that any one should
anticipate the troubles which you have to face. Come and sit down."

She led him to the couch and held his fingers in hers as she leaned back
in a corner.

"I honestly believe," she went on gently, "that the world is not
sufficiently grateful to those who toil for her. Criticism has become a
habit of life. Nobody believes or wants to believe in the altruist any
longer. I believe that if to-day a rich man stripped himself of all his
possessions and obeyed the doctrines of the Bible by giving them to the
poor, the Daily something or other would worry around until they found
some interested motive, and the Daily something or other else would
succeed in proving the man a hypocrite."

He smiled and in the lightening of his face she appreciated for the
first time a certain strained look about his eyes and the drawn look
about the mouth.

"You are worrying about all this!" she exclaimed.

"Yes, in a way I am worrying," he confessed simply. "Not about the
storm itself. I am ready to face that and I think I shall be a stronger
and a saner man when the battle has started. In the meantime, I think
that what has happened to me is this. I have arrived just at that time
of life when a man takes stock of himself and his doings, criticises his
own past and wonders whether the things he has proposed doing in the
future are worth while."

"You of all men in the world need never ask yourself that," she declared
warmly. "Think of your lifelong devotion to your work. Think of the
idlers by whom you are surrounded."

"I work," he admitted, "but I sometimes ask myself whether I work with
the same motives as I did when I was young. I started life as an
altruist. I am not sure now whether I am not working in self-defence,
from habit, because I am afraid of falling behind."

"You mean that you have lost your ideals?"

"I wonder," he speculated, "whether any man can carry them through to my
age and not be afflicted with doubts as to whether, after all, he has
been on the right path, whether he may not have been worshipping false
gods."

"Tell me exactly how you started life," she begged.

"Like any other third or fourth son of a bankrupt baronet," he replied.
"I went to Eaton and Oxford with the knowledge that I had to carve out
my own career and my ambitions when I left the University were entirely
personal. I chose diplomacy. I did moderately well, I believe. I remember
my first really confidential mission," he