G.J. went home at once, partly so that Christine should not be disturbed, partly because he desired solitude in order to examine and compose his mind. Mrs. Braiding had left an agreeable modest fire--fit for cold April--in the drawing-room. He had just sat down in front of it and was tranquillising himself in the familiar harmonious beauty of the apartment (which, however, did seem rather insipid after the decorative excesses of Queen's room), when he heard footsteps on the little stairway from the upper floor. Mrs. Braiding entered the drawing-room. This was a Mrs. Braiding very different from the Mrs. Braiding of 1914, a shameless creature of more rounded contours than of old, and not quite so spick and span as of old. She was carrying in her arms that which before the war she could not have conceived herself as carrying. The being was invisible in wraps, but it was there; and she seemed to have no shame for it, seemed indeed to be proud of it and defiant about it. Braiding's military career had been full of surprises. He had expected within a few months of joining the colours to be dashing gloriously and homicidally at panic-stricken Germans across the plains of Flanders, to be, in fact, saving the Empire at the muzzle of rifle and the point of bayonet. In truth, he found that for interminable, innumerable weeks his job was to save the Empire by cleaning harness on the East Coast of England--for under advice he had transferred to the artillery. Later, when his true qualifications were discovered, he had to save the Empire by polishing the buttons and serving the morning tea and buying the cigarettes of a major who in 1914 had been a lawyer by profession and a soldier only for fun. The major talked too much, and to the wrong people. He became lyric concerning the talents of Braiding to a dandiacal Divisional General at Colchester, and soon, by the actuating of mysterious forces and the filling up of many Army forms, Braiding was removed to Colchester, and had to save the Empire by valeting the Divisonal General. Foiled in one direction, Braiding advanced in another. By tradition, when a valet marries a lady's maid, the effect on the birth-rate is naught. And it is certain that but for the war Braiding would not have permitted himself to act as he did. The Empire, however, needed citizens. The first rumour that Braiding had done what in him lay to meet the need spread through the kitchens of the Albany like a new gospel, incredible and stupefying--but which imposed itself. The Albany was never the same again.