'I read your _Health of Nations_ when it was published after the war,' Dawson said politely.

'I'd toned it down enormously. A young man can do his future severer damage by publishing a book than indulging his irresponsibility with racehorses and women.'

'No man is one person, but a succession,' Dawson ruminated. 'We're like the portrait-gallery of wicked ancestors in Ruddigore, always liable to step from their frames and haunt the latest version. I'd trimmed my own views, when I reported to the Government on our medical services in 1920. But a State health scheme will come one day, be sure of it.'

'It's unthinkable to the medical profession.'

'The unthinkable is often inevitable. The death of kings is more certain than the birth of princes.'

Eliot admitted, 'I suppose it was unthinkable to kill germs with mouldy bread, when I tried in 1910. Now Professor Fleming at St Mary's has proved me right. He's even purified the penicillin mould, you know. But unlike me, Fleming's a canny Scot, he doesn't claim too much for it.'

'Very sensibly. Penicillin will never have any use whatever outside the laboratory.'

'I offered it as a panacea because I was a zealous revolutionary.' Eliot smiled. 'And revolutionaries generally come to grief through their own egotism.'

'Thank God for all of us you did, in those particular activities.' Eliot was gratified to sense Dawson's feeling as genuine.

They had reached the landing. Behind the door to their right lay the ruler of an Empire on which the sun never set. He received the loyalty of 66 million white subjects, and of 372 million coloured ones, who had no option. King George V had a talent for fatherliness, whether at a Delhi durbar or on the wireless at Christmas, and had presided with equal composure over the House of Lords revolt in 1910, the General Strike of 1926 and the Great War.