If you take the Central London Tube to the Bank Station; fight for your place in the lift; climb the tortuous staircase to Lombard Street; pass along that narrow, money-glutted thoroughfare, where scarlet-vested, top-hatted bank-messengers take dignified way from the sign of the Phoenix to the swinging doors of the Crédit Lyonnais: if, crossing Gracechurch Street below the clock of the London & South-Western Bank, you enter less-aristocratic Fenchurch Street and take the first zig-zag turning on your left, you will find—hidden between a stationer’s shop and a grocer’s—two swing doors, each with a brass name-plate from which the black lettering, “P. JAMESON AND COMPANY, CIGAR IMPORTERS,” has been almost erased by forty years of incessant polishing. And if you care to penetrate yet farther round that gray curving Lime Street, past the church of St. Andrew Undershaft, into the heart of Havana cigardom, St. Mary Axe, you will still find—clustered round the maroon marble of the Baltic Exchange—the warehouses of “Schornstein & Co.,” of “Beresford & Beresford,” of “Samuel Elkins & Son,” and others with whom Peter traded, intrigued, lunched and gossiped, between the years 1903 and 1914. But you will not find, search the City as you will, Peter Jameson, sometime senior partner in Peter Jameson & Company, and chairman of Nirvana Limited, Manufacturers of High-grade Cigarettes. Because—whatever war may have accomplished of good or evil to us other millions whom it caught up into its vortex—to Peter it came like a great cleansing storm, terrifying in its violence, unfathomable in its purposes, but bearing him at the last, past many rocks of doubt and fear, to sure harbourage, to certainty of body and of soul—and, better even than these, to Love. This, in so far as one man may tell another’s story, is the tale of that voyaging. § 2 Three families—the Jamesons, the Gordons, and the Baynets—are principally concerned in this story. All three were originally English yeomen; country, not county folk; probably peasants—in the best sense of the word. In the Jamesons and the Gordons there is an admixture of exotic Hebraic blood: that of the Señora Elvira de Miranda y Miraflores, who married a Captain Bradley of the British West India Regiment, then stationed in Jamaica, and had by him two daughters, one of whom married Peter’s father in 1880, and the other—some three years later—John Gordon, father of Peter’s cousin, Francis Gordon. The Baynet stock is pure English.