They all sat silent. Why should any of them speak, and put somebody else to the trouble of a reply? Nothing had happened since, twenty-four hours ago, they had last met here: no fresh interest had stirred the toneless tranquillity. Ronald’s slight attack of gout was certainly better, and he meant to drink his port again to-night: his wife’s Patience had ‘come out’ twice; as for Lady Yardley, was she living in to-day at all, or in times long buried beneath the years? Then Lady Hester joined them, brisk from her walk and her ‘tub.’ She asked Ronald how he was, she told them where she had been, and then she, too, succumbed, and sat silent. Violet followed, made a general apology for being late, and the doors into the dining-room were thrown open. “Will you take Grandmamma in?” she said to her father, and the other three followed. Though the evening sky was still radiant, and there was light enough to have dined with unshuttered windows, curtains were drawn and the room lit with many candles, for Staniers dined by candlelight, quantities of candlelight, whatever the sun happened to be doing. Round the panelled walls were a dozen family portraits, each with its concealed electric illumination that made them look as if they had stepped forward from the walls, and were part of that little knot of their heirs and inheritors who sat round the table. For all their unbroken continuity, the Staniers had always grown on a slender stem, and to-night, with Dennis rosily sleeping upstairs on the floor above, only Colin was wanting to complete the full number of the clan. From generation to generation all collateral lines descended from daughters or younger sons had died out, but the silver cord of the direct descent had never been broken. Now from the walls, the past ages joined the present: here seated in the soft glow of candles was the fruit and distillation of the years, Ronald with his heavy wine-bibber’s face, Hester, in whom, as she had said, beauty had run to seed in prettiness, and Violet. The other two, Ronald’s wife and old Lady Yardley, had been, so to speak, but the fuel that made the Stanier fire burn. The younger, Violet’s mother, was no more than a burned-out cinder in the grate, she had done her part, and the dustman would sometime call and remove her; the elder, watchful and alive below the ash, still glowed with some inscrutable vigour. Through her had passed the spark that now blazed in Colin and Violet alike, and something of it still lived in her embers. For more than sixty years, Stanier and all that it stood for had soaked into her: she had become a sort of incarnation of the Stanier consciousness, and, sunk far below the surface, except when Colin was present, into whose gay hands she could resign her watchful responsibility, she witnessed and recorded.