Gravel was spit into his face, dust clouds enveloped him; he had all he could do to maintain his position, but he managed it and was able to do some thinking beside.

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 He knew that the driver had taken the Inlet Road, and that there were numerous branchings off to small docks and landings on the Basin, whose shore waters were dotted with small islands—ideal places for seclusion and trysting, whether of lovers or looters. When, therefore, after not more than a few miles run, the car slowed down and, succeeding the hollow rumble of a bridge, dipped suddenly off the road, Harrington was not surprised and thought he knew exactly where he was—at the mouth of Cub Creek; where, by an odd coincidence, was the landing from which canoes and small launches took off for that very island which Quackenbaugh and Scanlon had been arguing over tonight in Mr. Boland's den.

As the momentum ceased, Henry dropped flat upon the ground, and peering underneath saw ahead of him, in the light rays from the vehicle that had furnished his own transportation, the wheels of another car. "Just what I thought," he was breathing to himself with satisfaction, when the lights clicked off and in the same motion the engine also. A full minute must have passed, then another, but no sound was uttered.

Henry was aware, however, that movement was going on about him; quiet, persistent, methodical movement in which several persons were taking part. Something was afoot. What was it? He must not miss anything. He wriggled backward from under the car and as his eyes circled slowly in the darkness they came upon a tiny ray of light that went out almost as he glimpsed it. Then he understood. By means of brief, intermittent flashes some leader was calling confederates about him, and—hark! there were low muttered voices now; yes, men were talking—conferring together.

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 Henry decided upon a strategic detour to the left and then forward toward the voices; but just as his hands and knees told him that he had groped to the rough log landing, he sat up with a start. He had recognized one of the voices conferring not half a dozen feet away—a sort of master voice. It was—it was, so help him, the voice of Thomas Scanlon, Chief Counsel for Boland General. Harrington, unable to trust his own ears, listened longer to make sure.

Yes, there was not a doubt; it was the voice of Scanlon in tones that were unmistakable but words too low for him to catch.

Scanlon? Scanlon? Henry puzzled for a moment and then the whole thing came clear. Scanlon was a traitor; he was plotting against his own company—against the town, against Mr. Boland. Henry having scorned Hornblower's proffer, that brassy schemer had found a partner in Scanlon. They were working together now—that was the meaning of this latest development—this theft of the records of Boland General, to make some contemplated inside job look like an outside one.

Harrington had the natural antipathy of an honest man for a traitor—and a traitor to John Boland—to a whole people, seemed a rarely reprehensible brand of Judas.

He straightened up slowly to his full height. Fearless in his indignation he meant to confront the pair of them, for Hornblower was doubtless there also. He took two steps forward and then for the third time this night there burst upon his ears the sound of a low explosion. It appeared to take place just behind him. He heard it back there, right behind his ear, as it were

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 —right up against the back of his head; but he heard none of its reverberations. He heard nothing. Sound was blotted out for him. Sound and time—everything was blotted out.

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FTER a long while, he did not know how long, but ages and ages, he was listening once more for the echo of that explosion, and thinking all the while: "Scanlon, Scanlon—I've got to get that traitor, Scanlon."

But he wasn't standing up any more. Why, he—he was sopping wet—he was in water, afloat in it like a log and the water was cold. Almighty, but it was cold! He was not alone in the water though. Somebody was alongside—tugging at him—trying to get him out of the water—trying to get him on to a log—no, into some kind of boat. He tried to grip the arm that held him, a strong and muscled arm, and failed; he tried to help himself and could not. He was hurt; the back of his head was beginning to pain him terribly.

"Who . . . who beaned me?" he groaned and a voice, a voice that should have been familiar and yet was not, hissed into his ear a stern command to silence. Danger was still near evidently. And it was still dark. His mind swam away in this darkness off and off until he thought it would never come back at all. When it did come back the sun was shining brightly. That is, it was shining brightly outside but he was somewhere inside.

