Arms linked, they passed into the curtained bed-room. Mauve-shaded candles burned on the white over-mantel, on the table by the lace-canopied cot. Blinking at the light, still only half awake, lay Peter the Fourth. The newly-weaned baby smiled happily at its parents. Peter the Fourth, they thought, would have his mother’s hair, his father’s eyes: Peter the Fourth, they thought . . . but what these two thought about their eight-months old son would fill a prologue, an epilogue, and a hundred chapters in between. As Evelyn confided, early in the summer, to Primula: “I don’t believe a word of that gooseberry-bush story, Prim. I believe Mummy and the pater made that child themselves. They couldn’t be so gone on it”—(“gone on,” acquired from Garton, was _the_ school-room word of the moment)—“if they’d just _found_ it.” Said Primula, sternly practical, “It must be frightfully difficult to make a baby. Think of its ears. . . .” The two girls came running, fully dressed, into Patricia’s room just as Peter slipped off for his bath; stood chattering till Patricia shooed them away and rang for Elizabeth. . . . § 2 The Peter Jameson who breakfasted with his wife at a quarter to eight on Armistice Morning was a very different animal from the our Mr. Jameson whose taxi had driven up to 22 a. Lowndes Square, London, four and a half years previously. Grayed hair and lined face still betrayed convalescence, the weariness of war-time; but his eyes, his voice, the whole atmosphere of happiness he exuded, testified a change in the man’s mentality. His essential creed had not altered: he still believed in work, and in successful work; he still loathed inefficiency, slackness, the never-mind-tomorrow attitude. But love, impersonated in Patricia, had softened the harshness of his youth; taught him the grand lesson of tolerance. Love had nearly bridged that vast, bitter gulf between fighting-man and stay-at-home: almost, he saw England whole—-not a country divided against itself, but a People working hand-in-hand for the common cause. Love, too, had opened Peter Jameson’s eyes so that they saw not only profits but also beauty in the new work to which he had dedicated himself.