"So,"--Sir William laid down his knife and fork and fell to seal-rattling under the table--"so you've come now to doubt the power of the British Navy!"
"I've come," said Julian, "to see the danger of not doubting it."
"I wonder," Sir William remarked dryly, "what your father would say to your views."
"If it mattered! God bless my soul!" Sir William looked at Julian for the first time with cold dislike.
After luncheon the younger members of the party still hung aimlessly about the table in the hall, while Sir William and Lady McIntyre opened the letters brought by the latest post.
Napier tried in vain, by any of the unmarked means, to detach Nan from the others. Finally he said, with less indirectness than he often permitted himself, "I never see you now. Are you still too devoured by the Belgian locusts to have anything left for your older--friends?"
"Locusts! How _can_ you? I am not at all devoured. Or, if I am, it's by something _quite_ different." She said it with her air of new importance.
"But in the midst of it all,"--she lowered her voice and spoke now as one positively beset by weighty affairs--"I keep worrying about Julian. Just because,"--she glanced back at him as he stood talking "Emergency Corps" with Madge--"just because he doesn't in the least worry about himself. Have you heard about the way his relations are behaving?"
"No," said Napier, disingenuously. "How are they behaving?"
"Simply abominably. Some of his friends, too. They cold-shoulder him in private; and in public--they cut him!" Her eyes gleamed with anger. "If they think that's the way to discourage Julian, they know very little!"
"I wish some one would discourage him from rubbing my old man the wrong way."
"He doesn't mean to," she said, with a proprietary air that haunted Gavan afterwards, "but, you see, Sir William and Julian approach everything from opposite poles."
Behind his soreness and annoyance, Napier was secretly amused at "the child's judicial air," as he characterized it to himself. "At opposite poles, are they? It would be interesting to know what they were--those 'poles.'"
"Oh, you think I don't know? Well, I do. Sir William's idea of the problem of government is the same as his idea of the problem of the individual. To acquire. Julian's is to apportion. To administer."