“Listen to this:
“‘Peace and rest at length have come,
All the day’s long toil is past,
And each heart is whispering Home,
Home at last.’”
“But what has that got to do with it?”
“That’s my answer to you, George.” And Fallaray waved his hand, as though the question was settled.
If Lytham had been older or younger, and if his admiration and esteem for Fallaray had not become so deep-rooted, he must have broken out into a torrent of incredulity and impatience. What he did, instead, persuading himself, easily enough, that his friend had not recovered from his recent disappointments, although he had obviously benefited in health, was to go over the whole ground again, more quietly and in greater detail, and to wind up with the assertion that Fallaray was essential to the cause.
To all of which Fallaray listened with a sort of respectful interest but without the slightest enthusiasm, and remained lolling in his chair. He might have been a Buckinghamshire Squire who knew no language but his own, hearing a Frenchman holding forth for no apparent reason on Napoleon. He watched his friend’s mouth, appraised his occasional gestures, ran his eyes with liking over his well-knit body and found his voice pleasant to the ear. Beyond that, nothing.
Lytham began to feel like a man who throws stones into a lake. All his points seemed to disappear into an unruffled and indifferent surface of water. It was incomprehensible. It was also indescribably baffling. What on earth had come over this man who, until a few days before, had been burning with a desire to reconstruct and working himself into a condition of nervous exhaustion in an endeavor to pull his country out of chaos?
“Well,” he said, after an extraordinary pause, during which everything seemed to have fallen flat. “What are you going to do?”
“But I’ve told you, my dear George,” said Fallaray, with a long sigh of happiness. “I have found a home, at last.”
“You mean that you are going to let us down?”