The tone which expressed Donal Muir--in common with many others of his age and sex--was a novel and abnormal one. His being no longer sang the healthy human song of mere joy in life and living. A knowledge of cruelty and brutal force, of helplessness and despair, grew in him day by day. Causes for gay good cheer and laughter were swept away, leaving in their places black facts and needs to gaze at with hard eyes. "Do you see how everything has _stopped_--how nothing can go on?" he said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with--dancing and tennis and polo and theatres and parties--how jolly and all right they were in their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand talk of them! There is only one thing." The blue of his eyes grew dark. "It is as if a gigantic wall were piling itself up between us and Life," he went on. "That is how I see it--a wall piling itself higher every hour. It's built of dead things and maimed and tortured ones. It's building itself of things you can't speak of. It stands between all the world and living--mere living. We can't go on till we've stormed it and beaten it down--or added our bodies to it. If it isn't beaten down it will rise to heaven itself and shut it out--and that will be the end of the world." He shook his head in sudden defiant bitterness. "If it can't be beaten down, better the world _should_ come to an end." Robin put out her hand and caught his sleeve. "It will be beaten down," she cried. "You--_you_--and others like you--" "It will be," he said. "And it's because, when men read the day's news, almost every single one of them feels something leaping up in him that seems strong enough to batter it to earth single-handed." But he gently put out his own hand and took in it the slim gloved one and looked down at it, as if it were something quite apart and wonderful--rather as if hands were rare and he had not often seen one before. There was much sound of heavy traffic on the streets. The lumbering of army motor trucks and vans, the hurry of ever-passing feet and vehicles, changed the familiar old-time London roar, which had been as that of low and distant thunder, into the louder rumbling of a storm which had drawn nearer and was spending its fury within the city's streets themselves. Just at this moment there arose the sound of some gigantic loaded thing, passing with unearthly noises, and high above it pierced the shrilling of fifes. Robin glanced about the empty garden. "The noise seems to shut us in. How deserted the Gardens look. I feel as if we were in another world. We are shut in--and shut out," she whispered. He whispered also. He still looked down at the slim gloved hand as if it had some important connection with the moment.