“You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.

“No one else can,” she answered.  “I’m—­I’m grown up.”

“Even if it hurts?”

“To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said.  “This—­This—­” She flashed her love.  She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....

Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again.  He liked him.  He liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows.  He liked him altogether.  He pronounced his verdict slowly.  “I suppose, after all,” he said, “that this is better than the tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man.  Eleanor, my dear, I’ve been thinking to-day that a father who stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong.  You are a dear girl to me.  I won’t stand between you two.  Find your own salvation.”  He got up.  “I go west,” he said, “presently.  You, I think, go east.”

“I can assure you, Sir,” the young man began.

Scrope held his hand out.  “Take your life in your own way,” he said.

He turned to Eleanor.  “Talk as you will,” he said.

She clasped his hand with emotion.  Then she turned to the waiting young man, who saluted.

“You’ll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the implications of that invitation.

She assented as carelessly.  The fact that she and her lover were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other considerations.  The two young people turned to each other.

Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.

For a time he could think only of Eleanor....  He watched the two young people as they went eastward.  As they walked their shoulders and elbows bumped amicably together.

(10)

Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.  He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared.  Then he remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an interruption.  Well, she had her own life.  She was making her own life.  Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own.  God bless those dear grave children!  They were nearer the elemental things than he was.  That eastward path led to Victoria—­and thence to a very probable death.  The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.

Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to elemental things, to heroic things.  The years of comedy and comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here.  And he had been thinking—­What had he been thinking?