And then Raphael Goltz woke up too. He talked to Ruth in the hot August evenings instead of sleeping. Even she was astonished at what the old man knew. He had studied foreign politics for years. He knew that the cause of the war lay farther back, much farther back than men realized. He saw things from a wide standpoint. He was a German Jew by blood and in intellect, Jew by nature, but England had always been his home. That he loved her well Ruth never had any doubt after those evenings. He never thought, though, that it would come to war. It seemed to him impossible. “It would be infamy,” he said. And then it came. Came with a shock, and yet with a strange sense of exhilaration about it. Men who had stood behind counters, and sat on office stools since boyhood, stretched themselves, as the blood of fighting forefathers stirred in their veins. They were still the sons of men who had gone voyaging with Drake and Frobisher, of men who had sailed the seven seas, and fought great fights, and found strange lands, and died brave deaths, in the days when a Great Adventure was possible for all. For them too had, almost inconceivably, come the chance to get away from greyly monotonous days which seemed like “yesterday come back”; for them too was the Great Adventure possible. The lad who, under Ruth’s supervision, took down shutters, cleaned boots, knives and windows, swept the floors and ran errands, was among the first to go, falsifying his age by two years, and it was old Raphael Goltz, German Jew, who even in those first days knew the war as the crime of all the ages. Ruth was the next, and he helped her too; while the authorities turned skilled workers down, and threw cold water in buckets on the men and women standing shoulder to shoulder ready for any sacrifice in those first days, old Raphael Goltz, knowing the value of Ruth’s cooking and physical soundness, found her the money to offer her services free—old Raphael Goltz, who through so many years had been so incredibly mean. He disliked dogs cordially, yet he undertook the care of Sarah and Selina in her absence. To Ruth’s further amazement, he also gave her introductions of value to leading authorities in Paris who welcomed her gladly and sent her forthwith into an estaminet behind the lines in Northern France.