For the rest, things revolved round Sir Richard; it being everyone’s hidden intention, for reasons strictly individual and peculiar, to keep everything from him for as long a period as possible. But everybody was convinced that he saw further into the matter than anyone else, and was equally determined to disguise his own peculiar cleverness from the rest of the company. Tony was there, rather quiet and subdued. That was a fact remarked on by everybody. Something, of course, had happened last night; and here was the mystery, vague, indefinite, only to be blindly guessed at, although Maradick knew. The fine shades of everybody’s feelings about it all, the special individual way that it affected special individual persons, had to be temporarily put aside for the good of the general cause, namely, the hoodwinking and blinding of the suspicions of Sir Richard; such a business! Conversation, therefore, was concerned with aeroplanes, about which no one present had any knowledge at all, aeroplanes being very much in their infancy; but they did manage to cover a good deal of ground during the discussion, and everyone was so extraordinarily and feverishly interested that it would have been quite easy for an intelligent and unprejudiced observer to discover that no one was really interested at all. Lady Gale was pouring out tea, and her composure was really admirable; when one considers all that she had to cover it was almost superhuman; but the central fact that was buzzing beyond all others whatever in her brain, whilst she smiled at Mrs. Lester and agreed that “it would be rather a nuisance one’s acquaintances being able to fly over and see one so quickly from absolutely anywhere,” was that her husband had, as yet, said nothing whatever to Tony about his last night’s absence. That was so ominous that she simply could not face it at all; it meant, it meant, well, it meant the tumble, the ruin, the absolute débâcle of the house; a “house of cards,” if you like, but nevertheless a house that her admirable tact, her careful management, her years of active and unceasing diplomacy, had supported. What it had all been, what it had all meant to her since Tony had been anything of a boy, only she could know. She had realised, when he had been, perhaps, about ten years old, two things, suddenly and sharply. She had seen in the first place that Tony was to be, for her, the centre of her life, of her very existence, and that, secondly, Tony’s way through life would, in every respect, be opposed to his father’s. It would, she saw, be a question of choice, and from the instant of that clear vision her life was spent in the search for compromise, something that would enable her to be loyal to Tony and to all that his life must mean to him, and something that should veil that life from his father. She was, with all her might, “keeping the house together,” and it was no easy business; but it was not until the present crisis that it seemed an impossible one.