Chapter 18

This then was it--the New World and the human creatures who were to
build it, the unborn as well as those now in their cradles or tottering
in their first step on the pathway leading to the place of building. Yet
he himself had no thought of there being any touch of heroic splendour
in his way of looking at it. He was not capable of drama. Behind his
shut doors of immovability and stiff coldness, behind his cynic habit of
treating all things with detached lightness, the generations and the
centuries had continued their work in spite of his modernity. His
British obstinacy would not relinquish the long past he and his had
seemed to _own_ in representing it. He had loved one woman, and one
only--with a love like a deep wound; he had longed for a son; he had
stubbornly undertaken to protect a creature he felt life had treated
unfairly. The shattering of the old world had stirred in him a powerful
interest in the future of the new one whose foundations were yet to be
laid. The combination of these things might lead to curious
developments.

They sat and talked long and the developments were perhaps more unusual
than she had imagined they might be.

"If I had been able to express the something which approached affection
which I felt for Donal, he would have found out that my limitations were
not deliberately evil proclivities," was one of the things he said. "One
day he would have ended by making a clean breast of it. He was afraid of
me. I suspect he was afraid of his mother--fond as they were of each
other. I should have taken the matter in hand and married the pair of
them at once--quietly if they preferred it, but safely and sanely. God
knows I should have comprehended their wish to keep a roaring world out
of their paradise. It _was_ paradise!"

"How you believe her!" she exclaimed.

"She is not a trivial thing, neither was he. If I did _not_ believe her
I should know that he _meant_ to marry her, even if fate played them
some ghastly trick and there was not time. Another girl's consciousness
of herself might have saved her, but she had no consciousness but his.
If--if a son is born he should be what his father would have been after
my death."

"The Head of the House," the Duchess said.

"It is a curious thing," he deliberated, "that now there remains no
possible head but what is left of myself--it ceases to seem the mere
pompous phrase one laughed at--the Head of the House of Coombe. Here I,
of all men, sit before you glaring into the empty future and demanding
one. There ought to have been more males in the family. Only four were
killed--and we are done for."

"If you had seen them married before he