The phrases he had used that afternoon at Claverings came back presently into his head.  They were, he felt assured, the phrases that had to be said now.  This war could be seen as the noblest of wars, as the crowning struggle of mankind against national dominance and national aggression; or else it was a mere struggle of nationalities and pure destruction and catastrophe.  Its enormous significances, he felt, must not be lost in any petty bickering about the minor issues of the conflict.  But were these enormous significances being stated clearly enough?  Were they being understood by the mass of liberal and pacific thinkers?  He drove more and more slowly as these questions crowded upon his attention until at last he came to a stop altogether....  “Certain things must be said clearly,” he whispered.  “Certain things—­The meaning of England....  The deep and long-unspoken desire for kindliness and fairness....  Now is the time for speaking.  It must be put as straight now as her gun-fire, as honestly as the steering of her ships.”

Phrases and paragraphs began to shape themselves in his mind as he sat with one arm on his steering-wheel.

Suddenly he roused himself, turned over the map in the map-case beside him, and tried to find his position....

So far as he could judge he had strayed right into Suffolk....

About one o’clock in the morning he found himself in Newmarket.  Newmarket too was a moonlit emptiness, but as he hesitated at the cross-roads he became aware of a policeman standing quite stiff and still at the corner by the church.

“Matching’s Easy?” he cried.

“That road, Sir, until you come to Market Saffron, and then to the left....”

Mr. Britling had a definite purpose now in his mind, and he drove faster, but still very carefully and surely.  He was already within a mile or so of Market Saffron before he remembered that he had made a kind of appointment with himself at Pyecrafts.  He stared at two conflicting purposes.  He turned over certain possibilities.

At the Market Saffron cross-roads he slowed down, and for a moment he hung undecided.

“Oliver,” he said, and as he spoke he threw over his steering-wheel towards the homeward way....  He finished his sentence when he had negotiated the corner safely.  “Oliver must have her....”

And then, perhaps fifty yards farther along, and this time almost indignantly:  “She ought to have married him long ago....”

He put his automobile in the garage, and then went round under the black shadow of his cedars to the front door.  He had no key, and for a long time he failed to rouse his wife by flinging pebbles and gravel at her half-open window.  But at last he heard her stirring and called out to her.

He explained he had returned because he wanted to write.  He wanted indeed to write quite urgently.  He went straight up to his room, lit his reading-lamp, made himself some tea, and changed into his nocturnal suit.  Daylight found him still writing very earnestly at his pamphlet.  The title he had chosen was:  “And Now War Ends.”