His first waking sensation was one of heat—heat. Lord! it was hot. This was an agreeable contrast, however, for his last waking sensation had been one of cold

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 —cold and wet. Yes; for he was clammy now on one side but hot, parching hot on the other. And no wonder! Some good Samaritan had been drying him out—by a fire.

Experimentally he straightened and began, of his own strength, to turn the dry front of him away from the embers, the damp back toward them. The sensation was delightful but the effort exhausting. His half-opened eyes closed again; his cheek was pillowed on something soft—something soft and hairy—on some kind of skin or fur. Again the sensation was delightful. Weak, warm, relaxed, he dozed off. But presently his eyes were open and staring curiously, taking further account of his surroundings. He was in a sort of bungalow, long and narrow, but crudely carpeted with skins.

Why, no—it wasn't a bungalow; it was a lodge—an Indian lodge, for there was a squaw—a little squaw—a pretty little squaw. She sat cross-legged on a stool regarding him absorbedly from the distance of two or three yards; she wore moccasins, leggings and a cougar skin for a skirt, a sleeved vest of deer-skin with the hair removed, fringed and slashed, and there was bead-work upon it. There were strings of tiny pink shells alternating with other strings of tiny white ones about her neck; some barely encircling it, some looping low upon her breast. Two braids of jet-black hair fell one in front of each shoulder.

The squaw had very black eyes but in complexion she was very light—white with brunette trimmings, as it were—yet unmistakably a squaw. The look she gave him was of the wild. It had the gravity of centuries in it, though the girl seemed about sixteen.

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 After his first start of surprise Henry stared and then managed a smile. Instantly the face of the little squaw brightened; red lips parted and white teeth gleamed at him most amiably, most encouragingly. He closed and opened his eyes quickly to make sure he had not been dreaming.

"I guess you are better," she said, in a perfect idiom with only the slightest trace of accent. The voice was refined—even cultured.

"I guess I am," said Harrington, struggling with a husk in his throat, but managing another smile.

"Perhaps you would like some more broth now."

"More broth?" murmured Henry confusedly.

"Yes," smiled the little squaw in a most self-satisfied way, and already she was up, passing round him with padding moccasined footsteps to the fireplace, where he heard the clang of a kettle cover; and a few seconds later she was back and holding a graniteware cup to his lips. Preceding the cup came a most delightful savor to his nostrils, a gamy, spicy fragrance that made him immensely hungry. The broth tasted as good as it smelled.

"It is delicious," he said, smacking his lips and feeling strangely content.

"Where am I?" it occurred to him to ask.

"On Lahleet's Island."

"And who is Lahleet?" Henry inquired. "Never heard of the lady, or her island."

"I am," the Indian girl answered demurely.

Henry started slightly and found himself contemplating the little woman with speculative interest. She was certainly a self-contained little piece.

"And how did I get to your island?"

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 "I brought you in my canoe." The Indian girl's face was still demure.

She was a part of his puzzle. Slowly Henry's mind attacked the problem of what had happened since he heard that last dull explosion. "Where did you bring me from?"

"From Adam John's island—Hurricane Island, that is."

Henry's mind associated quickly. Hurricane Island! That was the island Quackenbaugh and Scanlon were arguing about on that night a thousand years ago in Boland's den. Was that, then, Adam John's island? Henry was interested in Adam John and all that pertained to him for he had crawled out into No Man's Land one night and brought Adam John back with two bullet holes in him, and while Henry was doing this he acquired a bullet hole for himself. If you have saved a man's life you feel a proprietary interest in the man ever after.

The white man's slowly clearing consciousness centered in the girl again. She was the prettiest, the demurest, the most unaffected little thing! She had dropped down before him cross-legged, within reach of his hand, as if it were the most natural thing to do, and was answering his questions in a mood of entire neighborliness, contemplating him wonderingly the while as if he were some strange gift the gods had brought to her lodge. If the Shell Point Indians were like this—well, no wonder Mr. Boland could be sentimental over them!

