"How I should like to have seen you together," Rowena said with her happy laugh. "Now we'll dismiss the child," he said somewhat peremptorily. "Did you enjoy your boat the other day?" "So much. And I enjoyed this all the better when I came back to it. Change is good for most folk, I suppose. I had a visit from the Frasers yesterday. They were horrified to think I should be meditating spending the winter here." "They would be. But I wonder if you will do it." "Yes, I will," Rowena said, a shadow seeming to fall across her bright eyes. "What a lot of thinking I shall do! I have done a good bit already." He looked up quickly at her. "Tell me some of your deductions." "Oh, they are not very original. The mystery of life, and of sadness and gladness. I have begun to have a glimmer of light. There may be some good in our awful experience of the past four or five years. Somehow or other a character without any gravity in its composition has lost its attractiveness to me. The Fraser girls jarred upon me. They do resent and despise those who will not dance to their pleasure. Does it mean that this forced seclusion of mine is making me jump into the solid impassive state of old age?" He did not answer. Then she asked him somewhat wistfully: "Have you made any useful deductions during your convalescence?" He answered her by asking an apparently irrelevant question. "Did you ever meet Cuff Mackenzie? He was in the Scots Guards, and my regiment lay with his for some considerable time at the Front. Forgive a personal remark, but your eyes remind me of his, except perhaps that there was a graver light in his. A serenity that used to baffle me. He was shot, poor chap, close by my side. I helped carry him into his trench, and he only lived an hour. But he bequeathed me a legacy, and said with his dying breath that it was a key to the present history of the world. He asked me to study it. So I have been doing it. His copious notes on the margins have given me the clue to doing it. And I am intensely interested." "It's a book? What's the name? Who's the author?" "Oh, we all possess a copy of it. It's the Bible." "The Bible!" Rowena looked amused. "Do you know, I don't possess a Bible! Granny was quite shocked. She has placed a fat black one on my chest of drawers. I used one at school, but somehow I lost it, and never replaced it. It has never come into my calculations. Of course one hears it in church." "Mackenzie was very keen on prophecy. He got half the fellows in the Mess hanging on his words one night. He told them that Allenby's victory in the East was a triumphant fact for all Bible students, and proved it. I was there, and since I've owned his well-worn copy, I've been discovering a good deal." "I thought the Bible was quite out of date in these days," said Rowena. "Even the preachers in London were always putting their knife into it, and trying to prove that most of it was fable."