For one moment Lucy sat down on a chair, covered her face and wept. She might have had “a good cry,” but for her sudden realisation that she was not alone, that her guests were in the house, and that she had a duty to discharge towards them. She sprang up and dashed away her tears. Where had the guests gone? What were they doing? She had been so occupied with the unhappy drunkard that she had not realised what else had gone on around her. In her confusion she went first to the drawing-room. The door was wide open and the room was empty, an album lying on the floor just as she had dropped it. She paused, puzzled. Then she heard sounds below. It was evident that her friends were all in the kitchen. There she found them, busy. The pudding was already in the pot. The burned serviettes were put aside. Tom Black had carried the rag mat out to the scullery, and Wilfrid Somerset was washing plates. Lucy cried out in dismay; but they all laughed good-humouredly. The disaster had happened, they said, and now they’d got to make the best of it. “What is the use of having old friends, if they can’t do such a thing as this?” asked Miss Latimer. But Mr. Black, anyhow, was not an old friend, protested Lucy. No, Mr. Somerset admitted that—at least, he hadn’t been only an hour ago. “I think he is now,” he added. “Hours count for years sometimes.” Lucy resolutely pulled herself together. She, too, must make the best of it. Though, as a hostess, she was humiliated and defeated, she must still be the hostess, and try to extract a smile out of the cruel situation. For the time she must put this unhappy woman out of her thoughts, along with what might come on the morrow and the utter upset of all her plans for the future. She must try to turn the household wreck into an impromptu picnic. She tried and succeeded perfectly, so far at least as Tom Black and Hugh were concerned. In half an hour those two were laughing and running to and fro as if there could not be a better Christmas game than tidying a disordered room and pushing on a belated dinner. Tom Black thought in his own mind what a jolly woman Mrs. Challoner was not to be a bit put out by what would have utterly upset some people. Miss Latimer and Wilfrid Somerset knew better than that; they knew what dramatisations life sometimes forces upon us, and how costly such performances are. But they nobly seconded Lucy in her determination to put a fair face on things. The dinner was cooked in time and set upon the table with the informal decency which prevails in houses where “the family do their own work.” Tom Black really enjoyed himself a great deal more than he had expected he would when in prospect of the ordinary dinner-party. He actually took courage to say that he thought it would be far better fun if people always came prepared to get ready their own festivity, instead of sitting talking about nothing and looking through stereoscopes.