“_They_ enjoyed _me_,” she answered complacently. “I don’t think they’d ever seen anything quite like me before. Oh, George! Has David told you our news? We met Mr. Stornaway in London; and he wants us to come and work with him! Say, kid, can you beat it? I asked him what the work was; and he said it was just helping him to spend money. If there’s one thing I _do_ know about . . . We’re going to be the new big noise in London. Collect David; and we’ll tell you all about it!” If my embarrassment returned as I went forward to give her husband a hand, it vanished as he took up the interrupted tale. In voice and manner there was nothing to hint that he had ever been estranged from his radiant wife; and I decided that, in a sense, he too lived only for the moment. When we first met, a small boy without a friend in the world had decided that he must put himself to school. His father had been killed, fighting for Greece against Turkey; and David made his way to England, with enough money for one term, by working his passage round the world. When he had sucked in all that Melton and Oxford could give him, he banished them into the past, as he had already banished his wanderings, and concentrated all his energies on making money; when the money was made, he turned his back for ever on the oil-fields of Mexico and devoted himself to English politics until the war imposed on him a more urgent duty. On the day that he was discharged from hospital, blinded and maimed, he called to tell me that he had already secured new work. When Sonia left him, he set himself to get her back; and, when she returned, I am sure that he set himself with equal singleness of purpose to forget that they had ever been parted. Now he could think of nothing but Raymond Stornaway’s proposal. “That’s where I want your advice,” he explained gravely, as though in all his thirty-five tempestuous years of life he had ever taken advice from anybody. “And I want yours,” I told him. “I’m sorry to find Raymond butting in: I expect to need your help much more.” That evening after dinner, when the others had gone away to gamble, we talked of the war and of that other evening, when we stood on the dividing ridge between two worlds. Of the men who dined at Loring Castle on the last night of peace, he and I alone had survived. We talked of the war that was over as then we had talked of the war that was coming. I quoted him the words in which he had described his vision of what the world might be after the war; and I challenged him to say whether he still believed in the perfectibility of man. “I’ve acquired a lot of patience in the last four years,” he answered. Then I tested him with Hornbeck’s prediction that wars would be fought so long as the human race survived to fight them.