ho were kept in secluded quarters in Bloomsbury or
Maida Vale, gave dinners at the Savoy or the Carlton which the
scrapings of the aristocracy attended; but these gave no dinners in
return.

To get money to do things, no matter how,--or little matter how; to be
in the swim, and that swim all too rapidly washing out the real
people--that was the almost universal ambition. But still the real
people, however few or many, in the time of trouble came quietly into
the necessary and appointed places with the automatic precision of the
disciplined friend of the state and of humanity; and behind them were
folk of the humbler sort, the lower middle-class, the labouring-man. Of
these were the landpoor peer, with his sense of responsibility
cultivated by daily life and duty in his county, on the one hand; the
professional man of all professions, the little merchant, the sailor,
the clerk and artisan, the digger and delver, on the other; and, in
between, those people in the shires who had not yet come to be material
and gross, who had old-fashioned ideas of the duty of the citizen and
the Christian. In the day of darkness these came and laid what they had
at the foot of the altar of sacrifice.

This at least the war did: it served as a sieve to sift the people, and
it served as the solvent of many a life-problem.

Ian Stafford was among the first to whom it offered "the way out," who
went to it for the solution of their own set problem. Suddenly, as he
stood with Jasmine in the little room where so many lives were tossed
into the crucible of Fate that morning, the newsboy's voice shouting,
"War declared!" had told him the path he must tread.

He had astonished the War Office by his request to be sent to the Front
with his old arm, the artillery, and he was himself astonished by the
instant assent that was given. And now on this October day he was on
his way to do two things--to see whether Adrian Fellowes was keeping
his promise, and to visit Jigger and his sister.

There had not been a week since the days at Glencader when he had not
gone to the sordid quarters in the Mile End Road to see Jigger, and to
hear from him how his sister was doing at the opera, until two days
before, when he had learned from Lou herself what she had suffered at
the hands of Adrian Fellowes. That problem would now be settled
forever; but there remained the question of Jigger, and that must be
settled, whatever the other grave problems facing him. Jig