ave his little acquiescing nod.

"I wouldn't have it again," he said. "No, I wouldn't go back."

"And I give you my word," said Jeffrey, slowly thinking out his way,
though it looked to him as if there were really no way, "I'm as much at
sea as I was then. It's not the same turmoil, but it's a turmoil. I was
pulled up short. I was given plenty of time to think. Well, I
thought--when I hadn't the nerve to keep myself from doing it."

"You said some astonishing things in the prison paper," his father
ventured. The whole thing seemed so gravely admirable to him--Jeff and
the prison as the public knew them--that he wished Jeff himself could
get comfort out of it.

"Some few things I believe I settled, so far as I understand them." Jeff
was frowning at the table where his hand beat an impatient measure. "I
saw things in the large. I saw how the nations--all of 'em, in living
under present conditions--could go to hell quickest. That's what they're
bent on doing. And I saw how they could call a halt if they would. But
how to start in on my own life, I don't know. You'd think I'd had time
enough to face the thing and lick it into shape. I haven't. I don't know
any more what to do than if I'd been born yesterday--on a new
planet--and not such an easy one."

While the colonel had bewailed his own limitations a querulous
discontent had ivoried his face. Now it had cleared and left the face
sedate and firm in a gravity fitted to its nobility of line.

"Jeff," he said. He leaned over the table and touched Jeffrey's hand.

Jeff looked up.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The reason you're not prepared to go on is because you don't care. You
don't care a hang about yourself."

Jeffrey debated a moment. It was true. His troublesome self did not seem
to him of any least account.

"Well," said he, "let's go to bed."

But they shook hands before they parted, and the colonel did not put his
pipe away in the drawer. He left it on the mantel, conveniently at
hand.

XV

Next morning Anne, after listening at the colonel's door and hearing
nothing, decided not to tap. She went on downstairs to be saluted by a
sound she delighted in: a low humming. It came from the library where
her father was happily and most villainously attacking the only song he
knew: "Lord Lovell." Anne's heart cleared up like a smiling sky. She
went in to him, and he, at the window, his continued humming like the
spinning of a particularly eccentric top