“The old minister shut his book when I came in. Nina led me up to her father. He recognized me and smiled. I said a few words, but I doubt if he listened. He pointed towards the book on the minister’s knee—he could move his left hand—and tried to say something: I think that he was trying to pursue the subject that engrossed him, perhaps to get my opinion on it. But the next moment he gave a smothered sort of cry—not loud at all—and moved his hand towards his heart. Napier darted across the room to him; Nina put her arm round his neck and kissed him. He gave a sigh, and his head fell back on her arm. He was gone—all in a minute—gone to get the answer to his question. Then there was a ringing of bells, of course, and they came in and took him way. Nina put her hands in mine for a second before she followed them out of the room: ‘My dear father!’ she said. Then she put her arm in young Frost’s, and he led her out of the room, very gently, in a very gentleman-like way, I must say. I was left alone with the old minister. ‘The end of a remarkable life!’ I said, or something of that sort. ‘I’m glad it came so easily at the end.’ He bowed his white head. ‘He did great things for his country,’ he answered. ‘God’s ways are not our ways, Sir Paget.’ I said good-by, and left him with his book.” A month after Lord Dundrannan’s death I got Christmas leave, came to England, and went down to Cragsfoot on the Friday before Christmas Day; it fell on a Monday that year. It was jolly to be there again, and to find old Waldo out of danger and getting on really famously. But how he was changed! I will not go into the physical changes—they proved, thank God, in the main temporary, though it was a long time before he got back nearly all his old vigor—but I can’t help speculating on how much they, and the suffering they brought, had to do with the change in the nature of the man. Perhaps nothing; it is, I suppose, rather an obscure subject, a medical question; but I cannot help thinking that they worked together with his other experiences. At least, they must have made him in a way older in body, just as the other experiences made him older in mind. I never realized till then—though I ought to have—how very little I had really been through, in what had seemed two tolerably exciting and exhausting years, compared to him who had “stuck it through” all the time at the front. I said something of this sort to him as we gossiped together, and it set him talking.