"I thought it would last my time, George."
"If we live to the end of it we shall have seen the last war," I answered.
He snorted derisively.
"Till next time! As long as you let children point loaded pistols...."
He broke off and sat staring before him.
"Filson told me you'd been seedy," I said.
"Oh, if you talk to a fool like Filson!" my uncle exclaimed. "I went down to the House yesterday...." He paused and murmured to himself, as though unconscious of my presence. "We couldn't help ourselves, you know. I don't see what else we could have done.... I was down there, George, and walked home thinking it all over and, when I got in, I tumbled down in the hall. Good God! if a man mayn't fall about in his own hall ...! Filson was rather surprised, but I'm perfectly all right." He kicked away the rug and drew himself shakily erect. "Seventy-nine, George, but I must live a bit longer—till the Kaiser's been strangled in the bowels of the Crown Prince.... By all that's holy, if I were fifty years younger!"
There was something pathetically terrible in his disillusionment and anger with all things created. As he stood with clenched fists trembling above his head, I saw his body sway and sprang forward to catch him.
"You must take things a bit easy, Bertrand," I said.