Towards lunch time he mounted the steps of his mother’s little house in Park Street. It was George’s green Rolls-Bentley four-seater, he supposed, which stood at the curb. A noisy brute of a car, and just what George would drive. Automatically he searched his pockets— damn—no keys—Dalton had his keys, in Peshawur. He eyed the solid door thoughtfully. Locked, of course. If one rang, Hinton the parlormaid would open it....

Round the corner came two quite correct little boys, brothers, dressed alike in gray suits with bare knees and white collars. With them was a lively spaniel, off his lead, which dangled from the younger boy’s hand. Eminently well-behaved, they came level with the bottom of the steps where he stood—they were moving briskly, absorbed in the dog. Hilary pressed the bell.

The little boys broke into a brief run in an effort to refasten the lead to the frisky dog’s collar. They were still chasing him busily, several houses further down the street when Hinton opened the door to an empty doormat. Hilary slipped past her into the hall. With a dark look after the innocent pair with the spaniel, Hinton shut the door smartly and returned to the kitchen, muttering.

Hilary mounted the familiar carpeted stairs to his mother’s sitting-room, feeling again the awkwardness of all this eavesdropping, but driven by his earnest need of an answer to the riddle of his own situation.

He heard voices, and the door stood open.

“Cocktails, mater,” George was saying decisively. “Too much sherry lately—makes me liverish.”

“Oh? Well, ring the bell, dear, and just tell Hinton what you want,” their mother’s light, cheerful voice advised him. “Alice said one-fifteen for lunch. She’s at the hairdresser’s till one.”

Not even George’s liver could depress Mrs. Shenstone’s naturally gay and inconsequential spirit. She was one of that unique race of Englishwomen who lived through four years of the Great War without breaking down; and she was of the species which for the last twenty years has gone on being bright and competent and sane by the simple expedient of never once coming into focus. A pleasant, busy vagueness is their salvation. They exist in a happy haze of trivialities. It is a sort of nirvana. They earned it.

Hilary paused on the threshold and stood looking into the sunny room, and feeling bitterly sorry for himself. Everything was so entirely as usual here. Alice was expected to lunch – cocktails would come up on a clinking tray—his mother was at her writing-table in a becoming gown someone ought to praise— George with his finger on the bell and his eye on the lunch-time racing form....

Home again. But nobody looking up to say, “Hello, dear, what’s the news?” in the vague, charming way his mother always did whenever anyone came in that door....