"It isn't a very good article, I'm afraid. Dot was in too much of a hurry for it. I never could write quickly." These last months she had discovered herself writing even less quickly than usual. Once or twice, even, she had been forced to break off in the middle of the morning by a strange fatigue--a pain in her back. She had meant to consult a doctor; meant to ask Ronnie's advice. But she hated fussing about herself, hated fussing Ronnie. And besides, Ronnie _was_ depressed--in some trouble or other. She could feel that trouble instinctively. "You're sure nothing's worrying you?" she asked him as they said good night. "Quite sure. Sleep well, mater." He kissed her, and went. "No," he thought, striding home to the rooms in Jermyn Street which she had insisted on furnishing for him. "No! Nothing's wording me. In point of sheer fact, I've never been so bucked in my life." And he was "bucked," ludicrously so; "bucked" because he had yielded to his mother's persuasions; ludicrously so because, just for the moment, he had altogether forgotten Hector Brunton's existence. Only when he awoke next morning did Ronald Cavendish remember that Aliette was a married woman--and the possibility that, after all, she might not be one of the guests at her uncle-in-law's dinner-party. 3 The ambassadorial branch of the Brunton family occupies a palace of a house in that palatial avenue, Kensington Palace Gardens. Driving thither with his mother in the electric brougham with which she compromised between the horseflesh of the Victorian past and the petrol of the democratic present, Ronnie knew himself feverishly excited. All the suppressed emotions of three months leaped to new anticipation as they rolled away from Bruton Street, through Berkeley Square into the park. It was still daylight. Happy lower-middle-class folk crowded the seats under the trees, the grass beyond. Here and there, lovers, splendidly indifferent to the public eye, embraced one another with the frankness of post-wartime. Subconsciously, the sight of these couples affected the serious young man in the silk hat and stiff shirt of formal party-going. Almost he envied them. "The season has been the fiasco one expected," commented his mother. "Decent people have no money to spend--the other sort don't know how to spend it. I wish you'd order yourself a new dress-suit, Ronnie. And those waistcoat buttons are very old-fashioned. I must get you some new ones." "Rather a contradictory sentence," he commented. "Nothing of the kind. It's a man's duty to be well-groomed." She sighed--it had been a tiring day, and she hated dinner-parties. "I often wish you'd stayed on in the army." "Why?" "I think you were happier; and the army, in peace-time, is so healthy." "You do worry about me, don't you?" "Of course. That's what mothers are for."