“Some of her mother’s relations took her in. They were in very straitened circumstances. She was not an inmate at the Home where I found her-she had a post there.” After a pause he went on again. “She had had a most wretched time. I am naturally anxious to do all I can for her now. If it hadn’t been for my quarrel with her parents she would never have been exposed to such privations.”

He drove himself down to Field End with an obstinate conviction that there was a conspiracy to prevent him from doing what he chose to do with his own. They were all against him, everyone except Mirrie, but they should see-he would show them!

As he opened the door with his latchkey and came into the hall, Mirrie ran down the stairs to meet him in a little white dress and a blue sash. The dress had a childish round neck and puffed sleeves. She looked young and eager as she caught him by the arm and put up her face to be kissed.

“Oh, you’re back! How lovely!”

The frown melted from his brow.

“Pleased to see me?”

She squeezed his arm.

“Oh, yes! It’s lovely! Did you get your horrid will signed and everything finished so that you won’t have to go up again?”

He laughed.

“It isn’t at all a horrid will for you, my child-you know that.”

She gazed up at him adoringly.

“I know how frightfully, frightfully kind you are! But I do hate talking about wills-don’t you? I do hope it’s all signed and finished with so that you won’t have to think about it any more.”

He put an arm round her and kissed her again. It was rather a solemn sort of kiss, not at all like the first one. Nobody had ever kissed her on the forehead before. It gave her a curious half-frightened feeling, but it only lasted a moment, and then he was saying,

“Oh, yes, it’s all signed, with two of Mr. Maudsley’s clerks to witness it, so there is nothing to worry about any more.”

The words were said more to himself than to her. They kept repeating themselves in his mind-“Nothing to worry about-” But the worry persisted, and the frown returned to his brow.

Dinner that evening would have dragged if Mirrie had not prattled artlessly about the film they had seen in Lenton.

“It was lovely, Uncle Jonathan, and it was almost the first real film I’d ever seen-the first proper story film, you know. Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace didn’t approve of them. They didn’t approve of such a lot of things.”

The four other people at the table absorbed this, the first mention of any previous family circle. Johnny immediately enquired,

“Darling, who are Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace?” Whereupon Mirrie raised pleading eyes to Jonathan’s face.

“Oh, I’m sorry-they just slipped out.”

It was perhaps fortunate that Stokes was not in the room. Jonathan leaned across the table to pat Mirrie’s shoulder and murmur, “Never mind, my child,” and then straightened up to look sternly at the rest of them. “They were relations of Mirrie’s mother. She wasn’t happy with them. I am anxious that she should forget about her life under their roof. She has been asked to think and speak of them as little as possible. There are, I hope, a great many much happier years before her in which there will be no need to dwell upon the past.”

Johnny pitched his voice to Georgina ’s ear.

“This is where we drink confusion to Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace. Do you think it would run to champagne?”

Mrs. Fabian sent a kind vague smile across the table.

“Dear Jonathan, how well you put it! As a poet whose name I have forgotten says,

‘Tomorrow comes with flowers of May,

Gone are the snows of yesterday.’

“So what is the use of thinking about them?” Georgina had not meant to speak. She heard herself saying to Anthony very low, “Sometimes it’s the other way round.”

He said, “It isn’t-it won’t be.”

She had a startled expression.

“I didn’t mean to say it.”

He let his hand touch hers for a moment.

“It doesn’t matter what you say to me-you know that.”

Mirrie went on telling Jonathan about the film.

THE EVENTS of the evening which followed were to be told and re-told, weighed, scrutinized, and called upon to corroborate first one speculative theory and then another. Yet upon the surface, and at the time of their happening, these events were ordinary enough.

Mrs. Fabian’s remark as she entered the drawing-room had been made upon every occasion of Jonathan’s return to the family circle after some brief absence in town-“Well, I hope that you were able to complete your business satisfactorily.”

The words might vary in some slight degree, but the intention remained the same. It was axiomatic that a man who went up to town, whether for the day or for a longer period, did so in order to attend to business, a word to which she attached no positive meaning. On this particular evening the formula was unchanged. She said,

“I do hope that you were able to complete your business satisfactorily.”

To which Jonathan replied, “Yes, thank you.”

And with that the gong sounded and they went into dinner.

When the meal was over they returned to the drawing-room. Stokes brought in the coffee-tray and set it down on a small table before Georgina -all this in accordance with a routine which went back to her sixteenth birthday. She poured the coffee. Jonathan had his black and sweet. He stood beside her, took his cup from her hand, and remained there without turning away or sitting down, and without speaking.

Georgina went on pouring out. Mirrie liked a lot of milk and a lot of sugar. Johnny took his black. Anthony liked about a third milk. Mrs. Fabian discoursed on how coffee should be made, shook her head over Mrs. Stokes’ excellent brew, and drank three cups of it. When Jonathan had had a second cup he went off to the study with the time-honoured excuse that he had letters to write.

A minute or two later Georgina got up and left the room. Stokes saw her go into the study. When she came back to the drawing-room she took up a book. Anthony came over with the evening paper in his hand and sat down beside her. He said in an undertone,

“Why don’t you go to bed? You look all in.”

Georgina turned a page.

“No, I’m all right. We’ll all go presently.”

By this time Johnny was teaching Mirrie picquet. He could be heard telling her that she had no card sense, to which she replied that she didn’t know what it was, and Mrs. Fabian made the comment that serious card games were very fatiguing.

“But we used to play Old Maid, my three aunts and I, and sometimes a visiting cousin, and I used to enjoy it very much -only it vexed me because I was nearly always Old Maid.”

Johnny looked up from his serious game to blow her a kiss and say,

“Darling, it sounds like a riot! And it only goes to show that cards go by contraries, because the aunts didn’t marry and you did.”

Jonathan was still in his study when they went upstairs.

He often sat there until well after midnight, reading or dozing in his chair. At ten o’clock it was Stokes’ habit to take in a tray with a decanter and a syphon, but as often as not they would be left untouched. The entrance of anyone else was neither expected nor desired.

The rest of the party went up to the wide first-floor landing from which a passage led off on either side. Here they said their good-nights. Mrs. Fabian quoted:

“ ‘Early to bed and early to rise

Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.’

“Only of course you can’t take it literally, because I’ve never been wealthy, and I don’t suppose I ever shall be now.”

Johnny kissed her cheek and said,

“Perhaps you didn’t get up early enough.”

And then they separated, Mirrie, Georgina and Mrs. Fabian going to the left, and Anthony and Johnny to the right. For a time there were the sounds of doors opening and shutting and of water running, but all muted by the solid fashion of the walls and the thickness of carpets and curtains. Where the modern house echoes to the dropping of a boot or the sound of a footstep crossing the bedroom floor, Field End absorbed these things and kept its counsel. Stokes and Mrs. Stokes took their way up the back stairs to their third-floor room without the slightest sound coming through by way of wall or ceiling. No one on either floor would hear the opening of the study door or the footstep of the master of the house as he crossed the hall and came up to his own room fronting the stair. Whether he came or did not come, no one in any room heard anything.