We plunged into the action quickly enough. A breakfast-gong--a sip of coffee--a bite of toast--and _Nigel Parry_ locks up his morning's love-correspondence; _Helen_, his wife, breaks open the drawer and peruses the damning letter; _Nigel_ returns and catches her red-handed. After this we took a long breath and lingered over the moral aspect of the situation. Indeed, during the next ten years nothing occurred except the separation of the couple; the reported decease of the other woman (whom we never saw, dead or alive), and the marriage of the boy _Parry_ with an actress bearing the ascetic name of _Ursula_. We now left the old trail in pursuit of this red herring; and for the rest of the play, up to the last moment, our attention was concentrated on the attitude of the elder heroine to her daughter-in-law, to whom she had taken a profound dislike at sight. But something had to happen if the author was to bring about a reconciliation of the original pair and so justify the symbolic title of her play. Thinking it out, she seems to have recalled that it is customary in these cases to let an accident occur to some junior member of the family, over whose prostrate body the old ones may kiss again with tears. Accordingly, no sooner had mention been made, quite arbitrarily, of an automatic pistol, alleged to be unloaded, than old stagers knew by instinct that _Ursula_ would shoot herself inadvertently. This occurred with such promptitude that even the author recognised that we should not be satisfied with so ingenuous an episode. Complications had therefore to be devised at all costs. Young _Parry_ must be kept in ignorance of the fact that the episode was due to his stupidity in leaving the weapon loaded. So _Ursula_ invents a story to show that the wound in her thigh was due to a fall downstairs. It is true that blood-poisoning--not amongst the more familiar sequelae of a fall downstairs--supervened. But the legend served well enough on the stage. Among other effects it increased the irritation of the mother-in-law, who felt that the accident indicated a criminal carelessness in one who was about to make her a grandmother, a condition of things that had been brought home to us in the course of some female conversation flavoured with the most pungent candour. When the truth came out, the proved devotion of the young wife causes an _entente_ between her and her mother-in-law, accompanied--for reasons which I cannot at the moment recall--by a parallel reconciliation between the senior couple. Personally, I felt that the threatened "Indian Summer" was not likely to be much warmer than the ordinary English kind.