“No, pater, punctual to the second.” Patricia and her father shook hands. They were not in the least alike, these two. The doctor—two inches shorter than his younger daughter—had dark brown hair, just graying; the hands of a surgeon; pince-nez; a fine forehead, and an almost colourless face, set in stern lines. Since his wife’s death (he had been a widower twelve years) the already celebrated diagnostician had concentrated on work to the exclusion of every other interest but his children. His face showed the price paid for success. “Well, Jack, and how are things at Hillsea. I hear you’ve been disappointed in love?” “Oh, shut up, Pat.” Jack Baynet pulled uncomfortably at his white evening waistcoat; fingered his clipped moustache; trifled with his butterfly tie. As a subaltern in the Field Gunners, almost a senior subaltern too, he disliked being ragged by his older sisters—and, most particularly, he disliked being ragged about Alice Sewell. So, of course, Violet took up the running. “Poor dear! Fancy your own major cutting you out with her. It’s _too_ bad.” “Stark isn’t a major yet; only a captain,” snapped Jack; then, realizing a tactical error, “And anyway, I never was in love with her.” “Dinner is on the table, ma’m,” announced Smith. . . . Dinner, quietly served by two maids in the dark, square dining-room,—oak-panelled, lit only by electric candles, mauve-shaded, on the oval table and the huge Chippendalish sideboard—was a leisurely meal. Thick soup followed the smoked salmon, grilled sole the soup, a chick _en casserole_ the sole. Talk, family gossip of no interest to outsiders, flowed—slowly at first, quicker as Peter’s second-best Burgundy loosened constraint. “And why,” asked Rawlings suddenly, “has Peter gone to Hamburg?” “I think,” answered Patricia, always on guard against her brother-in-law’s curiosity, “that it’s something to do with cigars.” “Cigars? You mean cigarettes, don’t you? He hardly bothers about the cigar business nowadays.” “Perhaps you’re right,” said Patricia—knowing he wasn’t. “When is he coming back?” “Tomorrow, as far as I know.” “Do you ever see Francis nowadays?” put in Violet. “I was trying to read something of his in the _English Review_ just before we came out tonight. He’s a bit beyond _me_, you know.” “Francis Gordon,”—Heron Baynet spoke slowly, almost professionally—“might become a great writer, if he weren’t such a neurotic.” “Oh, pater, do keep off your hobby, just for this one evening,” Patricia protested. But, once launched, her father was not an easy person to stop.