That was it to a T. His heart was so deeply rooted in exactly the right place that nothing external could get at it. Whatever downed Ruding would have to blow him up bodily--there was no detaching his heart from the rest of him. And that’s what I mean by an inbred quality, the inner pluck that you can bet on. I don’t say it’s not to be found in the proletariat and ‘new’ people, but not in quite the same--shall we say?--matter of course way. When those others have it, they’re proud of it or conscious of it, or simply primitively virile and thick-skinned; they don’t--like such as Ruding--regard not having it as ‘impossible,’ a sort of disgrace. If scientists could examine the nerves of men like him, would they discern a faint difference in their colour or texture--the result of generations of nourishment above the average and of a traditional philosophy which for hundreds of years has held fear to be _the_ cardinal offence? I wonder. He went out again in 1917, and was out for the rest of the war. He did nothing very startling or brilliant; but, as at school, he was always on the ball, finishing as hard as when he started. At the Armistice he was a Lieutenant-Colonel, and a Major when he was gazetted out, at the age of fifty-three, with the various weaknesses which gas and a prolonged strain leave in a man of that age, but no pensionable disability. He went back to Vancouver. Anyone at all familiar with fruit-growing knows it for a pursuit demanding the most even and constant attention. When Ruding joined up he had perforce left his ranch in the first hands which came along; and at that time, with almost every rancher in like case, those hands were very poor substitutes for the hands of an owner. He went back to a property practically valueless. He was not in sufficient health to sit down for another long struggle to pull it round, as after the Boer War, so he sold it for a song and came home again, full of confidence that, with his record, he would get a job. He found that his case was that of thousands. They didn’t want him back in the Army. They were awfully sorry, but they didn’t know what they could do for him. The Governmental education and employment schemes, too, seemed all for younger men. He sat down on the ‘song’ and the savings from his pay to wait for some ship or other out of his fleet of applications to come home. It did not come; his savings went. How did I know all this? I will tell you. One night last January I had occasion to take a cab from a restaurant in Soho to my club in Pall Mall. It was wet, and I got in hastily. I was sitting there comatose from my good dinner when I had a queer feeling that I knew the back of the driver. It had--what shall I call it?--a refined look. The man’s hair was grey; and I began trying to recollect the profile I had glimpsed when bolting in. Suddenly with a sort of horror the thought flashed through me: Miles Ruding! It was!