Each day, alongside the war news, he read of strikes and rumours of strikes, and when he came to ask himself the reason why, he was appalled at his own ignorance. Something was wrong somewhere; something which would have to be put right. And the trouble was that it did not seem a matter of great ease to put it right. He felt that the glib phrases about Capital and Labour pulling together, about better relations between employers and men, about standing shoulder to shoulder, failed to hit the point. They were rather like offering a hungry lion a halfpenny bun. They could always be relied on to raise a cheer from a political platform provided the right audience was present; but it seemed doubtful whether even such a far-reaching result as that was quite enough. At times his natural indolence made him laugh inwardly. "What on earth is the use?" he would mutter, throwing pebbles into the pond below him. "What has to be--has to be." It was a favourite haunt of his--that pond; in the heart of a wood, with a little waterfall trickling over some rounded stones and falling musically into the pond a few feet below. The afternoon sun used to shine through the branches of some great beech trees, and the dense undergrowth around screened him from the observation of any chance passer by walking along the path behind. . . . "You can't do anything," the mocking voice would continue. "So why worry?" But the mental jaundice was passing--and the natural belief of man in himself was coming back. Ho felt the gas expert had been right, even though he had died. And so Vane became a reader of books of a type which had not formerly been part of his daily programme. He was groping towards knowledge, and he deliberately sought every help for the way. He tried some of H. G. Wells's to start with. . . . Previously he had read the "First Men in the Moon," because he'd been told it was exciting; and "Ann Veronica," because he had heard it was immoral. Now he tried some of the others. He was engaged thus when Joan Devereux found him one afternoon in his favourite haunt. She had stumbled on his hiding place by mistake, and her first instinct was to retire as quickly as she had come. Since their first meeting, their conversation, on the rare occasions they had met at Rumfold Hall, had been confined to the most commonplace remarks, and those always in the presence of someone else. Any possibility of a _tete-a-tete_ she had avoided; and the necessary mental effort had naturally caused her to think all the more about him. Now, just as she halted in her tracks and prepared to back out through the undergrowth, Vane looked up at her with his slow lazy smile. "Discovered!" he remarked scrambling to his feet, and saluting her. "Joan, you have come in the nick of time." "I would prefer you not to call me Joan," she answered coldly. "And after your abominable rudeness last time we were alone together, I don't want to talk to you at all."