“You understand, Julian,” the Bishop said, with a shade of anxiety in his tone, “that I am in the same position as yourself so far as regards the proposals which may lie within that envelope?  I have joined this movement—­or conspiracy, as I suppose it would be called—­on the one condition that the terms pronounced there are such as a Christian and a law-loving country, whose children have already made great sacrifices in the cause of freedom, may honourably accept.  If they are otherwise, all the weight and influence I may have with the people go into the other scale.  I take it that it is so with you?”

“Entirely,” Julian acquiesced.  “To be frank with you,” he added, “my doubts are not so much concerning the terms of peace themselves as the power of the German democracy to enforce them.”

“We have relied a good deal,” the Bishop admitted, “upon reports from neutrals.”

Julian smiled a little grimly.

“We have wasted a good many epithets criticising German diplomacy,” he observed, “but she seems to know how to hold most of the neutrals in the hollow of her hand.  You know what that Frenchman said?  ’Scratch a neutral and you find a German propaganda agent!’”

The Bishop led the way upstairs.  Outside the door of Julian’s room, he laid his hand affectionately upon the young man’s shoulder.

“My godson,” he said, “as yet we have scarcely spoken of this great surprise which you have given us—­of Paul Fiske.  All that I shall say now is this.  I am very proud to know that he is my guest to-night.  I am very happy to think that from tomorrow we shall be fellow workers.”

Catherine, while she waited for her tea in the Carlton lounge on the following afternoon, gazed through the drooping palms which sheltered the somewhat secluded table at which she was seated upon a very brilliant scene.  It was just five o’clock, and a packed crowd of fashionable Londoners was listening to the strains of a popular band, or as much of it as could be heard above the din of conversation.

“This is all rather amazing, is it not?” she remarked to her companion.

The latter, an attache at a neutral Embassy, dropped his eyeglass and polished it with a silk handkerchief, in the corner of which was embroidered a somewhat conspicuous coronet.

“It makes an interesting study,” he declared.  “Berlin now is madly gay, Paris decorous and sober.  It remains with London to be normal,—­London because its hide is the thickest, its sensibility the least acute, its selfishness the most profound.”

Catherine reflected for a moment.

“I think,” she said, “that a philosophical history of the war will some day, for those who come after us, be extraordinarily interesting.  I mean the study of the national temperaments as they were before, as they are now during the war, and as they will be afterwards.  There is one thing which will always be noted, and that is the intense dislike which you, perhaps I, certainly the majority of neutrals, feel towards England.”