Yet, for all that, there was an air of power and of
reserved strength about him that set him apart from his fellows, and a
casual observer would have believed him cold, and perhaps a thought
calculating, in nature.
Yet, standing there, looking out on that quiet, narrow street, he was
seething with varying emotions in which he was, in a sense, luxuriating,
though whether he would have admitted any living being to a share in them
was another matter.
Home! Home at last for good!--after what had been, with two short breaks,
a nine years' absence from England, and from all that England stands for
to such a man.
He had left his country in 1910, an angry, embittered lad of
twenty-three, believing that he would never come back or, at any rate,
not till he was an old man having "made good."
But everything--everything had fallen out absolutely differently from
what he had expected it to do. The influence of Mars, so fatal to
millions of his fellow beings, had brought him marvellous, unmerited good
fortune. He had rushed home the moment War was declared, and after
putting in some time in a training which he hated to remember, he had at
last obtained a commission.
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