When the two women at last came arm-in-arm down the staircase, it seemed to Peter Jameson as though it was Beatrice who had been crying; but she talked happily enough through tea-time—and refused his escort beyond the ricks of Tebbits’ Farm. Peter, watching the slight figure dwindling down the meadow-path into the mist of a March twilight, could not help thinking to himself, “A girl like that is much too good for poor old Francis.” Then, remembering that he had a bone to pick with Patricia, he strode rapidly back to Sunflowers. § 4 Francis Gordon sat at his great desk by the open window. All day he had been conscious of springtime, of a stir in his veins, a longing, a dissatisfaction. What did springtime or any time matter to him—to Francis Gordon? All his real springtimes lay behind: in front, stretched nothing but a gray void of seasons—hopeless and lonely. His brave days had gone down in dust. He was a cripple—a drag on the swift wheels of humanity—clog in a bright machine. And his one puny Power, the power of words he had once deemed so strong, that too availed nothing. “To write!” he thought, “O God, to _write_ when the world’s hand is on the sword-hilt. . . .” He looked out across Arlsfield Park. The sun, just dipping behind crest-line, irradiated the broad avenue of close-bitten turf. Feeding bunnies made sable dots all about the green: a herd of deer, antlered shadows, moved in and out among the new-leafed chestnut trees. At avenue’s end, the hills swelled blue-purple to a rose wash of sky. . . . But sunset’s beauty made no appeal to the heart of Francis Gordon. It felt cold, the heart within him, heavy with the sorrows of the world. Sunsettings and sunrisings—beauties of inanimate senseless things—God’s mockeries at humanity! God? . . . The man laughed. As if there were a God! He—whoever He might be—was no god, but a devil, a torturer. Yet men tricked themselves into this idea of godhead. Every cruelty in the world had been perpetrated in the name of some deity. The very Beasts in Gray wore His Name for device. And he, Francis Gordon, in the pride of his brain, had submitted to such trickery. For the sake of this fool-god, he had renounced the one woman. In return for that renunciation, the fool-god had promised him the Power of Words. He was to write, to spend his life at this stupid desk. . . . Meanwhile, _men_ fought. . . . He began to think of his own tiny share in that great fighting. Even there, he had not played a man’s part. Better to be one of those tortured men he had seen in the prison-camps of the Beast, than—a spy. Yes, a spy—it came down to that in the end. If only he had killed one Beast, killed it with his own hands, squeezed the life-blood from its foul throat. . . .