To Pink this catastrophe was infinitely greater than that of the bank.  Men he knew had lived there.  There were old club servants who were like family retainers; one or two employees were ex-service men for whom he had found employment.  He stood there, with Willy Cameron’s hand on his arm, with a new maturity and a vast suffering in his face.

“Before God,” he said solemnly, “I swear never to rest until the fellows behind this are tried, condemned and hanged.  You’ve heard it, Cameron.”

The death list for that night numbered thirteen, the two watchmen at the bank and eleven men at the club, two of them members.  Willy Cameron, going home at dawn, exhausted and covered with plaster dust, bought an extra and learned that a third bomb, less powerful, had wrecked the mayor’s house.  It had been placed under the sleeping porch, and but for the accident of a sick baby the entire family would have been wiped out.

Even his high courage began to waver.  His records were gone; that was all to do over again.  But what seemed to him the impasse was this fighting in the dark.  An unseen enemy, always.  And an enemy which combined with skill a total lack of any rules of warfare, which killed here, there and everywhere, as though for the sheer joy of killing.  It struck at the high but killed the low.  And it had only begun.

CHAPTER XXVI

Dominant family traits have a way of skipping one generation and appearing in the next.  Lily Cardew at that stage of her life had a considerable amount of old Anthony’s obstinacy and determination, although it was softened by a long line of Cardew women behind her, women who had loved, and suffered dominance because they loved.  Her very infatuation for Louis Akers, like Elinor’s for Doyle, was possibly an inheritance from her fore-mothers, who had been wont to overlook the evil in a man for the strength in him.  Only Lily mistook physical strength for moral fibre, insolence and effrontery for courage.

In both her virtues and her faults, however, irrespective of heredity, Lily represented very fully the girl of her position and period.  With no traditions to follow, setting her course by no compass, taught to think but not how to think, resentful of tyranny but unused to freedom, she moved ahead along the path she had elected to follow, blindly and obstinately, yet unhappy and suffering.

Her infatuation for Louis Akers had come to a new phase of its rapid development.  She had reached that point where a woman realizes that the man she loves is, not a god of strength and wisdom, but a great child who needs her.  It is at that point that one of two things happens:  the weak woman abandons him, and follows her dream elsewhere.  The woman of character, her maternal instinct roused, marries him, bears him children, is both wife and mother to him, and finds in their united weaknesses such strength as she can.