as you say over here, Americans are so imitative one never can
tell. He was not young - near fifty, I would say; very well
dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring
mills in the Northwest. I don't know precisely. He explained it
all to Sir Henry. I think he would have been glad of a little
influence - some way to meet the purchasing agents for the
government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could
come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway, he
was immensely interesting - and he had a ripping motor."

The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out
over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped
behind his back. He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he
had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant
nature. But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the
aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the fidelity of a loved
woman.

He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl,
believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in
another. He knew also how the charm of the girl was in the young
soldier's blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries.
Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to
him out of the garden of a convent - out of a roc's egg, like the
princess in the Arabian story.

All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered
romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad
somewhere in France. Lady Mary would see only broken
conventions; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond