The Warden was listening with an averted face and now he remarked-- "Did you come in, Lena, to tell me this?" When the Warden was annoyed there was in his voice and in his manner a "something" which many people called "formidable." As Lady Dashwood stood looking down at him, there flashed into her mind a scene of long ago, where the Warden, then an undergraduate, had (for a joke at a party in his rooms) induced by suggestion a very small weak man with peaceful principles to insist on fighting the Stroke of the college Eight, a man over six feet and broad in proportion. She remembered how she had laughed, and yet how she made her brother promise not to exercise that power again. Probably he had completely forgotten the incident. Why! it was nearly eighteen years ago, nearly nineteen; and here was James Middleton no longer an undergraduate but the Warden! Lady Dashwood bent over him smiling and laid her solid motherly hand upon his head. "Oh, dear, how time passes!" she said. "Jim, you are such a sweet lamb. No, I didn't come to tell you that. I came to ask you if you were going to dine with us this evening?" "Yes," said the Warden. "Why?" and he now looked round at his sister without a trace of irritability and smiled. "Because Mrs. Jack Dashwood is coming here. I didn't mention it before. Well, the fact is she happens to have a few days' rest from her work in London. She is with some relative in Malvern and coming on here this afternoon." "Mrs. Jack Dashwood!" repeated the Warden with evident indifference. "Jack Dashwood's widow. You remember my John's nephew Jack? Poor Jack who was killed at Mons!" Yes, the Warden remembered, and his face clouded as it always did when war was mentioned. "May and he were engaged as boy and girl--and I think she stuck to it--because she thought she was in honour bound. Some women are like that--precious few; and some men." The Warden listened without remark. "And I am just going to telephone to Mr. Boreham," said Lady Dashwood, "to ask him to come in to dinner to meet her!" "Boreham!" groaned the Warden, and he took up his pen from the table. "I'm so sorry," said Lady Dashwood, "but he used to know May Dashwood, so we must ask him, and I thought it better to get him over at once and have done with it." "Perhaps so," said the Warden, and he stretched out his left hand for paper. "Only--one never has done--with Boreham." "Poor old Jim!" said Lady Dashwood, "and now, dear, you can get back to your book," and she moved away. "Book!" grumbled the Warden. "It's business I have to do; and anyhow I don't see how anyone can write books now! Except prophecies of the future, admonitions, sketches of possible policies, heart-searchings." Lady Dashwood moved away. "Well, that's what you're doing, dear," she said. "I don't know," said the Warden gloomily, and he reached out his hand, pulling towards him some papers. "One seems to be at the beginning of things."