"Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr. Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's "Manifesto," then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they said."
"They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Arthur, seriously.
"What risk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British Government hasn't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own country. Besides, they wouldn't find it. And suppose they did, the English couldn't shoot me. I told them this afternoon, 'I'm not bound by your horrid war regulations.' But no," she said lugubriously through the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody's afraid."
"Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining in his moved face. "It's a great bond."
Gavan recognized the fact now, and all its implications, that Julian, with his pale halo of martyrdom, was able to draw closer to the girl than anybody else on her idealist side. Politics? She wasn't thinking about the future of governments and the stamp to be set on civilization, Napier told himself. She was thinking that bayonet work was cruel and revolting. She was prepared to let the great ideals be bayonetted like the babies of the Belgian stories, rather than let the war go on!
The last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening toward the end of January, about half-past six. Julian's convalescence, not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting: "Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs.
"And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being pelted."
She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America and the labor parties everywhere.
Away from that slavery to sickroom sensibilities, Gavan couldn't bear it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the peacemongers weren't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to Sir William, who had just lost his second son!
"Not Niel! Oh, Gavan, Niel!"