From the adjoining room his wife recalled him again and again to the flight of time. She was never to be distracted from her duties by any beauty or ugliness of the outer world. Had the Last Day dawned in fire, Gundred would have duly finished having her hair done before confronting it. There is a time for everything, she says, and all reasonable people know that the time for looking at landscapes is after lunch, while taking one’s afternoon drive, before going home to tea and the second post. Then, at the proper moment, ecstasies are allowable, and even suitable. But every minute of the day has its task, and nothing can be plainer than that dressing-time is the time to dress. Kingston, however, whistled idly at his desultory work, and dawdled as if the whole forthcoming week were vacant. He loved the young tenderness of the sunlight, and drew great breaths of life at the open window. Overhead, and far away to the right, stretched along the cliff a mighty, menacing shaft of darkness, the shadow of the huge Castle behind. But this little old wing, on its spur of rock, jutted so boldly out from the main mass of the building that all here was radiance. Gundred, too, enjoyed the sun, but did not allow his ardours to distract her from her duties. She had the white blinds pulled down, and her toilet was cheered merely by a subdued consciousness of the warmth outside. Then, when all was carefully and properly accomplished, she made her way down twisting steps, and along a strip of corridor, to the end of the wing, where the last two rooms on this ground-floor were portioned off as dining-room and sitting-room. The whole arrangement was quaint enough to please her, but neither so inconvenient nor so unusual as to offend her sense of what was becoming. It was better than living, sitting and dining, in the grim, mouldering halls of the Drum Tower, or in the bald, chintz-hung rooms of the modern wings. The unexpected booming of the gong roused Kingston to a sense of time. With an effort he tore himself from his ecstatic contemplation, and compressed the remainder of his toilet into half a dozen crowded moments. Then, flurried, and filled with the feeling that he ought to be apologetic, he hurried towards the dining-room. He found his wife seated at the breakfast-table, decapitating a boiled egg with her usual crisp neatness, which always suggested that she was doing the egg a favour in making it an example of exactly how an egg should be eaten. She was a lesson to the world. And he felt that she knew it. She, for her part, noticed immediately that his tie was under one ear, that it was exceedingly ill-knotted, and that it was the wrong sort of tie for that particular collar. ‘I thought I would begin, darling,’ said Gundred. ‘I did not know when you would appear. Such a lovely morning--yes?’