“Sorry, Father,” he said. The meal went on in silence, till Dennis, over-anxious to give no cause of offence, made a terrific crash with his pudding spoon. “If you can’t eat your lunch decently, you had better leave the room,” said Colin. Dennis took this to be a general objurgation, not a command. “Sorry, Father,” he said again, and went on with his pudding. “Did you hear what I said, Dennis?” asked Colin. Dennis got up at once, but stood by his father’s chair a moment, scarlet in the face at this public ignominy, and very nervous, but determined to speak. “I’ve never thanked you yet, Father,” he said, “for what you did for me. I can’t do more than thank you, for there’s nothing else I can do for you. But if there was----” Colin wheeled round in his chair. “Damn you, go away,” he said. CHAPTER VII The rigour of the winter abated, and a rainy January was succeeded by a long spell of warm caressing weather, borrowed from May-time, so mild and sunny was it. The trees were bursting into early bud, the sallows were hung with catkins, primroses were a-bloom, and all over the marsh the ewes were with young. No shepherd there remembered so early a lambing season, nor one more fruitful. Colin had spent a month on his beloved island, recuperating, and that very successfully, after his illness. Then one day, after a week of London, that longing for Stanier overcame him, and he drove down alone, with no plan but to stay there as long as he was content. He would find there only his grandmother, and she now kept to her room entirely, and no more preposterous rubbers of whist would be demanded in the evening. “After all, she has played two rubbers every night for seventy years,” thought Colin, and tried to work out the portentous sum of the total. But on his arrival, her nurse came down to tell him that she was mysteriously aware, it seemed, that he was coming, for she kept restlessly muttering to herself, “Colin will be here soon”: perhaps she would be quieted by the sight of him. So, rather grudgingly, for it must surely be a sheer waste of time, he went up to see her. There she lay in bed, pallid and immobile, with her pearls round her neck, and looked at him with that disconcerting, unwinking gaze, behind which there seemed to lie some frozen consciousness and knowledge. She was still repeating, even while she gazed at him, “Colin will be here soon,” but suddenly she stopped and gave that smile which looked as if it was the blurred reflection of something very far away, and she muttered no more.