"You paddle a canoe?" he asked, and found himself taking her right hand and feeling of it doubtingly. Yes; it was a calloused little hand and sinewy; yet the back

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 of it was soft, soft as velvet. He lifted it to where his eye could contemplate its form. It was a trifle thick and square for Caucasian standards of beauty; but none the less it was—charming.

"Who are you?" he asked abruptly, as sensing some mystery in her personality.

"I am a little Siwash," the girl answered with delicious gravity. Henry, still toying with the fingers of that hand, made a startling discovery—first with the sense of touch and then by a quick glance. He held the tips of the fingers toward her.

"Manicured," he accused.

But the Indian maid was undismayed. "I am a manicured Siwash," she smiled complacently.

Henry regarded her doubtfully a long time; and then, as if the enigma of her personality was too complex for weakened nerves, his eyes wandered past the girl, past the stool on which she had been sitting, past the bunk of skins which was the only detail of the furnishings his eyes had yet made out—passed on and then halted, staring wide. The windows were few and small, the interior was rather shadowy, but he made out—a piano! And a phonograph! Window curtains, too, of cretonne.

Lifting his astonished self upon an elbow, Henry took in the whole ensemble—a strange mixture of the crudities of an Indian lodge with the refinements of civilization—a conglomeration that heightened instead of allayed curiosity. In the shock of it Harrington tried to sit up but a whirl of pain shrieked through the back of his head.

"Oh, my . . . oh, my heavens!" he groaned and an involuntary hand went up. It came in contact with a mountain of bandages and surgical dressings.

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 "Who—who fixed me up?" he demanded confusedly.

"I fixed you up," smiled the Indian girl, again immensely well satisfied with herself.

"That was awfully kind of you, I'll say," admired Henry. "But—it feels like a doctor's job."

"I have had a nurse's training," explained the girl, "besides other training—two years at the Mission School in Seattle and two years in Carlisle."

"Um," grunted Henry, vastly relieved. That explains things. "He had heard of these cases; Carlisle Indians reverting to the blanket. The girl was less a mystery to him now; more a pleasant incident.

"You are a good little Siwash!" he approved, and patted the soft hand some more. He even reached out and patted the soft cheek and passed an exploring hand over the forehead because of an impulse to know the touch of that glossy hair. The little maid suffered these familiarities without protest. Perhaps that was Indian stoicism. Perhaps she liked it—this compliment of the white man's attention. "You are a darned nice little girl, Lahleet!" Henry approved, when suddenly gazing at her face brought another to his mind. "What time is it?" he asked abruptly, and fumbled for his watch.

"Eight o'clock," answered the girl, glancing at a tiny ivory clock.

"Eight o'clock of when?" Henry was still confused as to how much time had flown.

"Of Wednesday morning."

"Then I can make it," he gulped eagerly, "if—if How long will it take me to get to town, Lahleet? I positively must be there at ten o'clock."

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 four miles to Edgewater," she assured him. "I can have you on the mainland in five minutes. Adam John is waiting there now with his flivver; he will put you in town in fifteen minutes more."

"Thank God!" ejaculated Henry. "I had an engagement to play golf with Miss Boland at ten. I wouldn't miss it for the world."

The slightest possible change in expression appeared upon the face of the Indian girl.

"If you can stand the trip so soon," she qualified.

"Oh, I could stand the trip all right," declared Henry, "if—if I only had some more of that broth."

"Why, of course," assured the girl, suddenly gracious again. "Let me think," she exclaimed, and squatted motionless again while some inscrutable complex formed behind the mask of her pretty face. "Yes," she declared with emphasis, while the dark eyes glittered with the force of a new purpose, "yes, I can add something that will help—something that will make the broth stronger."

"That will be fine." Henry smacked his lips in pleasant anticipation. "Lahleet, you certainly are the goods."

As if pleased with the compliment, the girl bounded up and the moccasined feet again went padding about the fireplace. Her every movement was grace.

