on's defense was his own situation. He did not want the boy to
repeat his mistakes, to marry the wrong woman, and then find, too
late, the right one. During the impassioned appeal that followed he was
doggedly determined to prevent that. Perhaps he lost the urgency in
the boy's voice. Perhaps in his new conviction that the passions of the
forties were the only real ones, he took too little count of the urge of
youth.

He roused himself.

"You think you are really in love with her?"

"I want her. I know that."

"That's different. That's--you are too young to know what you want."

"I ought to be married. It would settle me. I'm sick of batting round."

"You want to marry before you enter the army?"

"Yes."

"Do you think for a moment that your wife will be willing to let you
go?"

Graham straightened himself.

"She would have to let me go."

And in sheer despair, Clayton played his last card. Played it, and
regretted it bitterly a moment later.

"We must get this straight, Graham. It's not a question of your entering
the army or not doing it. It's a question of your happiness. Marriage is
a matter of a life-time. It's got to be based on something more than--"
he hesitated. "And your mother?"

"Please go on."

"You have just said that your mother does not want you to go into the
army. Has it occurred to you she would even see you married to a girl
she detests, to keep you at home?"

Graham's face hardened.

"So;" he said, heavily, "Marion wants me for the money she thinks I'm
going to have, and mother wants me to marry to keep me safe! By God,
it's a dirty world, isn't it?"

Suddenly he was gone, and Clayton, following uneasily to the doorway,
heard a slam below. When, some hours later, Graham had not come back,
he fell into the heavy sleep that follows anxiety and brings no rest. In
the morning he found that Graham had gone back to the garage and taken
his car, and that he had not returned.

Afterward Clayton was to look back and to remember with surprise how
completely the war crisis had found him absorbed in his own small group.
But perhaps in the back of every man's mind war was always, first of
all, a thing of his own human contacts. It was only when those were
cleared up that he saw the bigger problem. The smaller questions loomed
so close as to obscure the larger vision.

He went out into the country the next day, a cold Sunday, going afoot,
his head down against the wind, and walked for mi