frightened.  Queer people—­paunchy and bald like gnomes, most of them.  Where?  Of course!  We had it all over—­a big dinner—­oysters!—­Colchester.  I’d been there, just to show all this raid scare was nonsense.  And I was coming back here. . . .  But it doesn’t seem as though that was—­recent.  I suppose it was.  Yes, of course!—­it was.  I got out of my car at the bottom of the rise with the idea of walking along the cliff path, because every one said one of their battleships was being chased along the shore.  That’s clear!  I heard their guns------”

He reflected.  “Queer I should have forgotten!  Did you hear any guns?”

I said I had heard them.

“Was it last night?”

“Late last night.  One or two in the morning.”

He leant back on his hand and looked at me, smiling frankly.  “Even now,” he said, “it’s odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly dream.  Do you think there was a Lord Warden?  Do you really believe we sank all that machinery—­for fun?  It was a dream.  And yet—­it happened.”

By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man.  “Yes,” I said; “that’s it.  One feels one has awakened—­from something more than that green gas.  As though the other things also—­weren’t quite real.”

He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully.  “I made a speech at Colchester,” he said.

I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the moment.  “It is a very curious thing,” he broke away; “that this pain should be, on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable.”

“You are in pain?”

“My ankle is!  It’s either broken or badly sprained—­I think sprained; it’s very painful to move, but personally I’m not in pain.  That sort of general sickness that comes with local injury—­not a trace of it! . . .”  He mused and remarked, “I was speaking at Colchester, and saying things about the war.  I begin to see it better.  The reporters—­scribble, scribble.  Max Sutaine, 1885.  Hubbub.  Compliments about the oysters.  Mm—­mm. . . .  What was it?  About the war?  A war that must needs be long and bloody, taking toll from castle and cottage, taking toll! . . .  Rhetorical gusto!  Was I drunk last night?”

His eyebrows puckered.  He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow rested thereon and his chin on his fist.  The deep-set gray eyes beneath his thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things.  “My God!” he murmured, “My God!” with a note of disgust.  He made a big brooding figure in the sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical largeness; he made me feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking.  I had never met a man of this sort before; I did not know such men existed. . . .