As if in a flash she saw as he lingered on the words that he was speaking of a thing of which he had secretly thought often and much, though he had allowed no human being to suspect it. She had not suspected it herself. In a secretive, intense way he had passionately desired a son. "If you had had a son--" she repeated. "He would have stood for both--the past and the future--at the beginning of a New World," he ended. He said it with such deliberate meaning that the magnitude of his possible significance caused her to draw a sudden breath. "Is it going to be a New World?" she said. "It cannot be the old one. I don't take it upon myself to describe the kind of world it will be. That will depend upon the men and women who build it. Those who were born during the last few years--those who are about to be born now." Then she knew what he was thinking of. "Donal's child will be one of them," she said. "The Head of the House of Coombe--if there is a Head who starts fair--ought to have quite a lot to say--and do. Howsoever black things look," obstinately fierce, "England is not done for. At the worst no real Englishman believes she can be. She _can't_! You know the old saying, 'In all wars England loses battles, but she always wins one--the last one.' She always will. Afterwards she must do her bit for the New World." CHAPTER XVIII This then was it--the New World and the human creatures who were to build it, the unborn as well as those now in their cradles or tottering in their first step on the pathway leading to the place of building. Yet he himself had no thought of there being any touch of heroic splendour in his way of looking at it. He was not capable of drama. Behind his shut doors of immovability and stiff coldness, behind his cynic habit of treating all things with detached lightness, the generations and the centuries had continued their work in spite of his modernity. His British obstinacy would not relinquish the long past he and his had seemed to _own_ in representing it. He had loved one woman, and one only--with a love like a deep wound; he had longed for a son; he had stubbornly undertaken to protect a creature he felt life had treated unfairly. The shattering of the old world had stirred in him a powerful interest in the future of the new one whose foundations were yet to be laid. The combination of these things might lead to curious developments. They sat and talked long and the developments were perhaps more unusual than she had imagined they might be.