“My only son went all through the War from the beginning to the end. He joined as a Tommy because, as an insignificant doctor, I had no pull. He was promoted to a commission for gallantry and decorated with the M. C. for distinguished work in the field. He was wounded three times—once so severely that his life was given up—but he returned to his regiment and finally marched with it into Germany. He was almost the last officer to be demobbed. After which, failing to get employment because patriots are not required in the city, he volunteered for the Black and Tans. Last Friday afternoon, in the course of carrying out orders, he was set upon in the streets of Cork by a dozen men in masks, foully murdered and hideously desecrated. My God, Mr. Fallaray, do you wonder that my blood boils when I hear of your weak-kneed treatment of these dirty dogs?” He stood for a moment shaking, his refined face distorted, his gentle unathletic figure quivering with rage and indignation. Then he turned on his heel and went away, walking like a drunkard. Fallaray and George Lytham looked at each other and both of them made the same gesture of impotence. It was a difficult world. II Fallaray’s position in the Cabinet was a peculiar one. It was rather like that of a disconcerting child in the house of orthodox church people who insisted on asking direct and pertinent questions on the Bible story, especially after having read Wells’s first volume of the “Outline of History.” How did Adam and Eve get into Eden? If God never sleeps, isn’t he very cross in the morning? And so on. All through the War, Fallaray had been a thorn in the side of his chief. His honesty and his continual “why” were a source of irritation and sometimes of anger. He had no patience whatever with shiftiness, intrigue and favoritism, the appointment of mere duffers to positions of high responsibility. He made no bones whatever about expressing his opinion as to the frivolity that prevailed in certain quarters, together with the habit of dodging every grave issue. On the question of the League of Nations too, he was in close accord with Lord Robert Cecil and often made drastic criticisms of the frequent somersaults of his chief. His definite stand on the Irish question was extremely annoying to the brass-hat brigade and to the master-flounderer and weathercock, who showed himself more and more to be a mixture of Billy Sunday and Mark Anthony, crying out that black was white at one end of the town and ten minutes later that white was black at the other end. And yet, when it came to results, Fallaray might almost as well have been on the town council of Lower Muddleton as in the Cabinet of the British Government. Respected for his faithfulness to duty, he was disliked for his honesty and feared for his utter disregard for personal aggrandizement and the salary that went with it.