"You are herb-wise?" asked Henry, as he saw her crumbling dried leaves into a saucepan with water, and putting it to simmer amid the embers.

"All Indians are that," the girl answered quietly. "When it boils it will be ready."

"I think I might get up out of your way," proposed Henry, looking up as she stood almost over his feet.

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 "If your clothes are dry," his nurse consented, and gave him a hand.

"Gosh!" groaned the man, for again there was a chariot race of pain in the back of his head. "I must have got an awful whack!"

Henry found her frame as strong as steel and sturdy as a column as she half-lifted him to his feet and steadied his steps toward the couch of skins. As he balanced experimentally upon his legs, he caught sight through one of the narrow windows of the snow cap of Mount Gregory far in the distance, floating on a haze of mist.

"You put your window where you could see that?" he beamed, pointing to the hoary mountain that to him was like a friend.

The girl nodded. "For a thousand years those snows have fed the streams where my people fished and hunted," she said. "For a thousand years that mountain has been God to them. For a thousand it shall be God to me."

There was something infinitely old in the maiden's face as she made this mystical affirmation; and Harrington stared at her wonderingly. Her manner was not only cryptic; there was in it an odd suggestion of the occult. Perhaps it was the perception of this which impelled Henry suddenly to unburden himself of that central knot of interrogations which jangled so painfully in his mind that he had shrunk from uttering them.

"Perhaps you know just what happened to me," he blurted. "How I got in the water . . . who it was that pulled me out—and—all the rest."

"You fell into the water, I think; or were knocked

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 in. It was Adam John who pulled you out and took you to his island; and Adam John who came for me and helped me bring you here."

"But Adam John? . . . How did Adam John happen to be there?"

A sizzling sound proceeded from among the embers. "Oh, my medicine is boiling over!" the girl cried.

"It tastes bitter—a little bitter," observed Harrington when she had drained off a clear liquor from the saucepan and stirred it carefully into the broth.

"That is the medicine." The girl's nod was reassuring.

"It's good though, all the same," affirmed Henry, like an appreciative patient, and drained the contents in deep draughts declaring after each that he felt better already; and between each of them his eyes slanted upward at his nurse. The picture she made continued to attract him; but the mystery of her puzzled him. His memory seemed trying to associate her with something past—but for some reason could not.

"You should doze off for a little now," his nurse suggested.

"I must doze off quick then for I've got to wake up quick. Sit down here, you little Siwash, and hold my hand; perhaps I will sleep quicker." Henry was in a weakly playful mood.

With a whimsical smile, as if she found white men delightfully absurd, Lahleet dropped upon her heels beside the couch, the top of which was only six or eight inches from the floor, and took hold of Henry's hand. He contemplated her placidly. He liked the touch of her hand. Presently he was wondering how it would feel upon his cheek. To make certain he laid it there.

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 "That feels good, Lahleet," he sighed, "wonderfully cool and soothing. Perhaps if you would stroke my face I would doze off quicker."

In sympathetic gravity, the Indian girl began compliance—a soft, cooling, almost caressing touch, again and again repeated—a ministry of service that brought her face close to his face, some wild scent into his nostrils. Harrington, amused and gratified, enjoyed noting again that, aside from an aboriginal flattening of cheek bones, the details of her features were good while their combination was altogether charming and attractive.

Through half-closed eyes he mused and then proposed abruptly: "Would you kiss me, Lahleet?"

It was purely sensuous and casual, this desire. It had struck him that it would be an agreeable sensation to test the softness of those berry-red lips.

And if the Indian girl felt either surprise or a thrill she did not betray it. On the contrary she studied the face of her patient gravely as considering whether from the clinical standpoint a kiss might be good for him. She appeared to decide that it would and with the most professional manner, bent over and laid a velvety pair of lips atop of his own for an instant of time, a touch that was more like the caress of a kitten than of a woman; and yet there was warmth and rousing in it.

