Then she knew what he was thinking of.
"Donal's child will be one of them," she said.
"The Head of the House of Coombe—if there is a Head who starts fair—ought to have quite a lot to say—and do. Howsoever black things look," obstinately fierce, "England is not done for. At the worst no real Englishman believes she can be. She can't! You know the old saying, 'In all wars England loses battles, but she always wins one—the last one.' She always will. Afterwards she must do her bit for the New World."
CHAPTER XVIII
This then was it—the New World and the human creatures who were to build it, the unborn as well as those now in their cradles or tottering in their first step on the pathway leading to the place of building. Yet he himself had no thought of there being any touch of heroic splendour in his way of looking at it. He was not capable of drama. Behind his shut doors of immovability and stiff coldness, behind his cynic habit of treating all things with detached lightness, the generations and the centuries had continued their work in spite of his modernity. His British obstinacy would not relinquish the long past he and his had seemed to own in representing it. He had loved one woman, and one only—with a love like a deep wound; he had longed for a son; he had stubbornly undertaken to protect a creature he felt life had treated unfairly. The shattering of the old world had stirred in him a powerful interest in the future of the new one whose foundations were yet to be laid. The combination of these things might lead to curious developments.
They sat and talked long and the developments were perhaps more unusual than she had imagined they might be.
"If I had been able to express the something which approached affection which I felt for Donal, he would have found out that my limitations were not deliberately evil proclivities," was one of the things he said. "One day he would have ended by making a clean breast of it. He was afraid of me. I suspect he was afraid of his mother—fond as they were of each other. I should have taken the matter in hand and married the pair of them at once—quietly if they preferred it, but safely and sanely. God knows I should have comprehended their wish to keep a roaring world out of their paradise. It was paradise!"
"How you believe her!" she exclaimed.