And suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to think she’d do a thing like that. Of course the S O S wasn’t a fake! As though she’d have the imagination! It was just the plain cold truth. She wasn’t shamming at all, she was really ill. And Gosh! at this moment she might be lying somewhere in ghastly pain, or even dead, for all I knew. The thought sent a most horrible pang of fright through me, a sort of dreadful cold feeling in my guts. I whizzed down Ellesmere Road at nearly forty miles an hour, and instead of taking the car to the lock-up garage as usual I stopped outside the house and jumped out.

So I’m fond of Hilda after all, you say? I don’t know what you mean by fond. Are you fond of your own face? Probably not, but you can’t imagine yourself without it. It’s part of you. Well, that’s how I felt about Hilda. When things are going well I can’t stick the sight of her, but the thought that she might be dead or even in pain sent the shivers through me.

I fumbled with the key, got the door open, and the familiar smell of old mackintoshes hit me.

“Hilda!” I yelled. “Hilda!”

No answer. For a moment I was yelling “Hilda! Hilda!” into utter silence, and some cold sweat started out on my backbone. Maybe they’d carted her away to hospital already—maybe there was a corpse lying upstairs in the empty house.

I started to dash up the stairs, but at the same moment the two kids, in their pyjamas, came out of their rooms on either side of the landing. It was eight or nine o’clock, I suppose—at any rate the light was just beginning to fail. Lorna hung over the banisters.

“Oo, Daddy! Oo, it’s Daddy! Why have you come back today? Mummy said you weren’t coming till Friday.”

“Where’s your mother?” I said.

“Mummy’s out. She went out with Mrs. Wheeler. Why have you come home today, Daddy?”

“Then your mother hasn’t been ill?”

“No. Who said she’d been ill? Daddy! Have you been in Birmingham?”

“Yes. Get back to bed, now. You’ll be catching cold.”

“But where’s our presents, Daddy?”

“What presents?”

“The presents you’ve brought us from Birmingham.”

“You’ll see them in the morning,” I said.

“Oo, Daddy! Can’t we see them tonight?”

“No. Dry up. Get back to bed or I’ll wallop the pair of you.”

So she wasn’t ill after all. She had been shamming. And really I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry. I turned back to the front door, which I’d left open, and there, as large as life, was Hilda coming up the garden path.

I looked at her as she came towards me in the last of the evening light. It was queer to think that less than three minutes earlier I’d been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead. Well, she wasn’t dead, she was just as usual. Old Hilda with her thin shoulders and her anxious face, and the gas-bill and the school-fees, and the mackintoshy smell and the office on Monday—all the bedrock facts that you invariably come back to, the eternal verities as old Porteous calls them. I could see that Hilda wasn’t in too good a temper. She darted me a little quick look, like she does sometimes when she’s got something on her mind, the kind of look some little thin animal, a weasel for instance, might give you. She didn’t seem surprised to see me back, however.