Towards the middle of October Nevil Aston, just in the midst of a period of blissful laziness, sauntered down the long walks of the south garden in Renata's wake, occasionally stopping to pick up one or other of the two fat babies who struggled along after their mother, interrupting more or less effectually the business on which she was engaged. A pathetic-eyed yard or so of brown dachshund and a tortoise-shell kitten completed the party. Renata Aston was small and dark, gentle and deliberate of movement, and possessing an elf-like trick of shrinking her entrancing personality into comparative invisibility that bereft one of further vision. She moved from border to border choosing her flowers with care, and looking even smaller than she was in the proximity of her lanky husband, and the plump little babies toddling after. Presently she came to a stop. All her satellites stopped too. She regarded her trophies critically. "This is very good for the end of October, you know." She remarked to all the assembled court. "I only want some violets now. Nevil, I wish you'd stop Charlotte picking the heads off the fuchsias: there are no more to come out." Nevil hoisted his small daughter on his shoulder as the safest way to avoid an altercation and humbly asked if he must pick violets, "they grow so low down." "You grow so far up," she retorted scornfully. "Max can help me. You can watch with Charlotte. You are very good at watching people work." "It is not a common virtue," pleaded Nevil, "watchers generally tell the workers how to do it. I never do. Why don't you tell a gardener to pick them, Renata?" "A gardener! For Aymer?" "All this trouble for Aymer?" "It is a pleasure." "I know just how it will be," he complained mournfully, "the moment Aymer is here you will hound me off to work and I shall see nothing of you at all. You won't even give me new pens. Charlotte, I should look horrid if I had no hair: be merciful." Renata smiled and shook her head. "I shall get no more work out of you this side of Christmas, sir. I have no such impossible dreams. Perhaps Aymer won't want either of us now he has got Christopher." "I wonder now," remarked Nevil, depositing Miss Charlotte on a seat while he took out his cigarette case, "I wonder if you are jealous, Renata." She flushed indignantly and denied the fact with most unnecessary emphasis, so her husband told her in his gentle teasing way. He turned her face up to his and professed to look stern, which he never could do. "Confess now," he insisted. "Just a little jealous of Christopher?" "Well," she admitted, laughing and still pink, "Aymer has never stayed away from us for so long before. I don't know what was the use of his having those rooms done up for himself if he never means to use them."