he light faded; the wanting returned. But
he determined the key to the solution lay within that ambit. The
happiness was there. It was here in life, found, realised in loving
meeting, as warmth is found on stepping from shadow into the sun. The
thing lacking was something that would fix it, render it permanent,
establish it in the being as the heart is rooted in the
body.--Something? What?

He thought, "Well, why is it that children's faces are always happy?
There's something they must lose as they grow out of childhood. It's not
that cares and troubles come; the absurd troubles of childhood are just
as terrific troubles to them as grown-ups' cares are to grown-ups. No,
it is that something is lost. Well, what had I as a child that I have
not as a man? Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it be belief?"

He thought, "I wonder if they're all the same, those three--belief,
faith, hope? Belief in hope. Faith in hope. It may be. Is it that a
child knows no limitation to hope? It can hope impossible things. But a
man hopes no further than he can see--I wonder--"

And suddenly, in one week, life from its armoury discharged two events
upon him. In the next week one upon the world.

CHAPTER III

I

Towards the end of July there was some particularly splendid excitement
for the newspaper-reading public. Ireland provided it; and the
newspapers, as the events enlarged one upon the other, could scarcely
find type big enough to keep pace with them. On the twenty-first, the
King caused a conference of British and Irish leaders to assemble at
Buckingham Palace. On the twenty-fourth, the British and Irish leaders
departed from Buckingham Palace in patriotic halos of national champions
who had failed to agree "in principle or detail." Deadlock and Crisis
flew about the streets in stupendous type; and though they had been
doing so almost daily for the past eighteen months, everybody could see,
with the most delicious thrills, that these were more firmly locked
deadlocks and more critical crises than had ever before come whooping
out of the inexhaustible store where they were kept for the public
entertainment. Austria, and then Germany, made a not bad attempt on
public attention by raking up some forgotten sensation over a stale
excitement at a place called Sarajevo; but on the twenty-sixth, Ireland
magnificently filled the bill again by the far more serious affair of
Nationalist Volunteers landing three thousand rifles