Henry lay quiescent, gratified but—lips working as if they yearned for a fuller experience.

"You are getting all waked up instead of dozing," his nurse decided, disappointedly. "I think I had best sing to you." Henry felt that he had been reproved—very delicately; not for asking for the kiss but for that yearning, wistful quiver for another one.

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 Lahleet rose quickly and took a banjo-shaped instrument from the top of the piano. It yielded yeeping bird-like notes in a very limited combination of tones but the girl played them over and over with an absorption in which her expression changed gradually from a kind of barbaric prettiness to something that was almost beauty.

"I cannot think that you are an Indian," Henry interrupted, "except for the scenery"—and he indicated the strings of shells and the fringes and slashes on the deer-skin vest.

The girl's eyes smoldered for an instant as in stubborn rebellion at the fate which had made of her a mixed-blood; then brightened quickly. "My father was a white man," she boasted. "My mother's father was a white man, but her mother was the daughter of Chief Keemah; that makes me a You do the arithmetic!" she broke off impulsively.

But Henry was becoming too drowsy for problems in arithmetic. He fell asleep instead.

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FTER a few minutes, as it seemed to Harrington, he awoke, feeling much better—it was miraculous how much better. But not only had his sleep been invigorating; it had been entertaining; it had been accompanied by dreams. He had dreamed about playing golf with Billie Boland. Oddest of all, he had dreamed that he was in love with her and, while it was a dream, that state was blissful in the extreme; but now that he was awake, he chuckled at the idea. She was charming and he was charmed; she was intriguing and he was intrigued but—his love life was in the past. He thought that, and stretched his long limbs indolently, but a twinge of pain reminded him that there was still a sore spot at the back of his head.

Yet his mood was happy.

"Lahleet!" he called. "I'm awake. I feel fine. You're a wiz. You're big medicine all right—Lahleet!"

The girl did not answer. Mystified, Harrington eased himself experimentally to an upright position and felt only the slightest dizziness. Yes, he was better, much better; but the room was empty.

Impatient he peered out the window above the couch—peered and was astonished. No sun was blazing yonder over the shoulder of Mount Gregory. He turned to the opposite window, and lo, the folds of the cretonne over there were alive with a golden glow. Perplexed he took a hasty stride in that direction but

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 was brought up with a sudden bang in the head—a bang of warning that he would have to avoid abrupt movements for some little time yet. With slower, chastened steps he gained this window and held its curtains wide; then muttered in astonished wrath. The sun was there, on that side, and half-way down the heavens—more than half-way. The time was no longer morning—it was afternoon. He had slept all day—he had missed the appointment to play golf with Miss Boland.

"Lahleet!" he called sharply; and this time there came an answer, but not from the Indian girl. To his utter astonishment there stepped from between curtains beyond the piano Miss Marceau, the teacher of the Indian School at Shell Point who had come to his office yesterday morning. She was dressed as then; she looked as then, prim, pretty and dignified, only a little reproving as at the harshness of his tone.

"Miss Marceau!" Harrington stammered. "How do you come here? I was looking for the little Indian girl. I was a trifle provoked with her. She has been awful kind to me—a regular good Samaritan. But she let me oversleep!"

"Yes?" queried Miss Marceau, in a concerned voice, but faintly tinged with rebuke. "You were sleeping so soundly that she wouldn't rouse you. Exhausted nature, no doubt; and, as it was only a golf game!"

"Hum! I see!" commented Henry, rather glumly. "Well, the damage is done now. Hum!" His eyes skirted the room. "Excuse me, Miss Marceau, if I sit!" he said, and sank down upon the stool to think it out. Yes—seven minutes past four by the ivory clock there upon the piano. The whole day gone! And—by

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 George, this was the day when Scanlon was coming to his office to—Scanlon! Scanlon! The thought of Scanlon was wildly inflaming. Scanlon, he had discovered, was a traitor—and a particularly base kind of traitor—planning a betrayal so gross and vile as to be almost unbelievable.

