“Your father was too much in love with life to go out of it voluntarily,” said Sister Baring. “Then what the blazes did he do, and why did he do it?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Is he alive or dead?” “How should I know, Mr. Baltazar?” “He never wrote to you—after——?” “Why should he have written to me?” she interrupted. The rebuke in her voice and eyes sent the young man into confused apologies. “Naturally not. You must forgive me, Sister; but, as I’ve told you, I’ve never met a pal of that mysterious father of mine before. I want to get all the information I can.” She drew a chair and sat by him. The great hall was very still and, in contrast with the vivid sunshine perceived through the eastern windows, very dark. Through the open door came the scents of the summer gardens. The air was a little heavy. She felt her cap hot around her temples, and lassitude enfeebling her limbs. The strain of the war years began to tell. She had regarded this appointment as a rest from the intolerable toil of the General Hospital in a large town which she had just quitted. Before then she had served in France. And before that—for many years—she had followed the selfless career of the nurse. Now, suddenly, her splendid nerve showed signs of giving. If she had not sat down, her legs would have crumpled up beneath her. So she thought. . . . She looked at the young man, so eager, so proven, so like his father in gesture and glance, yet in speech and outlook—she was yet to get to that—but she knew the revolutionary influences of the war, the real war, on those who have faced its terrors and become saturated with its abiding philosophies—so different from the fervid creature, John Baltazar, of the late nineties, who had never dreamed of the possibility of this world convulsion. He had much the same frank charm of manner, the direct simplicity of utterance; but the mouth was weaker; the eyes were blue, the eyes of a shrewish blonde—not the compelling, laughing, steel-grey eyes with a queer sparkle in the iris of John Baltazar. All in the young face that was not John Baltazar’s was the mother’s. She hated the mother dead, as she had loathed her living. Only once had she seen her, a blonde shrew-mouse of a woman. Just a passing by on the Newnham road, when a companion had pointed her out as Mrs. Baltazar. The little bitter mouth had bitten into her memory: the hard little blue eyes had haunted her for eighteen years. The mouth and eyes were there, before her, now. The rest, all that was noble in the boy, was John Baltazar. “Who has told you the little you do know about him?” she asked.