Something of her childhood in the Orphanage, and of the long years with Raphael Goltz, Ruth told North, as they sat together in the warmth and stillness of the May evening, but of the years in France she spoke little. She had seen unspeakable things there. The memory of them was almost unbearable. They were things she held away from thought. Beautiful and wonderful things there were too, belonging to those years. But they were still more impossible to speak of. She carried the mark of them both, the terrible and the beautiful, in her steady eyes. Besides, some one else, who was interested too, who was surely—the consciousness was not to be ignored—interested too, knew all about that. And suddenly she realized how that common knowledge of life and death at their height was also a bond, as well as love of Thorpe, and she paused in her tale, and sat very still. “And then?” said North, after a while. “I was out there for two years, without coming home, the first time. There seemed nothing for me to come home for, and I didn’t want to leave. There was always so much to be done, and one felt of use. It was selfish of me really, but I never realized somehow that Raphael Goltz cared. Then I had bad news from him. You remember the time when the mobs wrecked the shops with German names? Well, his was one of them. So I got leave and came back to him. It was very sad. The old shop was broken to pieces, his books had been thrown into the street and many burnt, and the piano, his beautiful piano, smashed past all repair. I found him up in the back attic, with Sarah and Selina. He had saved them for me somehow. He cried when I came. He was very old, you see, and he had felt the war as much as any of us.” Her eyes were full of tears, and she stopped for a moment to steady her voice. “He bore no malice, and three days after I got back he died, babbling the old cry, ‘We ought to have been friends.’ “It was always that, ‘We ought to have been friends,’ and once he said, ‘Together we could have regenerated the world.’ He left everything he had to me, over £60,000. It is to him I owe Thorpe.” Her eyes shone through the tears in them. “Come! and let me show you,” she said, and so almost seemed to help him out of his chair, and then, still holding his hand, led him through the door behind them, along the passage into the front hall. Here he stopped, and undoubtedly but for the compelling hand would have gone no farther. But the soft firm grip held, and something with it, some force outside both of them, drew him after her into the room that once was his friend’s. A spacious friendly room, with wide windows looking south and west, and filled just now with the light of a cloudless sunset.