"I've got to get ashore, Miss Marceau," he announced desperately; "and as quickly as possible. Just who is this girl, Miss Marceau? One of your Shell Pointers, I take it? One of your pupils, perhaps? But—is she some relation to Adam John?"

"You have guessed it," smiled Miss Marceau; although in that shadow in which she kept her face a smile was but faintly distinguishable. "Adam John is Lahleet's foster-brother."

"Which reminds me, Miss Marceau!" exclaimed Henry with the challenging emphasis of a new thought. "Mr. Boland took up with me last night that matter of the Shell Point land. He wants to buy it."

"Boland? What!" cried the school-teacher in a startled voice. "I told you so!" she blazed, and came darting forward, then halted suddenly, as somehow dismayed with herself. But she had halted this time in the spotlight of that filtering glory from the parted cretonne curtain.

Harrington gaped with sudden wonder and rose slowly, staring. "You!" he exclaimed in amazement. "You are Lahleet?" he breathed incredulously, peering closer into the face now framed so differently from the one he had been looking at before he slept. The beads were gone; the strings of shells and the braids were gone; the whole environment of feature was changed.

"Lahleet Marceau," the little school-teacher mur-

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 mured in momentary confusion, for she had not meant to disclose herself so soon. Yet a mischievous twinkle came into her eyes at Harrington's bewilderment.

"Good Lord!" He reddened to the roots of his hair. "And I patted your hand. . . . I patted your cheek . . . I treated you like—like a child! I even asked you to kiss me."

Miss Marceau made no pretense of not enjoying his discomfiture.

"And you did kiss me!" he suddenly recalled.

"That was my aboriginal self which likes to be agreeable," Miss Marceau answered, mischievously demure as Lahleet had been.

"Well, I guess it was my aboriginal self that wanted you to on such short acquaintance," confessed Henry. "But then"—his countenance assumed a rueful expression—"I thought I had found such a nice little playmate."

"And haven't you?" Now the straight and dignified lips of Miss Marceau did not say this. It was exclaimed by the roguish black eyes of Lahleet; but Henry, a trifle put out with himself at having been hoaxed for five whole minutes, muffed that glance.

"You aren't the same in your tailor-mades," he declared. "Besides, what is the big idea? You and this conglomeration of savagery and civilization?"

"Just that there's the same conglomeration in me!" exclaimed Miss Marceau, with a frank, almost apologetic spreading of both her hands in an odd little gesture which comprehended all of her small full-bosomed figure. "I've parts of two college educations. I've had a lot of the white man's civilization—and some of its thrills.

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 "But the call of my people was too strong for me. I came back to them—I had to come, bringing, as you see, some of civilization with me. But sometimes"—her black lashes were lowered for an instant—"sometimes the call of those coppery drops in my blood is too strong for me; and I have to answer that also. I have to become what you saw me this morning—what you called me—a little Siwash."

Harrington found himself listening with both understanding and sympathy. "By George!" he said, "I don't blame you. There are times when I have wanted to get away from the white man and from the white man's civilization. I was wanting to . . . only"—and he passed a hand before his face—"only yesterday morning I was wanting to."

"And don't you want to—now?" The velvet eyes seemed to coax and challenge. Despite the tailor-mades, she was not the teacher now but the wild, impish creature he had seen this morning.

"You temptress!" he denounced, his tones big and robust. "No, I don't want to—now!" And then as if her subtle thrust had opened a way for the full humor of the joke she had played to strike home, Henry broke into laughter.

"How you fooled me!" he laughed. "Ha, ha, ha!" laughing till his head hurt him, laughing till tears forced themselves into his eyes. "You little witch, come here; and don't you ever dare to get dignified with me again!"

The pose of the teacher fell off from Miss Marceau like Cleopatra's last veil before the eye of Caesar. She was the Indian girl again, and laughing as excitedly as he. She advanced to the plea of his outstretched hands

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 and met them with her own. Henry shook them heartily, It might have seemed that he was going to presume a basis of familiarity as already established and kiss her; but he did not. Her action had been too naively trustful to be presumed upon. He merely swung her round him playfully—or started to.

