"What would you like to do?" she asked.

"Anything. Sing for her. Work for her. Die for her. It makes one so
impatient to sit down and do nothing. If one could only stir her up
to a sense of her nationality!" he went on, less lyrically, though
with the same fine enthusiasm. "She seems to be losing it, letting
the smaller nations assert theirs to such an extent that she is
running the risk of becoming a mere geographical expression. She has
merged herself in the Imperial Ideal. That's magnificent; but the
Empire ought to realize her as the great Motherheart. If England
could only wake up as England again, what a wonderful thing it would
be!"

"It would," said Lady Chudley. "And you would like to be the
awakener?"

"Ay!" said Paul--"what a dream!"

"There was never a dream worth calling a dream that did not come
true."

"Do you believe that, too?" he asked delightedly. "I've held to it
all my life."

Colonel Winwood, who had been moving hostwise from group to group in
the great drawing-room, where already a couple of bridge tables had
been arranged, approached slowly. Lady Chudley gave him a laughing
glance of dismissal. Paul's spacious Elizabethan patriotism, rare--
at least in expression--among the young men of the day, interested