She hadn't known that he was in the house yet. He had contracted the habit of having tea at the club-house and talking on till dark. He did that, as she believed, because she always read to Lancelot in the evenings: she gave up the holidays entirely to him. Well, Lancelot that afternoon had been otherwise engaged--with friends of a neighbour. She had cried off on the score of "seeing something of Father," at which Lancelot had winked. But James was not in to tea, and at six--and no sign of him--she yielded to the liquid calling of a thrush in the thickening lilacs, and had gone out. There she stayed till it was dark, in a favourite place--a circular garden of her contriving, with a pond, and a golden privet hedge, so arranged as to throw yellow reflections in the water. Standing there, it grew perfectly dark--deeply and softly dark. The night had come down warm and wet, like manifold blue-black gauze. She heard his quick, light step. Her heart hammered, but she did not move. He came behind her, clasped and held her close. "Oh, you've come--I wondered. Oh, how sweet, how sweet--" And then "My love!" had been said, and she had been kissed. In a moment he was gone. She had stayed on motionless, enthralled by the beauty of the act--and when she had withdrawn herself at last, and had tiptoed to the house, she saw his lamp on the table, and himself reading the _Spectator_ before a wood fire! Recalling all that, she remembered the happy little breath of laughter which had caught her. "If it wasn't so perfectly sweet and beautiful, it would be the most comic thing in the world!" she had said to herself. A telegram from Jimmy Urquhart came that night just before dinner. "Arriving to-morrow say ten-thirty for an hour or so, Urquhart." It was sent from St. James's Street. Lancelot had said, "Stout fellow," and James took it quite well. She herself remembered her feeling of annoyance, how clearly she foresaw an interrupted reverie and a hampered Sunday--and also how easily he had falsified her prevision. There had been an animated morning of garden inspection, in the course of which she had shown him (with a softly fluttering heart and perhaps enhanced colour) the hedged oval of last night's romance; a pony race; a game of single cricket in the paddock--Lancelot badly beaten; lunch, and great debate with James about aeroplanes, wherein Lancelot showed himself a bitter and unscrupulous adversary of his parent. Finally, the trial of the new car: an engine of destruction such as Lancelot had never dreamed of. It was admittedly too high-powered for England; you were across the county in about a minute. And then he had departed in a kind of thunderstorm of his own making. Lancelot, preternaturally moved, said to his mother, "I say, Mamma, what a man--eh?" She, lightly, "Yes, isn't he wonderful?" and Lancelot, with a snort: "A man? Ten rather small men--easily." And James, poor James, saw nothing kissable in that!