Though she had worn her deep mourning for more than three years, her little white face looked pathetically young and helpless. I wondered what kind of life she could expect from the armistice. “We’re all in the same boat,” I answered. “I called to suggest that you should bring Sandy to the Admiralty. My father could just remember the Famine; my mother remembers the crowds in the streets when Sebastopol fell. Sandy may carry away something to fix this, eighty years hence, as the day when the Great War ended.” “I wonder if people will talk about it then as ‘the Great War’?,” Violet mused. As she buttoned her boy into his coat, I felt that she was thinking only of the day when her husband of a month, with all that health, fortune, rank and riches could give him, drifted whimsically to France, in the meshes of a machine which he ridiculed, there to die in defence of one country, which he faintly despised, against another, which he mildly disliked. Violet had been left with a son to bring up and a vast estate to administer. She would never, I knew, marry again; and, now that the war was over, she saw herself fading into the twilight of life to dwell with ghosts and memories and dreams. “The Great Waste,” I suggested, as we set out. “If any one could have foreseen, four years ago, how this would end, I wonder if there’d have been a war? I tremble to think what the world will look like when we have time to take stock.” In our passage from Loring House to the Admiralty, I found that the news had spread before us; and young Lucien de Grammont, speeding towards the French Embassy, stopped long enough to vent on us his disappointment that the allies had not insisted on unconditional surrender. “Those accursed Americans!,” he cried. “But for them, peace would have been signed in Berlin! Now in fifty years’ time . . . Well, let us hope we shan’t be alive to see it.” As he flung off in furious disappointment, I ventured the opinion that, but for the Americans, a German peace might have been dictated in Paris. Then we pressed through the crowd in the Processional Avenue and took up our positions to see at least the greatest war in history ending. My secretary had cleared the table of its trays; and we sat in a row, looking through the mist of Horse Guards’ Parade and trying to guess what was going to happen. The Crawleighs had arrived before us and were talking to Raymond Stornaway; Sir Roger and Lady Dainton followed on our heels; and our last inch of space was filled when my uncle Bertrand, puffing and growling at the stairs, lumbered in with heavy tread and demanded in the loud voice of incipient deafness why it was necessary to collect this nest of magpies.