“Six thirty, ack emma, sir. Time to get up, sir.”

James Garton, sometime driver in the Royal Field Artillery, now convalescing from wounds, on the Tebbits-Jameson farm, tapped his sleeping master on the left shoulder. Peter, waking with a start, looked round his comfortable dressing-room, at the mauve eiderdown on his bed, the bow-fronted wardrobe, the hunting prints on the walls.

“Lord, Garton! What on earth are you playing at? We aren’t on active service now.”

“No, sir.” The Yorkshireman grinned. “I don’t think there’ll be much active service after today, sir. Not if the Huns sign this armistice”—he pronounced the word armistÏce—“the newspapers are talking about.”

“Thought I’d like to wake you for the last morning of the war, sir,” Garton went on, producing a cup of tea and some biscuits. “Should I put out your riding-kit, sir?”

“No, Garton, you should not”—laughed Peter, falling in with the spirit of the game—“you should put out the blue suit of mufti you’ll find in that wardrobe. Also, you should prepare my bath.”

Said the Yorkshireman, hanging serge slacks carefully over the back of a chair, “Mister Harry says that you and Mrs. Jameson are sure to get taken up for joy-riding, sir.”

“That be damned for a tale.” Peter, tea finished, tumbled out of bed; stuck his feet into a pair of red morocco slippers; drew silk dressing-gown over pyjamas.

They had been speaking very quietly for fear of waking the pair in the next room: but now a voice, Patricia’s voice, called through the doorway:—

“Time to get up, Peter. Are you awake, Peter?”

“Of course I’m awake. Been awake for hours. How’s Peter the Fourth?”

“Slept like a top.” The door opened, revealing Patricia, slipperless, golden hair falling about her white shoulders. “What on earth....”

Garton, blushing furiously, fled: they heard him busy in the bath-room as they kissed good-morning.

“Funny fellow, isn’t he?” Peter explained his quondam servant’s presence. “And now let’s have a look at the heir.”

Arms linked, they passed into the curtained bed-room. Mauve-shaded candles burned on the white over-mantel, on the table by the lace-canopied cot. Blinking at the light, still only half awake, lay Peter the Fourth. The newly-weaned baby smiled happily at its parents. Peter the Fourth, they thought, would have his mother’s hair, his father’s eyes: Peter the Fourth, they thought ... but what these two thought about their eight-months old son would fill a prologue, an epilogue, and a hundred chapters in between.

As Evelyn confided, early in the summer, to Primula: “I don’t believe a word of that gooseberry-bush story, Prim. I believe Mummy and the pater made that child themselves. They couldn’t be so gone on it”—(“gone on,” acquired from Garton, was the school-room word of the moment)—“if they’d just found it.”

Said Primula, sternly practical, “It must be frightfully difficult to make a baby. Think of its ears....”

The two girls came running, fully dressed, into Patricia’s room just as Peter slipped off for his bath; stood chattering till Patricia shooed them away and rang for Elizabeth....