Then a surprising, terrible thing happened--so surprising and so terrible that Leonard and Janey could only stand and gape. Nigel hid his face in his hands, and began to cry. For some moments they stared at him with blank, horror-stricken eyes. Scarcely a minute ago he had been uproarious--forgetting pain and shame in the substantial ecstasies of reunion, smothering--after the Furlonger habit--all memories of anguish in a joke. Never since his earliest manhood had they seen him cry, not even on the day they had said good-bye to him for so long. Now he was crying miserably, weakly, hopelessly--crying quietly like a child, his hands covering his eyes, his shoulders shaking a little. Then suddenly he gasped, almost whimpered-- "Don't ask me those questions. Don't ask me any more questions." "Nigel," cried Janet, finding her tongue at last, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know you minded. Please don't cry any more--it hurts us." "We didn't mean anything, old man," said Leonard huskily. "Do cheer up, and forget all about it." Nigel took away his hands from his eyes, and Len and Janey glanced quickly at each other. They had expected to see his face swollen and disfigured, but except for a slight redness round the eyes it was quite unchanged. They both knew that it is only the faces of those who cry continually which are so little altered by tears. For a moment they could not speak. A chill seemed to have dropped on Sparrow Hall, and all three heard the moaning of the wind--as it swept up to the windows, rattled them, then seemed to hurry away, sighing over the fields. "Come, drink your soup, old chap," said Janet, pulling up his chair to the table. "Write me down an ass, a tactless ass," she growled to herself; "but how could I know he would take on that way?" Nigel obediently began to swallow the soup, while Len and Janey talked across him with laboured airiness about the weather. After the soup came bacon and eggs, and potatoes cooked in their skins. Nigel's spirits began to rise--he seemed childishly delighted with the food, though Janet's cooking was sketchy in the extreme. When the meal was over, he joined in the washing up, which was done at a sink in the corner of the kitchen. "What sort of people are the Lowes?" he asked suddenly, polishing a fork with a vigour and thoroughness which made Leonard and Janey tremble lest he should realise what he was doing. "What sort of people are the Lowes?" Janet flushed. "Oh, they're quite ordinary," said Leonard, "quite ordinarily unpleasant, I mean. The old chap's narrow and pious, like most devil-dodgers, and the young 'un's like an ape." "And they've got all the Kent land?" "Oh, it's nothing to speak of. You know that end was always too low for wheat"--poor Len was in a panic lest his brother should begin to cry again.