‘But his life! All that … well, well, it is not pleasant to discuss it. I confess that it bewilders me.’

Mr Marriot made no reply. So many things bewildered Uncle Preston, who suffered from a permanent sense of grievance because events and persons would not fit into the frame through which he looked at life.

Uncle Preston strongly advised the lawyer to refuse Harry the twenty-one pounds. Let him save it out of his salary. If Harry insisted, he must have it, his uncle supposed, but he would much rather that Harry didn’t. After all, the boy was still under age. Even if no guardians had been legally appointed, he, Preston Garden, was the tiresome lad’s natural guardian; and Harry must recognize the fact.

Mr Marriot promised to let him know immediately there was any more news from the agents about the sale of the practice; and so the talk ended.

Uncle Preston was lost in a fit of gloomy musing as he rode home to Forest Hill (the car was still having things done to it).

Like all Gardens, and most human beings, for that matter, he seldom saw his life as a whole. He only worked doggedly from day to day to make it safe and to keep free from annoyances, just as Aunt Maxine instinctively worked to get as much coarse enjoyment as possible, and the dead Hartley had clutched at beauty, passion and excitement, and the dead Oliver had turned to drink and to some dark, vague satisfaction in his own mind which had always escaped him.

There was No Peace, thought Uncle Preston, staring unseeingly out of the railway carriage window at the miles of grey houses running past under the pure sky of a summer evening. There was Always Something. Rows, styes on people’s eyes, asthma, debts. Surely, when a man was always taking pains to keep worry at bay, worry ought to recognize the fact, and stay at bay? But worry seemed to haunt him, like a wasp.

And he got up still gloomily as the train drew into Forest Hill Station, with the problem unsolved; and went soberly homewards, swinging his quite unnecessary umbrella. With him, safely lodged in his skull, went the Garden nervousness and craving for excitement which was responsible for all his worryings; which welcomed the rows, asthma, even the styes on people’s eyes, because these incidents fed its restless activity. Neither he nor any of his brothers or his sister had ever heard the beautiful and appalling saying, ‘Mine was a nature which dreaded storms, but it needed them.’ Yet how true it was of them.

Harry and Francis, meanwhile, were obtaining their ration of natural excitement in a healthy manner through a little too much to drink and through love.

Francis’s affair with Toby had opened out with the ease of a flower in the sunlight; and they now spent most of their non-working hours together, making jokes and love.

He had pursued her with such singleness of mind that he had awed her into submission.