Once or twice Larry Strangways took out his watch and glanced at it, as if to underscore the fact that the sands were slipping away. I kept my face hidden as much as possible beneath the rose-colored parasol. So far as I could judge, he looked over my head. We still had said nothing--there was still nothing we could say--when, beneath the bank of the lawn, and moving back in our direction, we saw the crown of Hugh's Panama. "Good-by!" Larry Strangways said, then. "Good-by!" My hand rested in his without pressure; without pressure his had taken mine. I think his eyes made one last wild, desperate appeal to me but if so I was unable to respond to it. I don't know how it happened that he turned his back and walked firmly up the lawn. I don't know how it happened that I also turned and took the necessary steps toward Hugh. All I can say is--and I can say it only in this way--all I can say is, I felt that I had died. That is, I felt that I had died except for one queer, bracing echo which suddenly come back to me. It was in the words Mildred Brokenshire had used, and which, at the time, I had thought too deep for me to understand: "Life is not a blind impulse working blindly. It is a beneficent rectifying power." CHAPTER XXIII As Hugh Brokenshire and I were walking along the Ocean Drive a few days after Larry Strangways had come and gone, the dear lad got some satisfaction from charging me with inconsistency. "You're certainly talking about England and Canada to-day very differently from what you used to." "Am I? Well, if it seems so it's because you don't understand the attitude of Canadians toward their mother country. As a country, as a government, England has been magnificently true to us always. It's only between Englishmen and Canadians as individuals that irritation arises, and for that most Canadians don't care. The Englishman snubs and the Canadian grows bumptious. I don't think the Canadian would grow bumptious if the Englishman didn't snub. Both snubbing and bumptiousness are offensive to me; but that, I suppose, is because I'm over-sensitive. And yet one forgets sensitiveness when it comes to anything really national. In that we're one, with as perfect a solidarity as that which binds Oregon to Florida. You'll never find one of us who isn't proud to serve when England gives the orders." "To be snubbed by her for serving." "Certainly; to be snubbed by her for serving! It's all we look for; it's all we shall ever get. No one need make any mistake about that. In Canada we're talking of sending fifty thousand troops to the front. We may send five hundred thousand and we shall still be snubbed. But we're not such children as to go into a cause in the hope that some one will give us sweets. We do it for the Cause. We know, too, that it isn't exactly injustice on the English side; it's only ungraciousness." "Oh, they're long on ungraciousness, all right." "Yes; they're very long on ungraciousness--"