Mamma's eyes blinked. Her forehead was pinched with vexation. Her foot tapped on the floor. Mark's eyes kept up their puzzled stare. "What's been happening?" he said. "What's the matter? Everywhere I go there's a mystery. There was a mystery at Ilford. About Dan. And about poor Charlotte. I come down here and there's a mystery about some people called Sutcliffe. And a mystery about Mary." He laughed again. "Minky seems to be in disgrace, as if she'd done something.... It's awfully queer. Mamma's the only person something hasn't happened to." "I should have thought everything had happened to me," said Mamma. "That makes it queerer." Mamma went up with Mark into his room. Papa's room. You could hear her feet going up and down in it, and the squeaking wail of the wardrobe door as she opened and shut it. She waited, listening. When she heard her mother come downstairs she went to him. Mark didn't know that the room had been Papa's room. He didn't know that she shivered when she saw him sitting on the bed. She had stood just there where Mark's feet were and watched Papa die. She could feel the basin slipping, slipping from the edge of the bed. Mark wasn't happy. There was something he missed, something he wanted. She had meant to say, "It's all right. Nothing's happened. I haven't done anything," but she couldn't think about it when she saw him sitting there. "Mark--what is it?" "I don't know, Minky." "_I_ know. You've come back, and it isn't like what you thought it would be." "No," he said, "it isn't.... I didn't think it would be so awful without Papa." II. The big package in the hall had been opened. The tiger's skin lay on the drawing-room carpet. Mark was sorry for the tiger. "He was only a young cat. You'd have loved him, Minky, if you'd seen him, with his shoulders down--very big cat--shaking his haunches at you, and his eyes shining and playing; cat's eyes, sort of swimming and shaking with his fun." "How did you feel?" "Beastly mean to go and shoot him when he was happy and excited." "Five years without any fighting.... Anything else happen?" "No. No polo. No fighting. Only a mutiny in the battery once." "What was it like?" "Oh, it just tumbled into the office and yelled and waved jabby things and made faces at you till you nearly burst with laughing." "You laughed?" Mamma said. "At a mutiny?" "Anybody would. Minky'd have laughed if she'd been there. It frightened them horribly because they didn't expect it. The poor things never know when they're being funny." "What happened," said Mary, "to the mutiny?" "That." "Oh--Mark--" She adored him. She went to bed, happy, thinking of the tiger and the mutiny. When Catty called her in the morning she jumped out of bed, quickly, to begin another happy day. Everything was going to be interesting, to be exciting. At any minute anything might happen, now that Mark had come home. III. "Mark, are you coming?"