I stared away up at a very tall, soldierly old man with a jagged scar across his forehead.  His wide-open, black-lashed gray eyes flashed a glance like a menace, like a sword, and then suddenly smiled as if the sun had jumped from a bank of storm-clouds.  And I looked into those wonderful eyes and we were friends.  As fast as that.  Most people would think it nonsense, but it happened so.  A few people will understand.  He took me out to dinner, and it was as if no one else was at the table.  I was aware only of the one heroic personality.  At first I dared not speak of his history, and then, without planning or intention, my own voice astonished my own ears.  I announced to him: 

“You have been my hero since I was ten years old.”

It was a marvelous thing he did, the lad of twenty, even considering that the secret was there at his hand, ready for him to use.  The histories say that—­that no matter if he did not invent the device, it was his ready wit which remembered it, and his persistence which forced the war department to use it.  Yes, and his heroism which led the ship and all but gave his life.  And when he had fulfilled his mission he stepped back into the place of a subaltern; he was modest, even embarrassed, at the great people who thronged to him.  England was saved; that was all his affair; nothing, so the books say, could prod him into prominence—­though he rose to be a General later—­after that, after being the first man in England for those days.  It was this personage with whom I had gone out to dinner, and to whom I dared make that sudden speech:  “You have been my hero, General Cochrane, since I was ten years old.”

He slued about with the menacing, shrapnel look, and it seemed that there might be an explosion of sharp-pointed small bullets over the dinner-table.

“Don’t!” I begged.  The sun came out; the artillery attack was over; he looked at me with boyish shyness.

“D’you know, when people say things like that I feel as if I were stealing,” he told me confidentially.  “Anybody else could have done all I did.  In fact, it wasn’t I at all,” he finished.

“Not you?  Who then?  Weren’t you the boy Donald Cochrane?”

“Yes,” he said, and stopped as if he were considering it.  “Yes,” he said quietly in the clean-cut, terse English manner of speaking, “I suppose I was the boy Donald Cochrane.”  He gazed across the white lilacs and pink roses on the table as if dreaming a bit.  Then he turned with a long breath.  “My child,” he said, “there is something about you which gives me back my youth, and—­the freshness of a great experience.  I thank you.”

I gazed into those compelling eyes, gasping like a fish with too much oxygen, I felt myself, Virginia Fox, meshed in the fringes of historic days, stirred by the rushing mighty wind of that Great Experience.  I was awestruck into silence.  Just then Milly got up, and eight women flocked into the library.