he had seen in many countries of the world how their tentacles were reaching out into the entrails of other nations. So when he walked into his club men gathered round him to congratulate him on the articles he was writing on the crisis, and to his amusement his reinstatement was complete.
And Valerie, with her imagination now fired by his, as the possibilities of the war’s lasting were discussed, began to look ahead and to wonder what her part and his in it might be. And forgetting personal things she consented at last to go home to dine with her father and mother, providing relatives she disliked were not present.
In the week before they returned to Dargaville Davenport Carr invited several men to dinner to meet Dane. Valerie, the only woman present besides her mother, was content to be still, to sit back, and to watch Dane lead the talk. In her eyes he had never looked handsomer, and he had certainly never talked better. She did not mind that he had forgotten her, that he was lost in the subject of the Belgian opposition. She had again that curious feeling as to his phantom-like quality that arrested her at most unlikely times. She forgot all about his weaknesses as she listened to him talk that night. They did not matter at all. What mattered was that he could rise above them as he had done that last month or two. Indeed, as far as she knew, he had never touched drugs or drunk to excess since the night she had sat by him in his den. All she saw that night was the picture of his pale and brilliant face surrounded by a ring of tense and interested faces, listening fascinated to all he had to say.
Valerie’s spirits went down as they packed up to go home. Things were just beginning to happen about them. The little Dominion was moving. Men were coming into the cities from the back-blocks everywhere to form the
