Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/279

 must have concrete Christian marriage again: you can't have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy: a harem that isn't even a home."

Green nodded and rose slowly to his feet, with his hands in his pockets.

"When it comes to a fight," he said, "When I look at these enormous underground preparations, it is not difficult to infer that you think it will come to a fight."

"I think it has come to a fight," answered Blair. "Lord Eden has decided that. And the others may not understand exactly what they are doing; but he does."

And Blair knocked out his pipe and stood up, to resume his work in that mountain laboratory, at about the same time at which Lord Eden awoke from his smiling meditations; and, lighting a cigarette, went languidly indoors.

He did not attempt to explain what was in his mind to the men around him. He was the only man there who understood that the England about him was not the England that had surrounded his youth and supported his leisure and luxury; that things were breaking up, first slowly and then more and more swiftly, and that the things detaching themselves were both good and evil. And one of them was this