Four grown-ups and a child were gathered in the living-room of Halsey's cottage. The cottage was old like its tenant and had all the inconveniences of age; but it was more spacious than the modern cottage often is, since it and its neighbours represented a surviving fragment from an old Jacobean house--a house of gentlefolks--which had once stood on the site. Most of the house had been pulled down, but Colonel Shepherd's grandfather had retained part of it, and turned it into two cottages--known as 1 and 2 Ipscombe Place--which for all their drawbacks were much in demand in the village, and conferred a certain distinction on their occupants. Mrs. Halsey's living room possessed a Tudor mantelpiece in moulded brick, into which a small modern kitchener had been barbarously fitted; and three fine beams with a little incised ornament ran across the ceiling. Mrs. Halsey had not long cleared away the tea, and brought in a paraffin lamp, small but cheerful. She was a middle-aged woman, much younger than her husband--with an ironic half-dreamy eye, and a native intelligence much superior to her surroundings. She was suffering from a chronic abscess in the neck, which had strange periodic swellings and subsidences, all of which were endlessly interesting to its possessor. Mrs. Halsey, indeed, called the abscess "she," wrapped it lovingly in red flannel, describing the evening dressing of it as "putting her to bed," and talked of "her" qualities and oddities as though, in the phrase of her next-door neighbour, "it'd a been a christened child." She had decided views on politics, and was a match for any political agent who might approach her with an eye to her vote, a commodity which she kept, so to speak, like a new shilling in her pocket, turning it from time to time to make sure it was there. But independent as she was, she rarely interfered with the talk of Halsey and his male friends. And on this occasion when the three men--Halsey, Peter Betts, and young Dempsey--had gathered smoking round the fire, she settled herself with her knitting by the table and the lamp, throwing in every now and then a muttered and generally sarcastic comment, of which her husband took no notice--especially as he knew very well that the sarcasms were never aimed at him, and that she was as proud of him as she was generally contemptuous of the rest of the world. Halsey had just finished a rather grudging description of his experiences two days before for John Dempsey's benefit. He was conscious that each time he repeated them, they sounded more incredible. He didn't want to repeat them; he didn't mean to repeat them; after this, nobody should get any more out of him at all.