"To the death for you I'll go, my Gouverneur Faulkner," I answered him, looking straight into his tired eyes that were so deep under the black, silver-tipped wings of his brows. I did not mean that death I had threatened myself from the mathematics in the paper, but in my heart there was something that rose and answered the sadness in his eyes with again all that savageness of a barbarian. "Then I'll take you to the point of demise--almost--if I need you," he answered me with a laugh that hid a quiver of emotion in his voice as something that was like unto a spark shot from the depths of his eyes into the depths of mine. "Go get the papers verified and let me know when you have finished." And this time I was in reality dismissed. I went; but in my heart was a strange smoulder that the spark had kindled. In the small room that opened off of that of the Gouverneur Faulkner, with a door that I knew to lead into the room of my Uncle, the General Robert, I seated myself at a table by a window which looked down upon the city spread at the foot of the Capitol hill lying shimmering in the young spring mists that drifted across its housetops. I laid down the papers, took a pencil from a tray close beside my hand and then faced the most dreadful of any situation that I had ever brought down upon my own head. I also faced at the same time the smiling countenance of my Buzz, who looked into the door from the room of my Uncle, the General Robert, slipped through that door and closed it gently behind him. "Safe on first base! The old boy of the bayonets has been called to the Governor and he'll not be back before they both have luncheon sent in to them. I have taken his letters and now I'm off. What did Bill hand you?" "Death and also destruction," I answered in an expletive often used by my father in times of a catastrophe, and with those words I showed to my Buzz the two long papers. "Shoo, that's no big job. I looked over and verified this one myself yesterday in ten minutes. Hello, this other one is in French. Just run it through and if it is to tally, call it; and I'll hold this one. We can do it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead from the top line across." And my Buzz held the paper in his hand as he seated himself in readiness upon the corner of my desk beside me. "Oh, my Buzz, I have such a mortification that I cannot add one to another of these long figures. When I place one number to another I must use my fingers, and in this case you see that it is impossible." Tears I did not allow in my eyes, but they were in my voice, and I looked into the eyes of my Buzz with a great terror. "What is it that I shall do? I am in disgrace." "You complete edition of a kid, you, don't you know I can do it for you? That is, if you know what all these kilo things stand for in English. Do you?" As he spoke, that kind Buzz put his hand on my shoulder with a nice rough shake.