‘I couldn’t help coming,’ he said, the flush fixed on his face. ‘You didn’t expect me to wait really till Sunday week, did you?’ ‘I’m very glad you didn’t,’ she said, ringing the bell for tea and sitting down at the tea-table and beginning to pull off her gloves. They stuck because they were wet with the rain she had been out in. ‘Let me do that,’ he said, eagerly, watching her every movement. She held out her hands at once. ‘You’ve been walking in the rain,’ he said reproachfully, pulling away at the soaked gloves. Then, looking down at her face, the grey hard daylight of the March afternoon full on it from the high windows, he saw that she was tired--fagged out, in fact--and he added, alarmed, ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Doing?’ she repeated, smiling up at the way he was staring at her. ‘Why, coming home as quickly as I could out of the rain.’ ‘But why do you look so tired?’ She laughed. ‘Do I look tired?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not a bit.’ ‘Then why do you look as if you had walked hundreds of miles and not slept for weeks?’ ‘I told you you ought to see me in daylight,’ she said, with amused eyes on his face of concern. ‘You’ve only seen me lit up at night, or in the dark. I looked just the same then, only you couldn’t see me. Anybody can look not tired if it’s dark enough.’ ‘That’s nonsense,’ he said. ‘You’ve been walking about, and going in tubes. Look here, I wish you’d tell me something----’ ‘I’ll tell you anything,’ she said. What sweet eyes she had, what incredibly sweet eyes, if only they weren’t so tired.... ‘But you must sit down,’ she went on. ‘You’re so enormous that it hurts my neck to have to look up at you.’ He threw himself into the chair next to her. ‘What I want to know is----’ he began, leaning forward. He broke off as the door opened, and Mrs. Mitcham came in with the tea. ‘Go on,’ said Catherine encouragingly. ‘Unless it’s something overwhelmingly indiscreet.’ ‘Well, I was only going to ask you--do you <i>like</i> tubes?’ She laughed. She was always laughing. ‘No,’ she said, pouring out the tea. The teapot was impressive; all the tea arrangements were impressive, except the part you ate. On that had descended a severely restraining hand, thinning the butter on the bread, withholding the currants from the cake. Not that Christopher saw anything of this, because he saw only Catherine; but afterwards, when he went over the visit in his head, he somehow was aware of a curious contrast between the tea and the picture frames. ‘Then why do you go in them?’ he asked, Mrs. Mitcham having gone again and shut the door. ‘Because they’re cheap.’ His answer to that was to glance round the room--round, in his mind’s eye, Hertford Street as well, and Park Lane so near by, and the reserved expensiveness of the entrance hall, and the well-got-up, even if personally objectionable, porter.