"How do I know!" Napier returned irritably.
"She said, 'Well, I'll just see about that! You mustn't go pulling me up by the roots to see how I'm growing,' she said. 'It puts me back.' And then I very nearly took hold of her. But all I did was to sit tight and say: 'Which way are you growing, Nan? If I can't find out, I'll have to get Gavan to.' 'You'd ask Gavan!' And she looked so startled, I laughed. 'So you don't want Gavan to know how you behave,' I said. I wasn't surprised!"
He brought it out with an incredible lightheartedness. If underneath his surface equability Julian was really agitated, shaken, torn, it was not on the score of his own and Nan's future. It was for the immediate fate of Europe. He swung back to it as they came in sight of the hall. "I was thinking as I came along that our diplomacy for the last twenty years—"
A servant crossed the lawn to meet them with two telegrams for Sir William.
"And the telephone, sir. Sir William left word that you—Yes, London, sir." Napier hurried back to his post.
Tommy Durrant was at the other end—a message for Sir William from the Prime Minister. Napier wrote it down. He'd ring Tommy up before six. Any more news? King Albert's letter, asking for the support of England, had been read in the House with immense effect. "In spite of some labor opposition, they'll vote the credit to-night; you'll see. If the German fleet molests the French, we'll be on hand!" cried Tommy along the wire. "Army? Mobilizing over night. Kitchener's back from Egypt."
Under the renewal of the hammer-strokes, Napier's sense of a world blindly driven to some incredible doom gave to the family group, when he rejoined it, an air of unreality. And this in spite of the fact that Miss Greta did not make the mistake of ignoring the subject which in all minds usurped the foreground.
She made her own little contribution with an air of engaging frankness. "If the war were going to be fought out on sea, the British fleet, of course—But you wouldn't say yourself, would you, that the British were a military people?"
"Not in the sense that Germany is," Napier agreed.
"In no sense at all," said Julian.