rold?"

Harold smiled assent to this tribute, and Sabre said, "I suppose we
shall go on much as before?"

"Oh, rather, old man."

"Harold be working in your room, eh?"

"Yes, that's the idea, for a start, anyway. They're just shoving up a
desk for him. Come along in and see how we're fixing it, old man."

"I'll look in presently."

"Righto, old man. Come along, Harold." At the door he turned and said,
"Oh, by the way. I want you to show Harold through the work of this side
of the business a bit later on."

Sabre looked quickly at him. "You _want_ me to?"

Twyning flushed darkly. "Well, he may as well get the hang of the whole
business, mayn't he? That's what I mean."

"Oh, certainly he should. I quite agree. Send him along any time you
like."

"Thanks awfully, old man."

But outside the door Twyning added to himself: "You thought that was an
order, my lord; and you didn't like it. Pretty soon you won't think.
You'll know."

V

Sabre remained standing at his desk. He had a tiny ball of paper in his
hand and he rolled it round between his finger and thumb, round and
round and round and round.... In his mind was a recollection: "You have
struck your tents and are upon the march."

He thought, "This has been coming a long time.... It's my way of looking
at things has done this. I'm getting so I've got nowhere to turn. It's
no good pretending I don't feel this. I feel it most frightfully....
I've let down the books. They'll take a back place in the business now.
Twyning's always been jealous of them. Fortune's never really liked my
success with them. They'll begin interfering with the books now.... My
books.... It was rottenly done. Behind my back. Plotted against me, or
they wouldn't have sprung it on me like that. That shows what it's going
to be like.... It's all through my way of looking at things.... I've no
one here I can take things to. This frightful feeling of being alone in
the place. And it's going to be worse. And nowhere to get out of it.
More empty at home.... And now there's this. And I've got to go back to
that.... 'You have struck your tents and are upon the march' ... Yes.
Yes...."

He suddenly recollected Nona's letter. He took it from his pocket and
opened it; and the second event was discharged upon him.

She wrote from their town house:

"_Marko, take me away--Nona._"

His emotions leapt to her with most terrible violence. He felt his heart
leap against his breast as though, e