But the tide of battle was turned. Possibly most of the fights of humanity are decided two generations or more before one arrives on the field. The powers of inheritance and of tradition are strong and cumulative. The girl had said that she did not belong to her family, yet to-day when the country needed its children, blood asserted itself in her veins as the very blood of an American five generations ago who had fought and died for the thirteen colonies at King’s Mountain; of a woman, a girl, who about the same time had put her two babies behind her and fired steadily on the Indians at Cherry Valley; of two young great-uncles who had fallen, one on each side, for the right as each saw it, at the first Bull Run; of the great-grandfather who had sacrificed his waning strength to be a war governor, and the grandfather who had left this Garden Court which he loved, because the country needed him at a foreign post. Whether she willed it or not patriotism was in the girl’s blood, and while she steeled herself against its upsetting influence, that slow-rolling flood of tradition and inheritance which had shaped her was, subconsciously, shaping her still. Forces of good are strong as well as forces of evil, and the habit of one generation is the inborn tendency of another. “Eric, are you speaking anywhere in civilization this week?” inquired his father. “If it isn’t too colossal an effort, I’d like to hear you.” The two tall, handsome men, alike in build and feature, sharply different in expression, sat of another June Sunday morning, in wicker chairs, smoking tranquilly, in the rose-garden. The Dorothy Perkins lattice was a bit more broken, the gravelled walks a bit greener with weeds, the aspect around a bit more neglected than two years ago. About the garden moved as before the tall, thin figure in a white frock, swinging a basket, piling into the basket masses of red and pink. She came and stood before them at the sentence as a bird might halt in its careless flight. “Do, beautiful one,” she urged. “He makes a dream of a speech, and you’d be proud. You might even buy Liberty Bonds--you might. Everybody loosens up and buys bonds when Eric stands there and turns on his winning way.” Mannering’s sarcastic, easy smile came before his slow words. “I? Buy bonds? With what? I haven’t money to be patriotic.”