After lunch Richard arrived. Richard was Speed's younger brother, on vacation from school; a pleasant-faced, rather ordinary youngster, obviously prepared to enter the soap-boiling industry as soon as he left school. In the afternoon Richard conducted the pair of them round the grounds and outbuildings, showing them the new Italian garden and the pergola and the new sunken lawn and the clock-tower built over the garage and the new gas-engine to work the electric light plant and the new pavilion alongside the rubble tennis courts and the new wing of the servants' quarters that "dad" was "throwing out" from the end of the old coach-house. Then, when they returned indoors, Lady Speed was ready to conduct them over the interior and show them the panelled bed-rooms and the lacquered cabinets in the music-room and the bathroom with a solid silver bath and the gramophone worked by electricity and the wonderful old-fashioned bureau that somebody had offered to buy off "dad" for fifteen hundred guineas. "Visitors always have to go through it," said Speed, when his mother had left them. "Personally I'm never the least bit impressed, and I can't understand anyone else being it." Helen answered, rather doubtfully: "But it's a lovely house, Kenneth, isn't it? I'd no idea your people were like this." "Like what?" "So--so well-off." "Oh, then the display _has_ impressed you?" He laughed and said, quietly: "I'd rather have our own little place at Lavery's, wouldn't you?" While he was saying it he felt: Yes, I'd rather have it, no doubt, but to be there now would make me utterly miserable. She replied softly: "Yes, because it's our own." He pondered a moment and then said: "Yes, I suppose that's one of the reasons why _I_ would." After a pleasant tea in the library he took Helen into the music-room, where he played Chopin diligently for half-an-hour and then, by special request of Richard, ran over some of the latest revue songs. Towards seven o'clock Lady Speed sailed in to remind Richard that it was getting near dinner-time. "I wish you'd run upstairs and change your clothes, dear--you know father doesn't like you to come in to dinner in tweeds.... You know," she went on, turning to Helen, "Charles isn't a bit fussy--none of us trouble to really _dress_ for dinner, except when we're in town--only--only you have to put a limit somewhere, haven't you?" As the hour for dinner approached it seemed as if a certain mysteriously incalculable imminence were in the air, as if the whole world of Beachings Over were steeling itself in readiness for some searching and stupendous test of its worth. It was, indeed, ten minutes past eight when the sound of a motor-horn was heard in the far distance. "That's Edwards," cried Lady Speed, apprehensively. "He always sounds his horn to let us know.... Now, Dick dear, don't let him know we've been waiting for him--you know how he hates to think he's late...."