"The wrong attitude entirely!" announced Lord Eskerley promptly. "What’s the right attitude, then?" asked Eric, who hated correction almost as much as Lord Eskerley delighted to administer it to him. "The right attitude," replied the old man, with sudden seriousness, "should be a feeling of pride that We were fortunate enough to find ourselves Original Members of the Brotherhood—to hold Founders’ Shares. When the edifice is completed—and completed it will be—the world won’t be able to see the foundations. But they will be there all right! And we shall know who laid them—the Old Order!" "What do you mean by the Old Order?" asked Eric. "The landed gentry?" "Far more than that. I mean the people to whom this country, as such, has always really meant something; I mean every mother’s son who felt the ancient spirit of our race wake in him, perhaps for the first time, when the challenge came in Nineteen Fourteen. I don’t care who he was—squire’s son, parson’s son, miner’s son, poacher’s son—it was all the same. If he was conscious then of that single blind impulse to get up and play the game, just because it was the game; just because it was impossible to do otherwise—without any dialectics about Freedom, or Altruism, or Democracy, or whether his job would be kept open for him or not; simply because the Blood told him to—then he belonged to the Old Order! He held a Founder’s Share, all right! "Of course," the old man continued presently, "the more one has to give the more one is expected to give, at a time like this. And as a rule it seems to be the best that is taken. ’_This is the heir; come, let us kill him!_’—that has been the general attitude of the War Gods. Only the very best would suffice—only the very best!" We sat silent again. Lord Eskerley himself had lost his two sons, and his only grandson. After him, what was to become of the ancient title—of the "Big Hoose" and its "policies"—of the family which had served the State for three hundred years? "_This is the heir!_" How true that was. I thought of my brother Walter’s eldest son. Fortunately in this case there were two more. And Roy? What would become of Baronrigg, if— But Lord Eskerley was speaking again—more to himself than to us.