Wondering again as he had wondered before whence this freckled scrub of a boy had derived his instincts of the gentleman born and bred, Jeremy answered gravely: “It might be. That’s for you to decide, Buddy.” “I kinda guess She’d like for you to see this.” He dug out of his pocket a crumpled sheet, covered with the strong, straight, beautiful script of Marcia. “Read there, Boss.” He indicated an inner page. “...or later it must come,” the letter ran. “As soon as you are old enough you must learn to be a soldier. Every one in the world who can, must learn to be a soldier. I cannot tell you, Buddy, of the terrible thing that German national ambition is; how it reaches out into every nation to make that nation its tool; how it aims to overrun the world and make it one vast Germany. You will be old enough soon to see what it is doing in your own little city, so far away. Perhaps you do not comprehend. Perhaps you will not understand even what I am writing; but you may find some one on your paper who will know and will explain.” “I think, perhaps, I was meant to see this, Buddy,” interjected Jeremy. “But I guess I know what She was drivin’ at all right,” replied the boy. “How can America be so blind!” Jeremy read on. “How can its newspapers be so blind! The last numbers of The Guardian that I saw, no word of arousing the people to a sense of what all this means. Oh, Buddy, Buddy! If you were only a man and had a newspaper of your own! I have written your aunt about the books and...” The bottom of the page terminated the reading. Jeremy, with his lips set straight and hard, handed back the sheet. The boy faced him with a candid eye. “Boss, you’re a man,” he said. “Am I?” said Jeremy, more to himself than in reply. “And you got a noospaper of your own.” “Not of my own, wholly.” “Ain’t it?” cried Buddy, amazed. “Who’s in on it?” “The people who read it, and believe in it. It’s partly theirs. The men I work with to help keep politics straight and fair. I have to think of them.” Buddy sighed. “It ain’t as big a cinch as it looks, ownin’ a paper, is it!” “Not these days, son.” “Anyway, I guess She knows,” asseverated the stout little loyalist. “She’s lived there an’ she oughta know. What She says goes, with me.” The clear single-mindedness of a boy! How the editor of The Guardian, feeling a thousand years old, envied his lowliest assistant! How the unstilled ache for Marcia woke and throbbed again at her words! She had begged him not wholly to forget her. Had it been a spell laid upon him it could have been no more compelling. He wondered whether, twenty years hence, her influence would have become less vital, less intimate upon him, and, wondering, knew that it would not.