“We think Captain Brett is buried here,” he explained. “We aren’t perfectly certain because, as you see, the place has been a good deal shelled lately and there are a lot of graves.” “It’s near enough,” said Mr. Brett quietly, as if he were talking to himself. “He lies where good men lie. He’s had a short life and a clean death. I don’t need to worry any more about Arnold.” Mr. Brett had gone on steadily with his inventions and his adaptations, but, when he sat under the yew tree and watched the bees in the fuchsia hedge, the sunshine and the flowers had a trick of fading out and leaving in their places a shell-swept muddy hillside under a low grey sky. CHAPTER II Mr. Brett was aroused from his reverie by a firm, heavy tread along the brick path. He tilted his hat further back and watched the approaching figure with a kindly eye. Mr. Brett liked John Sterling; he had chosen him three years previously out of fifty applicants to be his private secretary, and he had had no reason to regret it. Mr. Brett had not been moved by sentimental reasons in his choice of a secretary, though John Sterling had distinguished himself by dogged pluck, where all were plucky, and lost an arm at Mons. The reasons that decided the great inventor to take the unknown young Englishman were two. He explained them to one of his business friends afterwards. “He knows what he doesn’t know,” Mr. Brett observed with satisfaction, “and he’s not too sharp to learn. “I don’t want a sharp man. I’m kinder sharp myself. I had a brainy young secretary once who kept on having good ideas. He’d have ’em before breakfast and right on up to supper time. They kept him so busy, and me so busy listening to them, and pointing out from time to time where they wouldn’t work, that none of my own ideas panned out. I had to bounce him. I said, ‘Look here, my son, I paid you to carry out my notions, and I find I’m being loaded down with yours. Now I can stand quite a lot of other men’s notions, in general conversation, or once a week when I’m preparing my soul for Heaven—but not over my desk in my office. I just kinder like to keep that desk for any little notions of my own.’ Of course he was too sharp to see that, so he got bounced. “Now John Sterling hasn’t got any ideas except how to carry out mine. “All the other candidates made pace by telling me what they could do. They ought all to have been Prime Ministers—and they knew it—they’d have been thrown away as private secretaries. But John sat there looking at me with those steady grey eyes of his, and all he said was, ‘If you tell me what to do I think I can do it. I write a plain hand.’ “I guess the universe is going to remain just the way it was before John came into it. But that’ll suit me all right. I haven’t any quarrel with the universe.”