was no lack of detonating material; simply there was no gun.
"You was always a smart little feller," said Mark, as they were parting. "I knowed you was a wonder—and so y'are."
And so he was. A wonder even to himself! And all they could do was to let him go on being a wonder and go on wondering about it.
He completed the renovation of his house, labouring with a new determination. The profane world had failed him; he had in self-defence retired into his own. He must abide by the consequences, Better, at any rate, to be an intelligent hermit than a sheep—especially in the light of all this war-talk.
The Halifax Herald had reported diplomatic embroilments abroad, but Paul was not interested. Like most sailors he had not acquired a taste for newspapers. Ever since the days when he had argued with Otto, he had regarded everything connected with war as a misapplication of energy. War? Why, it was a phenomenon he had discussed out of countenance with army officers in Egypt and cast off as an antiquated institution, a thing to be placed in a museum beside the mummies.
But it had gone to the heads of the people like rum.
John Ashmill was going to enlist, in spite of old Dave's protests. At the age of twenty-seven John had outgrown every other form of excitement.
In Halifax, when Paul went to buy furniture for his house, men jumped upon soap-boxes and ranted, Never had the world seemed so colossally bad-mannered. Never had the walls of his fortress been so aimlessly battered; never had it seemed so impregnable.
There was a "mass meeting" in the town hall of Hale's Turning—a bare room over the post office where Paul
