And so the younger folk got all the thrills the papers could afford them, and all the enjoyment out of life that was to be had under the circumstances; and no one, from their merry talk and laughter, would have imagined that just across the water issues so tremendous for the future of the world were surely and quickly coming to grips. Gregor MacLean lived with his widowed mother at White Lodge, on the other side of Willstead Common. He was an only son, but, through the good Scotch common-sense of his parents, had escaped the usual penalty of only sons. He was in fact a genuinely good fellow, somewhat reserved and unexpressive of his feelings, and in no way spoiled either by his mother’s delight in him or the good-sized shoes he had stepped into at his father’s death. He was on the Stock Exchange, in his late father’s firm, Dymoke and MacLean, of Draper’s Gardens. But the Stock Exchange was for the time being dead, and as Gregor said he saved in every way,--money, gray matter, and nervous energy--by stopping at home, he stopped at home and enjoyed himself,--gauging the pulse of affairs by the price of Consols and the Bank-rate in the evening and morning papers, and laying in stores of health on the links, while yet there was time, against the demands the future might make upon him. The firm of Dymoke and MacLean was of long-standing and high repute. It had a solid old connection which at the best of times did little in the way of speculation, and never dreamed of realising when things were at their worst. It did, occasionally, when the bottom had fallen out of things generally, confer ponderously with the heads of the firm and empower them to buy for it good old reliable stock which the less fortunate had had to jettison, and sometimes it invested on a large scale, as provision for younger sons and unmarried daughters. And so the business was an eminently safe one and satisfactorily profitable, and old John Dymoke could sit comfortably in his big swing-chair in his office in Draper’s Gardens, no matter what wild storms swept the Street outside, and young Gregor could spend his days on the links with perfect equanimity, though the virus of possible war had thrown the Exchanges of the world into convulsions such as they had not known for generations. Mr Dymoke played neither golf nor tennis. He loved Draper’s Gardens and the society of his old cronies of the Exchange. Gregor MacLean took great interest both in golf and tennis and in the play of Miss Honor Dare, and looked upon Draper’s Gardens as one of the necessities of a comfortable existence but not as a place to spend more time in than was absolutely imperative. And that is how he came to be spending profitable days on the links while his less-pleasantly-situated fellows were worrying themselves gray over the slowly unfolding developments of international politics.