Helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write. She must not jar him, must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all her fault at lunch.... But, on the other hand, she must not let him sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page--"thinking out my day's work," he called it--till too late. This she certainly did not desire to do, for Lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in the household. When once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet, must be, until lunch-time. These were his best hours for work. The small house brooded under a funereal silence. Lunch was a movable affair. Hubert could not endure clocks in his working-room. Their sound, which he declared was just not regular, got on his nerves, and he found himself on days when his inspiration would not flow, gazing at the dial with growing despair, like a bad sleeper who begins to count the hours which strike at ever lessening intervals, until he knows at last that now he will not sleep at all. The writer's estimate of time varied largely with the amount of his success. When he was writing well, the hours would speed away and he would then emerge at half-past two or even--once--at three, full of a joy so intense as to ignore, or even to melt, the iciness of Helena and Lily. At other times, when his pen dragged itself along the paper sleepily or idly drew vague circles on the blotting-pad, he would get tired and hungry. On these days lunch was punctual at one o'clock. After lunch, which was a meal solid almost to the limits of bad art, he would subside on the tempting armchair again and Helena be asked to bring him the weekly reviews. Not only the literary pages were digested; Hubert read the music, art, even the drama columns--everything except the science meetings in the _Athenæum_. This took, roughly, half-an-hour each day and the lonely time so occupied, he told Helena when he explained his ways to her, was devoted to "keeping in touch with the modern movements." There is no one English word for the Italian _siesta_. Then came the part of the day to which Helena looked forward; the afternoon, when they took ever such long tramps with Spook, the small white Aberdeen, across the wide free heath, and so home to tea beside a comfortable fire. Helena could almost hate his work when at the stroke of five he would get up, more stern by now than in the sleepy morn, and leave her with the statutory kiss. And when it rained, so that this jolliest part of the day was lost and he said in a masculine way that it would be a chance to do some letters (instead of having fun indoors!), she would sit by the drenched windows and look out through the jerky raindrops with all the pathetic grievance against Fate of children in a seaside lodging on wet holidays.