Markham nodded as he poured out his visitor’s whisky. “Yes, I’m serving the country—the military people have taken me over, lock and stock: with everyone else, apparently, who has ever done chemical research. I’ve been pretty hard at it the last few days, ever since the scare was serious.... And you—are you soldiering?” “No,” said Theodore and told him of the departmental prohibition. “It mayn’t make much difference in the end,” said Markham.... “You see, I was right—the other evening.” “Yes,” Theodore answered, “I believe that was why I came in. The crowd to-night reminded me of what you said at Vallance’s—though I don’t think I believed you then.... How long is it going to last?” “God knows,” said Markham, with his mouth full of biscuit. “We shall have had enough of it—both sides—before very long; but it’s one thing to march into hell with your head up and another to find a way out.... There’s only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been strangled at birth.” Theodore stared at him, not sure he had caught the last words. “You ought to——?” “Yes—you heard me right. If the human animal must fight—and nothing seems to stop it—it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the race of ’em, forbid it to exist.... Holt was also right that evening, fundamentally. You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of war; in the end, it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove that—very definitely.” “And when you’ve proved it—we stop fighting?” Markham shrugged his shoulders, thrust aside his plate and filled his pipe. “Curious, the failure to understand the influence on ourselves of what we make and use. We just make and use and damn the consequence.... When Lavoisier invented the chemical balance, did he stop to consider the possibilities of chemical action in combination with outbursts of human emotion? If he had...!” In the silence that followed they heard the chiming of three-quarters—and there flashed inconsequently into Theodore’s memory, a vision of himself, a small boy with his hand in his mother’s, staring up, round-eyed, at Big Ben of London—while his mother taught him the words that were fitted to the chime. Lord—through—this—hour Be—Thou—our—guide, So—by—Thy—power No—foot—shall—slide. ... That, or something like that.... Odd, that he should remember them now—when for years he had not remembered.... “Lord—through—this—hour——”