"Gosh! my head!" he cried, and stood with one hand raised to the bandages while, with half-rueful expression, he gazed at the girl and laughed again. "You played me a good one, didn't you—didn't you?" he demanded, and then something. . . some triumphant quirk of the berry-red lips, something meaningful in her dark glance, a half-mystical twinkle of exultation as over a successful ruse, made him halt and stare at her—stare at her and divine: "You—you doped my broth, you little devil!"

The smile went out of Lahleet's face. She straightened proudly, a mild defiance in her glance as one who scorned to lie.

"You little aborigine! What did you do that for?" Harrington demanded, sternness not all simulated.

"To spite Miss Boland," she confessed coolly. "I do not like her. I saw you looking at her out of the window yesterday. I do not like designing women." A red spot enlarged in the center of each of Lahleet's cheeks, enlarged and burned, and a lip curled scornfully with the gleam of a white tooth that looked as if it could bite. Yet the little woman was so naively earnest, so childishly, so deliciously frank in her jealousy, that Henry could not even be resentful. He laughed, vastly amused.

"Designing? Fiddlesticks! On whom has she designs?"

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 "You! You said you would help me against John Boland and you are falling for her."

Henry's eyes widened again, but he was being deliciously entertained. So obviously this was not Miss Marceau, but the little Siwash accusing.

"She spoke to you at the Country Club yesterday afternoon, and just for that you went off and lay down and pulled up handfuls of grass on Pigeon Point."

"Oh, look here now!" Henry seized the girl by the elbows almost angrily. "I'm not going to have you spying upon me."

"It was lucky for you that somebody was spying last night when that yeggman slugged you on the head." The black eyes were bold now—impudent even.

"Adam John!" Henry cried out, humbled and shamed. "So that's how Adam John was there! Come here, you child!" he commanded sternly.

The girl obeyed him meekly.

"Listen," he said in the voice of one no longer to be trifled with. "For me, Miss Marceau is gone—sunk without a trace. You are Lahleet, the little Siwash. Get down there where you were this morning, while I sit on the couch and lecture you."

Half-jesting, half-serious, but sinking before the frown and the sheer power of a pointed index finger, the small brunette in the tailored suit, the brown silk stockings and oxfords to match, dropped cross-legged, Lahleet-fashion, to the floor. But when Harrington continued to frown so fiercely, the playful twitch went away from the corners of her mouth. She betrayed a guilty flush and stared up sober and submissive, as to someone infinitely older, who had the right to castigate her verbally.

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 "Now, look here, you little cougar kitten!" the lawyer warned. "You cut out this movie stuff. I'm not going to have you spying round on me. I can take care of myself. Besides, it's not nice, Lahleet—spying on your friends that way. It was luck, of course, that Adam John was around last night—by George, it was! And I'm grateful as a dog to him and you. But that sort of thing won't happen again.

"You must think of me as your friend—a thousand times your friend for what you and Adam did for me last night; and—especially, first and forever, you must put out of your head these absurd suspicions about the Bolands."

But the soft black eyes hardened at the name, and Harrington noticed it.

"Now, listen," he commanded very gravely, shaking his finger till almost it smote her little nose. "Listen!"

The girl's manner became dutifully attentive while Harrington expounded to her very clearly and earnestly and glowingly, with necessary elaborations of detail, all that great project for the benefit of the Shell Point Indians which John Boland had committed to him. The little woman listened at first wonderingly, then doubtingly, battling each point, but finally contritely, with a shamed light in her eyes.

"I'll help you!" she exclaimed impulsively, thrusting a warm little hand into his. "I'll help you. We'll get the signature of every member of the tribe within two weeks."

"Within two weeks?" glowed Henry. "Mr. Boland thought that might take two or three years."

