father," she said, "sometimes I really respect you. If you
should come across that young man again, keep your eye upon him. He
knows one thing at least which I wish he would tell us--he knows where
Beatrice is."

Her father looked at her in amazement.

"He knows where Beatrice is and he has not told you?"

She nodded.

"You tried to have him tell you and he refused?" the professor
persisted.

"Exactly," she admitted.

Her father put on his hat.

"I knew that young man was something out of the common."

CHAPTER X. THE JOY OF BATTLE

They sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, in the topmost corner of the
field. In the hedge, close at hand, was a commotion of birds. In the elm
tree, a little further away, a thrush was singing. A soft west wind
blew in their faces; the air immediately around them was filled with
sunlight. Yet almost to their feet stretched one of those great arms of
the city--a suburb, with its miles of villas, its clanging of electric
cars, its waste plots, its rows of struggling shops. And only a little
further away still, the body itself--the huge city, throbbing beneath
its pall of smoke and cloud. The girl, who had been gazing steadily
downwards for several moments, turned at last to her companion.

"Do you know," she said, "that this makes me think of the first night
you spoke to me? You remember it--up on the roof at Blenheim House?"

Tavernake did not answer for a moment. He was looking through a
queerly-shaped instrument that he had brought with him at half-a-dozen
stakes that he had laboriously driven into the ground some distance
away. He was absolutely absorbed in his task.

"The main avenue," he muttered softly to himself. "Yes, it must be a
trifle more to the left. Then we get all the offshoots parallel and the
better houses have their southern aspect. I beg your pardon, Beatrice,
did you say anything?" he broke off suddenly.

She smiled.

"Nothing worth mentioning. I was just thinking that it reminded me a
little up here of the first time you and I ever talked together."

He glanced down at the panorama below, with its odd jumble of hideous
buildings, softened here and there with wreaths of sunstained smoke, its
great blots of ugliness irredeemable, insistent.

"It's different, of course," she went on. "I remember, even now, the
view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this;
everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that