The room was as hideously comfortless as ever, and smelt abominably of stocks. Tea had been taken away, and it had not occurred to Helwise to offer him a fresh brew. A détour upstairs before entering, prompted by some inexplicable shyness, had shown him his dressing-table standing in water. Evidently the window had been open when the factotum wielded his weekly hose. On the hall-floor he found a telegram requiring immediate answer, and an envelope containing money had slipped off the table into Helwise’s umbrella. Yet he felt less irritated than usual as he stood on his mockery of a hearth, while Wiggie, with a throw of double sixes, sprang Climber over an imitation brass inkstand, a framed funeral card and a mug from Morecambe. Helwise looked happy, he thought, tossing dice with breathless intensity. He did a great deal more for her, every day, than this foolish young man was doing at the moment, but it never evoked that spirit of flagrant joy. He realised suddenly that, in spite of her rattle-headed irresponsibility, she had something he had not--a youth of soul at once a blessing and a curse. Perhaps he had taken her too seriously, demanded too much of her, not in practice, but in temperament. The Shaws and Wiggie asked nothing of her except to be her aimless and absurd self. Even Harriet bullied but protected and liked her. He alone kept her, made things easy for her, and found her a pricking thorn. He shrugged his shoulders. After all, it was _his_ dressing-table. Harriet had grabbed the only true hound in the pack, a daintily-finished model that Bluecaster had brought Helwise from Grasmere, and was playing in her usual fashion, barking orders and rattling the dice like an enemy’s brains. After Lanty came in, she barked rather louder than before, especially at Wiggie, for whom she seemed to have a measureless contempt. Nobody noticed it, though, but Wiggie himself, with all his little thread-ropes of intuition flung out like so many cables. Dandy was having very bad luck, laboriously boosting a pincushion-backed dachshund over a pink mountain of Lanty’s best blotting-paper. She wooed the fates with a variety of chants and curses, but to no purpose. For her the dice would not fall. Her cheeks were as pink as the paper by the time Pincushion’s head came over the hill. “He despises me for being a wretched town-person!” she said dismally. “Wiggie’s getting on all right, but then Wiggie’s a magician. All hairy and feathery and furry things love him. We can’t keep the birds out of his bedroom.” “Birds in your room mean bad luck!” Harriet observed brutally, slinging the dice-box at the magician, and adding “Butter-thumbs!” when he missed it. “Rotten luck--illness--death! You’d better be making your will.”