"If the Germans really did," Julian began; but Napier picked him up smartly, "You forget, we _know_."
"Well, well, it's one proof the more, if we needed the more, that war brutalizes noncombatants as well as combatants."
Lady McIntyre shook her ear-rings desparingly. "Aromatic vinegar," she murmured, as she went upstairs.
While Julian exposed diplomacy and denounced governments, Nan sat, chin in hand, drinking it in, as if she recognized in these doctrines that true faith for which all her life she had been thirsting. Under the subtle flattery, Julian, in spite of weariness, waxed yet more eloquent. Napier pulled out his watch and made a low exclamation, intended to indicate some pressing business overdue. He went up the stairs two steps at a time. And yet the pace wasn't quick enough to please him. Away, he must get away. Julian had been pitying Colin and Neil, "pawns in the great game." Napier knew now that he envied them. Oh, that he too might go and fight! He walked to and fro in his room in the first access of that fever that was to beset him sore until he should be standing in the trenches of the Somme. With Julian's denunciation of war nagging at his ears, Napier hailed war as the Great Simplification. Not only of international troubles, but of private ones. Instead of ten thousand struggles, one.
Well, at all events, he couldn't, as he now realized (and happily, by reason of the great crisis, he wasn't going to be asked to) stay here in Scotland and look on at this love-making! War had its uses, even to the civilian.
An hour later he was still sitting there, back to the window, smoking innumerable cigarettes and trying to read his novel. A light, rattling sound made him turn round. A fine hail on the window-panes this cloudless August evening. He looked out.
Julian was down below with a handful of coarse sand. A sign: Come down.
The hall was empty, except of the footmen beginning to lay tea. Outside Julian waited.
"You're off to London to-morrow, too," he began. "Is that the idea?"
"Well, then there's precious little time." He was threading a way through the shrubberies to a half-concealed garden bench.
"I've been wanting your advice, Gavan. The fact is,"--he smiled as he made the confession--"I don't know quite where I am."