Julian, on, the morning following his visit to the Prime Minister, was afflicted with a curious and persistent unrest. He travelled down to the Temple land found Miles Furley in a room hung with tobacco smoke and redolent of a late night.
“Miles,” Julian declared, as the two men shook hands, “I can’t rest.”
“I am in the same fix,” Furley admitted. “I sat here till four o’clock. Phineas Cross came around, and half-a-dozen of the others. I felt I must talk to them, I must keep on hammering it out. We’re right, Julian. We must be right!”
“It’s a ghastly responsibility. I wonder what history will have to say.”
“That’s the worst of it,” Furley groaned. “They’ll have a bird’s-eye view of the whole affair, those people who write our requiem or our eulogy. You noticed the Press this morning? They’re all hinting at some great move in the West. It’s about in the clubs. Why, I even heard last night that we were in Ostend. It’s all a rig, of course. Stenson wants to gain time.”
“Who opened these negotiations with Freistner?” Julian asked.
“Fenn. He met him at the Geneva Conference, the year before the war. I met him, too, but I didn’t see so much of him. He’s a fine fellow, Julian—as unlike the typical German as any man you ever met.”
“He’s honest, I suppose?”
“As the day itself,” was the confident reply. “He has been in prison twice, you know, for plain speaking. He is the one man in Germany who has fought the war, tooth and nail, from the start.”
Julian caught his friend by the shoulder.