He liked this, for it was the first really girlish thing she had said. Perhaps even at that stage Faber read her wholly, and believed that it was good for her to see "common sense in curl papers," as he put it. He might even have led her to talk of her father and her home had not the inexorable secretary knocked upon the door at that very moment. The summons brought him to "attention," as the call of a sergeant to the new recruit. "Time is unkind to us," he said. "I must go down to Throgmorton Street to make a hundred thousand dollars. Well, we shall meet again in Paris or Berlin. A thousand dollars for your I.A.L. if we don't. Remember me to your father, please. Is he likely to accept that call to Yonkers, by the way?" "I don't know," she said quite simply; "he is so ignorant about American money." John Faber smiled at that. Gabrielle went down the Strand blushing furiously, and wondering why she had said anything at once so honest and so foolish. CHAPTER III BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH I Clad in an alpaca coat, which had long since lost its lining, and in carpet slippers very much too large for him, Gordon Silvester awaited his daughter's return to the house in Well Walk. The luncheon bell had rung a second time, and God alone knew what was in the mind of Agatha, the cook. Silvester feared this woman greatly, especially in those frequently recurring seasons when her madness ran to taking the pledge. It was a quarter past two when Gabrielle returned, and they should have lunched at half-past one. The minister's anxiety was above all meats, and in his curiosity to know what had happened he forgot the sainted martyr below stairs. "Well, is he willing, my dear?" Gabrielle drew a chair to the table; she carried a couple of letters in her hand, and glanced at their envelopes while she spoke. "Oh, my dear father, it was quite hopeless." Silvester sighed, and took up his knife and fork. It was a terrible descent from the millennium to mutton; but, after all, he ate but to live. "I feared it would be so. Well, we have done our best, and that is something. Did he give you any reasons?" "One tremendous reason--he calls it human nature." Silvester helped her to a fair cut and himself to two. He was already eating when he took up the subject again. "This movement will be stronger than his argument," he said. "What people call human nature is often little more than the animal instinct. I can conceive no nobler mission for any man. We cannot expect this particular class of man to see eye to eye with us." "There was never any chance of it, father. He believes that war is the will of God, and he does not hesitate to say so." "Would he have us to believe that typhoid fever is the will of God--or smallpox? We are stamping those out. Why not the greater plague?" Gabrielle sighed.