"Growing old?" Mary repeated to herself on the way upstairs to her room. "Growing old?" she echoed once more when she stood in front of her mirror. The candlelight, apricot-shaded, flattered her reflection. Growing old at forty? What nonsense Jemmie talked! He forgot that he was fifteen years older than she. Now he certainly _was_ growing old. How much he had aged just lately and how much he had improved with age! Dear old Jemmie, he really needed her far more than Geoffrey or Muriel needed her. He was much more a child to her than either of them. If it were not for Richard, she might begin to wonder if children were much of a consolation for growing old. And Richard would be here to-morrow. But for how long? Mary felt sick and dizzy in a sudden thought of how brief his stay might be. If he really were ordered to the front? Was it credible that he should be? Richard in danger, and Richard how many thousand miles away! She had been proud and glad when he chose to be a soldier; but war had been so remote then. It seemed only yesterday that Jemmie bought High Corner, so that the children might always spend their holidays out of London. And now the eldest of those children was liable to be sent abroad to fight for his country. High Corner without children would not be High Corner any longer. But perhaps the war would soon be over. She must read the papers more carefully. She must not skip them as she did now. She must not rely on gossip about the duration of the war. She must learn to judge for herself. And Richard would be here to-morrow. "I must not lie awake fretting," she decided. "I must get to sleep quickly. It will be time to fret when Richard is ordered abroad." He arrived when the sun was driving away the wraiths of morning mist and when the others were all at golf. For her, when she saw him, so tall and straight and slim and fair, coming toward her along that green walk by the phloxes, he was more radiant than the sun. "Hark, mother, do you hear that robin? That's the first I've heard this autumn," he exclaimed as he bent to kiss her. In the silence of their first embrace the birdsong passed into the dim green recesses of the day, vanishing like the voice of her son's vanishing childhood. "Do you remember that fatal day when I killed a robin?" he asked. "No, dearest, I'd forgotten that you'd ever killed anything." "Why, mother, when I had that air-gun I killed everything I saw until that day." "How you exaggerate, my Richard." "Yes, I did indeed. But that day I'd missed everything, and then sitting on a branch of that oak, the one Geoff and I planted to shade us in our old age, I saw a robin. I fired and killed him, and I was so shocked at what I'd done that I've never really been able to kill even a partridge since with any pleasure." "Always such a dear little boy," she exclaimed, holding tight to her son's arm.