“Thank God it is not!” he answered, and moved towards his office. Across the hall, where the drawing-room door stood slightly ajar, he could see that there was a warm fire in the loathly grate, though the grate itself he could not see, nor the pot dogs on the mantelpiece. There was no light in the room but the light of the fire. On a low stool Dandy was sitting, staring into the red glow as it poured out and wrapped her round, setting a thousand torches to the brightness of her hair, and racing with golden feet over her slender grace. She looked curiously lonely, he thought, since there was somebody else in the room, whose voice he placed without hesitation. If the somebody else hadn’t been there, he might perhaps have entered, drawn by the first real glimpse of heart’s joy the house had held for years. At least he might have stood on the threshold and looked within, before his personal tragedy dragged him back into the desert; but instead he turned to Helwise, still staring at him with that half-look of fear. “Can I have something to eat? I don’t seem to have had anything all day--I don’t remember.” At the sound of his voice Dandy sprang up, looking nervously towards the hall, and Harriet came out of the dusk and stood beside her. Helwise threw the door wide. “Don’t go into the office, Lancelot! There’s no fire, and the gas has been escaping. What a dreadful storm, wasn’t it? I felt certain every minute that the house would be blown down. I don’t know why I didn’t have a heart-attack! Dandy and Harriet came over for news, so I made them promise to stay until you got back. I really _couldn’t_ be left alone, and it’s Our Agnes’s night out.” The two girls came forward into the hall. “It was very good of you,” Lanty said mechanically, looking at them with tired eyes. Behind them he could see the grate, now, and the pot dogs. Helwise chattered on. “I’m sure I don’t know if you can have anything to eat! I expected you’d get some food at one of the farms. You always say you like it best there. We’ve had supper some time since, and it’s the girl’s night out, as I said. There isn’t any meat in the house, I know, and there won’t be any bacon for breakfast, as you weren’t Armer, after all, but I dare say you can have some tea, if you care about it. I put some into the Thermos at five o’clock, thinking you might turn up, so you can’t say I don’t remember your comfort sometimes! I’ll go and get it.” “Hot whisky do you a jolly sight more good!” Harriet shot out bluntly, without looking at him. She looked instead at the sign-manual of her bicycle on the wall. Dandy, in an apologetic tone, murmured “Soup!” Lanty smiled faintly. What a mixture life was--bathos dancing on the edge of the Pit! Now he came to think of it, he did not want anything to eat. He had asked for it as one asks for some small alleviation in an unbearable trial. He would not have the Thermos, anyhow.