The girl smiled, her accustomed pose of self-assurance quite reëstablished. "We can do it in two weeks,"

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 she affirmed with a delightful little emphasis upon the we. "But"—and the girl rose from her place at his feet—"you must be hungry."

"I am," confessed Henry, "hungry as a wolf; but I simply mustn't linger here another instant. You have done so much for me. Won't you please put me on the mainland at once?"

"Yes," assented the girl. "Come," and she led him outside.

"Do I understand you stay here alone at night?" Harrington asked, noting the wildness of the lodge's environment. "Aren't you afraid?"

"Afraid? The daughter of a chief afraid? Besides I do not go unarmed. I can shoot like a white man. I can throw a knife like an Indian. I—I can fight like the devil." Lahleet wrinkled her nose and grimaced at him delightfully.

"By Jove, I believe you would!" admired Henry.

"Just to prove that I'm not a marplot, that I kept you here because I thought your condition required it, Miss Boland will be waiting for you over at the landing," she announced over her shoulder as she led the way down the knoll through towering spruce and tamarack.

"Miss Boland! Oh, my Lord!" Henry was thinking of the figure he would make in his water-soaked and fire-dried evening clothes and sheik-like headgear of bandages.

"Yes," assured Lahleet, quite pleased with herself. "Adam had a job for this afternoon and I told him to telephone Miss Boland."

"But she—but she," stammered Henry. "You see I don't know her that well."

title: Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/93


text:
Page:Formal Complaints about the Conduct of The Right Honourable Dominic Raab MP, Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor, and Secretary of State for Justice.pdf/14

 may often be unaware of the impact. Both such types of behaviour may comprise bullying in the sense used in the FDA Case. I obtained further assistance, in terms of the range of possible behaviours which may be relevant in the context of an allegation of bullying, from the independent inquiry report of Dame Laura Cox DBE, "The Bullying and Harassment of House of Commons Staff" (15 October 2018).

61. My attention has also been drawn to the approach to bullying adopted by Sir Alex Allan in his findings as Independent Adviser into the Conduct of Priti Patel. He stated:

… ''The definition of bullying adopted by the Civil Service accepts that legitimate, reasonable and constructive criticism of a worker's performance will not amount to bullying. It defines bullying as intimidating or insulting behaviour that makes an individual feel uncomfortable, frightened, less respected or put down.''

62. I did not detect any difference of substance between Sir Alex Allan's approach to the meaning of bullying and that adopted in the FDA Case, which was itself considering Sir Alex Allan's findings. I have approached my findings of fact on the premise that it is necessary and appropriate to distinguish between "legitimate, reasonable and constructive criticism" of an employee's performance and behaviour capable of being regarded as bullying.

63. In his written representations to the investigation (addressed more generally below), the DPM contended that there must be an objective element to the alleged conduct before one could regard it as bullying. In particular, he suggested that the following question (derived from the test of harassment under section 2 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997) should form part of the test for determining whether bullying has taken place:

Did the person know, or ought they to have known, that the conduct in question was i) offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting; or ii) an abuse or misuse of power which was likely to undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient?

64. This proposed test may not represent an accurate statement of the legal position, at least in relation to the first limb of the test which the High Court adopted in the FDA Case.


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Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/412

 through successions of choice spots. Many of his districts have not been revisited. In a few I was his immediate successor.

By ill-luck M. Du Chaillu on both journeys just missed striking the main stream of the Ogowé, but he knew that it was there, and the information he brought back of the existence of a great river whose delta he recognised he had been exploring, was received in France with a more proper spirit than in England or Germany; and in 1862 MM. Serval, Bellay, and Griffon were commanded by the French government to trace the Nazareth, which Du Chaillu regarded as the chief mouth of his great river. This they did almost to the bend of it by Elivã z'onlange (called by Du Chaillu Anengué); but they failed to reach the junction of the Ogowé (called by Du Chaillu the Okanda) with the great river discovered by Du Chaillu, the Ngunie, which junction he