"Father," said the old man looking full at Michael. "Father! well, you do look blooming." The colour rushed to Michael's face. He had expected complications, and had prepared numberless phrases in his mind to meet imaginary dilemmas. But he had never thought of this. "Not Father," said Serena intervening. "You are forgetting. Father died before you married, and you put up that beautiful monument to him in the Church." "So I did," said the old man, testily. "So I did, but he is exactly like him all the same, only Father never wore his clothes too tight for him and a made up tie--never." Michael, the best dressed man of his day, was bereft of speech. "You're a little confused still," said Serena. "You were wounded in the head at Ypres. You have been ill a long time." There was a silence. "I remember," said John Damer at last. "Have they taken the Ridge?" "Yes, long ago." "Long ago? Oh! can it be--is it possible? Have we?"--the old man reared himself suddenly in bed, and raised two thin gnarled arms. "Have we--won the war?" "Yes," said Michael, as Serena put her arms round his father, and laid him back on his pillow. "We have won the war." John Damer lay back panting, trembling from head to foot. "Thank God," he said, and in his sunken lashless eyes two tears gathered, and ran down the grey furrows of his cheeks, and lost themselves in his long white beard. They gave him the sedative which the doctor had left ready for him, and when he had sunk back into unconsciousness, they stole out of the room. They went back to the picture gallery looking on the gardens, and Michael gazed long at the portrait of his grandfather in the blue frock coat. "Am I so like him?" he said with a sort of sob. "Very like." He sat down and hid his face in his hands. "Poor soul," he said. "Poor soul. He's up against it. Do you know I had almost forgotten we had 'won the war' as he called it. There have been so many worse conflicts since that act of supreme German folly and wickedness." "Not what he would call wars," said Serena. "He only means battles with soldiers in uniforms, and trenches and guns." "How on earth are we to break to him that his wife is dead, and that I am his son, and that he is eighty years of age, and that Jack is his grandson." "It must come to him gradually." "In the meanwhile I shall take off these vile clothes and get back into my own. Serena, what can a made-up tie be, and why is it wrong?" Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm's length. "It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all right with a hook and eye." "It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and naturally it pricks," said Serena smiling at her husband. "It is lucky Jack did not hear it."