The latter, I remember, was announced when Churchill and I were finally finishing our account of the tremendous passing of the Protector.  In that silent room I had a vivid sense of the vast noise of the storm in that twilight of the crowning mercy.  I seemed to see the candles a-flicker in the eddies of air forced into the gloomy room; the great bed and the portentous uncouth form that struggled in the shadows of the hangings.  Miss Churchill looked up from the card that had been placed in her hands.

“Edward,” she said, “the Duc de Mersch.”

Churchill rose irritably from his low seat.  “Confound him,” he said, “I won’t see him.”

“You can’t help it, I think,” his aunt said, reflectively; “you will have to settle it sooner or later.”

I know pretty well what it was they had to settle—­the Greenland affair that had hung in the air so long.  I knew it from hearsay, from Fox, vaguely enough.  Mr. Gurnard was said to recommend it for financial reasons, the Duc to be eager, Churchill to hang back unaccountably.  I never had much head for details of this sort, but people used to explain them to me—­to explain the reasons for de Mersch’s eagerness.  They were rather shabby, rather incredible reasons, that sounded too reasonable to be true.  He wanted the money for his railways—­wanted it very badly.  He was vastly in want of money, he was this, that, and the other in certain international-philanthropic concerns, and had a finger in this, that, and the other pie.  There was an “All Round the World Cable Company” that united hearts and hands, and a “Pan-European Railway, Exploration, and Civilisation Company” that let in light in dark places, and an “International Housing of the Poor Company,” as well as a number of others.  Somewhere at the bottom of these seemingly bottomless concerns, the Duc de Mersch was said to be moving, and the Hour certainly contained periodically complimentary allusions to their higher philanthropy and dividend-earning prospects.  But that was as much as I knew.  The same people—­people one met in smoking-rooms—­said that the Trans-Greenland Railway was the last card of de Mersch.  British investors wouldn’t trust the Duc without some sort of guarantee from the British Government, and no other investor would trust him on any terms.  England was to guarantee something or other—­the interest for a number of years, I suppose.  I didn’t believe them, of course—­one makes it a practice to believe nothing of the sort.  But I recognised that the evening was momentous to somebody—­that Mr. Gurnard and the Duc de Mersch and Churchill were to discuss something and that I was remotely interested because the Hour employed me.

Churchill continued to pace up and down.

“Gurnard dines here to-night,” his aunt said.

“Oh, I see.”  His hands played with some coins in his trouser-pockets.  “I see,” he said again, “they’ve ...”

The occasion impressed me.  I remember very well the manner of both nephew and aunt.  They seemed to be suddenly called to come to a decision that was no easy one, that they had wished to relegate to an indefinite future.