WORLD'S END

Lanny could understand all that; but he said: "What good will it do you to be respectable if you aren't happy?"

"But, Lanny!" she exclaimed. "I mean to be happy with Harry."

"Maybe," said he; "but I don't believe you'll ever forget that you left Marcel without any cause. Suppose he goes and jumps off the Cap?"

"Oh, Lanny, he won't do that!"

"How can you be sure? And then, suppose that France mobilizes? Marcel will have to go to war, won't he?"

Beauty turned pale; that was the horror she couldn't bring herself to face. The boy, seeing that he had the advantage, pushed harder. "Could you bear to leave him if you knew he had gone to fight for his country?" All Beauty could do was to bury her face in her arms and weep. Lanny said: "You better wait and see what happens."

III

They wouldn't have to wait long. Surely nobody could complain of the slowness of events at the end of July 1914! First it was Russia mobilizing one and a quarter million men; then it was the German Kaiser serving an ultimatum to the effect that Russia had to cease mobilizing. Paris buzzed like a beehive at swarming time; for France was Russia's ally and was bound to go to war if Russia was attacked.

Robbie had said that the governments would find him, and they did. By one means or another, word spread that the representative of Budd's was staying at the Hotel Crillon, in a front suite with a pleasant view up the Champs-Йlysйes. Military gentlemen representing most of the governments of Europe came to enjoy that view, and partake of the array of drinks which Robbie had upon the sideboard in his reception room - all going onto the expense account of a munitions salesman. The immaculately uniformed gentlemen came to find out what stocks Budd's had on hand at present - of guns and ammunition, of course, not of whiskies, brandies, and liqueurs.

Robbie would smile suavely, and say that he regretted that Budd's was such a very small plant, and had practically no stocks on hand. "You know how it is, I begged your General So-and-So to place an order last year. I warned you all what was coming."

"Yes, we know," the military gentlemen would reply, sorrowfully. "If the decision* had rested with us, we should have been prepared. But the politicians, the parliaments" - they would shrug their shoulders. "What could we do?"

Robbie knew all about politicians and parliaments; in his country they were called Congress and had steadily refused to vote what the safety of the country required. Now, of course, there would be a quick change, the purse strings would be loosened. The policy of Budd's was fixed; it was "first come, first served" to all the world. The terms in this present crisis would be fifty percent of the purchase price to be placed in escrow with the First National Bank of Newcastle, Connecticut, before the order was accepted; the balance to be placed in escrow a week before the completion of the order, to be paid against bills of lading when shipment was made. Munitions makers had grown suddenly exacting, it appeared. Robbie added confidentially - to everyone - that he had cabled his firm recommending an immediate increase of fifty percent in its entire schedule of prices: this to meet inevitable rises in the cost of materials and labor.

The visitors would depart; and while the next lot cooled their heels in the lobby, the salesman would take off the heavy alligator-skin belt which he always wore, slip a catch, and draw out several long strips of parchment with fine writing on them. He would sit at his portable typewriter, the newest contraption created by Yankee ingenuity, and would study the parchment strips and proceed to type out a cablegram in code.

That secret code had been one of the thrills of Lanny's life for several years. It was changed every time Robbie made a trip, and there were only two copies of it in existence; the other was in the possession of Robbie's father. The one other person who knew about it was the confidential clerk who devised it, and who did the decoding for the president of the company. The belt in which Robbie kept his own copy was never off his person except when he was in the bathtub or in swimming; usually he swam from a boat, and before he sank down among the fishes he would make sure there were no agents of foreign governments near by.