Hatter Fayre caught the mirth in her voice and responded to it. When he smiled it was easy to see how he had come by the network of fine wrinkles at the corners of his keen grey eyes and why the old Oxford nickname had persisted through all the long years of his exile in India, for a nickname, unless it is an unkind one, rarely sticks to a man who is not beloved of his friends. “I do seem to be a bit of a back number!” he admitted ruefully. “Girls occasionally were demure, you know, in my day.” “I’m fond of Cynthia,” went on his hostess thoughtfully. “But she sometimes makes me rejoice that my peck of troubles are all sons.” Fayre turned to his other neighbour. “What do you say, Sybil? You know Lady Cynthia, don’t you?” Lady Kean, who had been listening to the discussion in silence, shot a languid glance of derision at her hostess. “Eve’s a cat,” she said. “She’s only trying to assert her independence. Cynthia can twist her round her little finger. She twists us all, I think, except perhaps Edward. He’s untwistable.” Sir Edward Kean, catching the sound of his name, strolled towards them. “What about Edward?” he asked, smiling down on his wife from his great height. “Something flattering, I hope.” To Fayre, deeply interested in these old friends from whom he had been separated for so long, there was nothing he had come across since his return to England more surprising or touching than Kean’s attitude towards his wife. Fayre and Sybil Kean had known each other since their nursery days; had played together as children in the country and had foregathered again later in London. Kean had come into both their lives later, at a time when he was a struggling young barrister and Fayre was cramming for the Indian Civil. When Sybil Lane, as she was then, fell madly in love with her first husband, a handsome guardsman, married and was carried off by him to Malta, Fayre had a suspicion that Kean was badly hit. Certainly he had remained single and had developed a capacity for work which, according to his friends, was almost demoniacal. To Fayre, far away in India, had come, first the news of the death of Sybil’s husband, killed in the first year of the War, and second the report of her marriage to Kean five years later, and now he was back in England for good, picking up old threads once more and keenly interested to see how time had dealt with the friends of his youth. For a week, now, they had been at Staveley together, and what he had seen there had both saddened and touched him.