“Do you remember that hymn, Elise, played to a waltz tune, ‘The roseate hues of early dawn how fast they fade away—’? Well, I guess it’s accurate; anything to do with the sun over here is liable to pretty rapid fading.” Hermione rose slowly and gracefully. She had not been going into the house. She opened her lips to speak, then she shut them again, and walked leisurely towards the open library door. “Hermione has made a grand recovery,” said her father appreciatively. “She reminds me of Jonah’s gourd: as far as I remember it came up in the night and was powerful shady on the following day. But in the end it crossed Jonah by wilting when he least expected it. Jonah miscalculated that gourd—but he wasn’t much of a stayer as a lodger anyway.” “Oh, Daddy!” said Elise. “Are you really going to Paris?” Mr. Brett met her eyes; for a long time they neither of them spoke. Then Mr. Brett said with a gentleness which his voice never held for any one else. “I guess you’re going to be all right here Elise—with John.” CHAPTER XI John looked across from the mass of papers on his desk to his father-in-law’s impassive face. He was a young man with a generous share of self-control, but he could not help revealing that he was very much moved. “You can’t really mean, Sir,” he said with a momentary trembling of his hand, as he turned over the mass of papers, “that _all_ your work is to be left with me. The reconstruction work as well; that I am to have the regulation of all this and take the proceeds? It’s a tremendous future—and a tremendous fortune!” Mr. Brett lit a cigar in a leisurely way and tilted back his chair to his favourite angle. “Yes,” he agreed indifferently, “there’s money in it, there’s most usually money in what occurs to me, but it ain’t anything to make a fuss about. Some people breed money, and some people breed dogs. I guess I’m what you might call a money-fancier. As for those old notes, I took ’em while I was prowling round this garden and the English Government has decided it wants to take them up. I made it my condition that you were to be managing director—that’s all there is to it. “I sha’n’t be over here any more. I can’t be in two places at once, and I’ve run that Channel passage during this war as faithfully as if I were a German submarine, and I guess I’m just about as tired of it as German submarines are going to be. I’ll get along all right in Paris. Brains don’t go bankrupt. What I have left will come in mighty useful in France. France wants new machinery a sight more than you do. She’s commercially as flat as a plate, but she can be built up and she’s got to be. There’ll be plenty on the plate before France is through, and I’d like to be one of the men who put something there. Don’t you worry about me.” John drew a deep breath. He could not keep still in his excitement. He walked up and down the long library at Mambles with his visions hot before him.