Jerry drank ceremoniously and alone, but there was a fuller tribute than any emptied glass ever tokened--in the brimming eyes of Noreen.... The boys were in the hall. “I’m going--not to war, lads--but to bed,” Cardinegh said, and presently called after them at the door: “May the patchwork for peace fail to cover the knees of the nations!” Noreen was alone. Her brain, sensitive from weariness and wounds, moved swiftly, restlessly. She knew at this moment the correspondents would be discussing the phases of her father’s madness--whispering at Tetley’s of the fall of the chieftain. Later, at the banquet-table, when the wines swept away all lesser regards, they would no longer whisper.... These men were her friends all. Not one would have hesitated to serve her well in any need. She did not want to do them an injustice; and yet there was something in their minds that was stinging and foreign now. The cause was in her own mind, and she realized it. They were big among men, big among their kind, honorable and genuine, but it was not in human reason for them to share her immutable trust, any more than they could share the feminine outpouring of her heart for the man afield. Also she knew that there were few things in this world that Routledge could have done wicked enough to shake these men so utterly from allegiance to him. He had been to them a mystical attraction of virtue, as he was now in their eyes the imperator among criminals. She understood something of what her father had passed through in the recent hours. The sight of the Bookstalls boy had withered him like some disordered ghost; and yet, to her, there was a greater tragedy in watching her father try to hold his old place as chief at the table of war-men. He had not lost that king-torture of consciousness which showed him that he was not as he had been. His struggle to cast out the abiding fatuities, and to regain his old high place of mental activity, was terrible to witness--like the suspension of his faculties upon a cross. Little could be added now to Noreen’s suffering. It is not given to one in the depths to realize what perfect soul-substance the recent months had brought her. The thought had come in her happier reactions, that if she were like other human beings, the patience, the self-control, and the purity of her yearning--this bearing all cleanly and without a cry--was great with tempering and expansion. But the hunger within her was deep and masterful for the end of it all. As never before, she felt the need of a human force to lean upon. There was neither priest nor pastor nor woman in her life. Her heart cried out for a greatness such as Routledge had suggested in Rawder. To her, their bravest man was a splendid, glowing picture of sorrows; before such a one she could have knelt and found healing, indeed.... And with what infinite content could she have knelt in this hour before the disciple of Rawder!