He saw the flirts, who wear an attachment as they wear a hat, tied for life to the affection that is true as steel. (Dreadful for both of them!) Also the young men who treat Love as a cross between a meal and a music-hall joke, plighted to the shy idealists. He saw the Bohemian married to the curate. Likewise the attractive young rake, fettered to the frump. He saw the women born for motherhood, left lonely spinsters for want of charm to attract. He saw the mothers who sighed for freedom, resenting the nursery. He saw the Anything, wedded to the Anything _But_. Yes; he saw for that moment nothing but the wholesale gigantic Blunder of the mis-mating of the world. * * * * * No doubt it was all crystallized for him in one tender image; Olwen's dead mother, the girl he should have married. He sighed and smiled. "Pity there's no putting things right, as that lunatic suggests," he thought. "There would be an invention worth boasting about! Wireless wouldn't be in it, or X-rays. Pity it isn't all true...." A tap at the door interrupted his musings. The softest of girl's voices asked, "Are you ready for me, Uncle?" "Yes!" he called out, jerking himself back into the world of realities. "Come in, Olwen." Olwen Howel-Jones came in. A small, but daintily made girl of nineteen. Just a handful of softness in a skimpy one-piece frock. A pale, three-cornered morsel of a face set off by sleek hair as black as her little French boots. Large eyes that seemed sometimes brown, sometimes grey; a mouth tremulous, but vivid as a red carnation--such was Olwen. She brought a ripple of Youth into that bare temple of Science that was her uncle's study. Something else she brought--a breath of tension, of impatience. A man would have passed it over; not so a woman. Already one woman in the hotel had said to herself, "I wonder who it is that child's so desperately in love with?" Had she been in the room at the moment, that woman might have seen the answer to her question flame suddenly into the young girl's face as she stepped up to the table by the window. Under the balcony there was a sound of footsteps. Olwen pushed aside a great jar full of arbutus that stood at the further edge of the table. "That's in your light, Uncle," she said. The Professor's back was to her as the figures passed quickly out from below the balcony. He caught a glimpse of the two wounded British officers swinging off towards the _plage_. He caught the gleam of scarlet on khaki; heard a snatch of the rather husky boyish laughter of one of them; a scrap talk of the other. In a resonant voice with that particularly dominant form of accent, Scots with a dash of Canadian, there floated up through the clear morning air this somewhat arrested announcement: "I'm the finest judge of women in Europe."