Napier was seeing nearly as little in these days of Julian as of Nan. They had had high words over the development and intensification of Julian's opposition to the war, and in particular over his strictures on the Government. Napier had studiously avoided all reference to Nan Ellis. Such efforts as had been possible to keep in touch with her were mainly unsuccessful. He had a minimum of time he could call his own, and she apparently had none at all. She was never at the little flat in Westminster except late at night, and she was seldom in Lowndes Square. Madge, too, resented this preoccupation on the part of her new ally. "Oh, don't ask me where she is. Gone to see some of Mr. Grant's queer friends, I suppose."
By this side wind and that, he gathered that Nan was being swept into the little pacifico-philosophic group and was thick as thieves with certain men and women whose names were beginning to be anathema to the general public. Gradually, in Napier's mind, the conviction tightened. If something isn't done, they'll not only have made a convert of that girl, they'll be making use of her—some use or other, God knew what!—for their nefarious ends.
Instead of Julian's protecting her, he'd likely as not do the other thing. All from the loftiest motives!
And upon that, Napier's first motion of enmity toward the man who had been his closest friend. Strangely to his own sense, with far more bitterness than he resented Julian's notorious anti-war work, Napier would, as he knew now, resent the harnessing of the airy spirit of the girl to that lumbering and ill-looked-on car.
What was to be done?
He had stood aside out of loyalty to his friend, who was also (as he reminded himself a thousand times) the first comer in the field. The field of private feeling. Yes. But there was no obligation upon Napier to stand aside while the girl he loved was swamped in a bog of disloyalty to the country, and of personal reprobation. Worse. Of personal danger.
No! he wasn't going to look on at that and not raise a hand. The old struggle which he thought he had abandoned, wearing this new face, became possible once more. Possible? It became inevitable. For it had become a duty. So he told himself.
The trouble was that on the rare occasions when he was with her, something in the new post-Greta manner of the girl—an intangible but effectual barrier—so barred the way to even the beginning of renewed confidence, that Napier, over-worked, over-anxious, found the edge of his impulse turned. He would leave her, saying to himself, "I'll have this out with Julian." And when he found himself with Julian for a few hasty minutes, "having it out" proved so baulked and inconclusive a business, "I must tackle Nan," Napier would say to himself.
Not that he failed altogether to tackle Julian, nor to tackle him on the admittedly burning questions: such as Julian's speech introducing a deputation to the Prime Minister, or that highly provocative letter assailing British pre-war diplomacy, the letter rejected by the "Times" and "accepted, of course, by the dingiest radical rag in the kingdom."
"They are using you!" Napier had burst out.