Twenty minutes before he had been saying good-bye to Melton with moist eyes and unsteady speech. That phase was now ancient history, and—characteristically enough—he was ready to fling the whole blazing vigour of his vitality into the next.
"Come and find Mrs. Dainton," I suggested.
"Jove! I'd quite forgotten about her," was his ingenuous answer.
Tom and his father arrived that evening in time for dinner. We fired the first shot with our soup and, when Mrs. Dainton and Sonia left us, we were still fighting out the big battles with dessert knives, nutcrackers and port glasses to mark the positions. Concentration Camps were hotly canvassed at one end of the table, soft-nosed bullets at the other. Sutcliffe, who was rapidly acquiring the White Paper habit, flung out disconcerting dates and figures at the more vulnerable gaps in Dainton's argument, and Draycott, with a bad attack of paradox, proved to his own satisfaction that we had lost the war and alternately that no war had taken place.
"Well, it's all over now," said Dainton, as the decanter went its last round. "I think it's done us good, you know. We wanted a bit of stuffing knocked into us."
O'Rane had sat through the dinner in one of his effective silences. As the others pushed back their chairs and sauntered into the hall, he caught my arm and drew me through an open French window into the garden.
"There, there, there you have it," he stammered excitedly, "first hand! From a man who's been out there! 'We were getting a bit slack and wanted stiffening.' My God!"
"It was true as far as it went," I pointed out.
"And is that the only lesson he's learnt? Man, before this war we could put Europe in our vest pocket. Now they've taken our measure. You don't read the foreign papers."
Barely three years had elapsed, but I confess I had forgotten that when Raney, in the period of fagdom, suffered voluntary martyrdom once in ten days, it was in order to spend his unmolested afternoons studying the continental Press.