I remember
how we stood upon the headland watching the squadron circling far
away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight, seeing
clearly the way things must go. And then even it was not too late.
I might have gone back, I think, and saved the world. The people
of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one
thing I respected their moral standards. The east and south would
trust me as they would trust no other northern man. And I knew
I had only to put it to her and she would have let me go . . . .
Not because she did not love me!

"Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way
about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I
was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness
of what I ought to do had no power at all to touch my will. My
will was to live, to gather pleasures and make my dear lady happy.
But though this sense of vast neglected duties had no power to draw
me, it could make me silent and preoccupied, it robbed the days I
had spent of half their brightness and roused me into dark
meditations in the silence of the night. And as I stood and
watched Evesham's aeroplanes sweep to and fro--those birds of
infinite ill omen--she stood beside me watching me, perceiving the
trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly--her eyes questioning
my face, her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was gray
because the sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of
hers that she held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again
in the night time and with tears she had asked me to go.

"At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood.
I turned upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the
mountain slopes. 'No,' she said, as if I had jarred with her
gravity, but I was resolved to end that gravity, and make her
run--no one can be very gray and sad who is out of breath--and when
she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm. We ran down past
a couple of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at my
behaviour--they must have recognised my face. And half way down
the slope came a tumult in the air, clang-clank, clang-clank, and
we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war things came
flying one behind the other."

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

"What were they like?" I asked.

"They had never fought," he said. "They were just like our
ironclads are nowadays; the