It was not until early in the new year, however, that Brandon was transferred to a wooden structure in Saint James’s Park, the headquarters of the newly-created department. He was almost ashamed to find how much more congenial was the work he had now to do. To the really constructive mind, there is something repellent in the naïve formulas, and the crude paraphernalia of mere destruction. Here in the new “billet” was scope for a rather special order of brain. He was able to look forward to a future in which a new England would arise. There were already portents in the sky, portents which told him that the world of the future was going to be a very different place from the world of the past. Much depended on whether the grim specter of war could be laid with reasonable finality for a long time to come, but from the day in which he took up his new labors he did not doubt that, whatever the final fate of Prussia, the issue of Armageddon itself would be a nobler, a broader spirit in the old land which he loved so dearly, and a freer, humaner world for every race that had to live in it. His position in the Social Reconstruction Bureau was one of importance. Long before the war, even before he came into the Hart’s Ghyll property, it had been his ambition to make the world a rather better place for other people to inhabit. And the opportunities which came to him now gave rare scope to a reawakened energy. A marvelous field had been offered to this protagonist of works and faith. In spite of the last terrible clinch in which the new world as well as the old was now involved, these were great days for Brandon. His powers burgeoned nobly in the service of that nation which had now definitely emerged, in spite of all her limitations and her legacies from the past, as the banner bearer of civilization. Deep in his heart lay the faith that through blood and tears the whole race of men would be born again. And month by month that faith grew, even amid the final stupendous phase when the specter of famine stalked through the land. Moreover, he had a sense of personal election. A promise had been made to him, and through him, to his fellows. “One unconverted believer” was now the living witness that all the old prophecies were true. Every living thing in the world around him, of which a supernal Being was the center, had a new meaning, a new force, a new divinity. Unsuspected powers were now his; latent faculties allowed him to live more abundantly. He looked up where once a skeptic’s eye had looked down, and the difference was that between a life in the full glory of light and sorry groping in darkness.