As we drove away, I watched our party scattering. From their silence I judged the Crawleighs were trying to realize that their two elder boys were safe at last; the Daintons, walking close together with bent heads, were no doubt thinking of the son who would not return. As my uncle’s big, lonely figure disappeared from sight, I fancied that he might indeed be feeling he had lived too long. William the Fourth had completed half his reign when Bertrand was born: a man who had survived the nineteenth century, the Victorian era and the greatest war in history might well shrink aghast from the unknown future. 6 At Barbara’s thoughts I could make no guess. Before the war, she had been more mercilessly pursued by publicity than any one of her generation. When our engagement was announced, I slunk like a criminal past the contents-bills that proclaimed a “_Famous Society Beauty Engaged_”; and, on the day of the wedding, when the traffic was held up for three hours and the auxiliary police were numbered by hundreds, the London crowd was certainly far more concerned to catch a glimpse of Lady Barbara Neave than to hear that the Channel ports were safe. Since our marriage, she had hardly appeared in public; but, as she crouched over the fire without speaking, I wondered what picture she was composing for her life in the unknown, new peace. When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck, confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions and lay down that night with the same confused recollections. There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not know how to give it words. “I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara, as we went up to bed.