In so far as any one moment can be separated from all that goes before and linked with all that follows after, I suppose this moment should be called decisive. Two minutes before, my wife had shewn me that she wished to remain abroad; from this moment hung the chain that drew us back to London. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been bandying academic crusades with O’Rane; forty-eight hours later I forsook my own crusade and extricated myself from his in order to join my uncle’s. “Bertrand _beaten_?,” I cried. “That’s been a safe radical seat for fifty years!” “Where are the English papers?,” O’Rane asked. “It must have been an odd election if _he_ couldn’t get in,” said Hornbeck. Thanks to our isolation, I think we were all taken equally by surprise. As I read out the strength of the new parties, our tranquil garden became like a stricken field the day after battle. For a time we tried to count the dead; then we found it simpler to hunt for the living. “Runciman’s gone!,” I cried. “McKenna’s gone . . .” Then the tragedy changed to farce. “_Asquith’s_ gone!” Laurence caught the paper from my hand: “Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-liberal . . . Coalition-unionist.” . . . “The old liberal party’s dead!,” I exclaimed. “There’s a handful of independents.” . . . “Ireland, except in the north, has gone solid for Sinn Fein,” Hornbeck read out over my shoulder. “Labour will be the biggest single party in the House,” said Laurence. “You were asking if people in England were talking the same kind of rot,” Hornbeck reminded me. Then we sat silent as he pieced together this amazing election and rehearsed the battle-cries on which it had been won. As he read, I saw O’Rane rising slowly and facing north with one hand outstretched for an instant towards the bleeding and exhausted world on the far side of our sheltering mountains: from Denmark to Italy, from Ireland to Siberia, two continents were still fighting for life because one man, nearly five years before, had flung bombs at another. “It’ll take years to undo this,” he muttered. Hornbeck read remorselessly on. “The Germans themselves couldn’t improve on it,” he commented at the end. “But _we_ can! We _must_!,” O’Rane cried. “In Heaven’s name . . . We went into this to secure the rights of small nations to a free existence; no one seems to care whether the big nations have a free existence or not! Could France and England follow out their destinies in the days when we lived under the shadow of this war? Can they do it now, when Europe is being sown with dragon’s teeth?”