"If it were like this all the time!" Ruth answered a thought wistfully as she floated with paddling hands, sea and sky, as it was in the beginning, enveloping her. "Like music in church. Just the peace that passeth understanding, as my Miss Caryll'd say." "Ah," said Ernie, speaking with the profound sagacity that not seldom marks the words of the foolish. "Might be bad for us. If there was nothing to fight we'd all be like to go to sleep. That's what Mr. Trupp says." "Some of us might," said Ruth, the girl slyly peeping forth from her covering womanhood. "Look at Germany!" continued the wise man, surging closer. "Look at what the Colonel said the other night at the Institute. We're the rabbits; and Germany's the python, the Colonel says." "That for Germany!" answered Ruth, splashing the water with the flat of her hand in the direction of the rising sun. "And she's all the while a-creepin--a-creepin--closer acrarst the sea," said Ernie, edging nearer--"for to SWALLOW US UP!" And with a rush he engulfed her young body in his arms. CHAPTER III THE WATCHMAN ON THE HEAD On one of the last days of that brilliant October, just before the grey curtain of rains descended to blot out autumn fields and twinkling waters, Colonel Lewknor and his wife moved into the hostel. On that first evening Mrs. Lewknor came down the broad stair-case in "review order," as she called it, to celebrate the consummation of the first stage of her project, and found her husband standing at the sea-ward window of the hall, a Mestophelian figure, holding back the curtain and peeping out. Quietly she came and stood beside him, about her shoulders the scarlet cape a Rajput Princess had given her after Lord Curzon's durbar. The house, which was the solitary building in the great coombe, stood back some hundred yards from the cliff along which the coast-guard's path to Beau-nez showed up white-dotted in the darkness. The Colonel was staring out over the misty and muffled waters, mumbling to himself, as was his way. "We shall get a nice view from here, anyway," he said with his satyr-like chuckle. She laid her hand upon his shoulder. "Of what?" she asked. "The landing," he replied. She rippled off into a delicious titter. After thirty years of married life her Jocko was still for Rachel Lewknor the most entertaining of men. "You and Mr. Trupp!" she said. "A pair of you!" For the two men had drawn singularly close since the Colonel on retirement had established himself in Meads. The old soldier in truth came as something of a revelation to the great surgeon, who delighted in the other's philosophical mind, his freedom from the conventional limitations and prejudices of the officer-caste, his wide reading and ironical humour.