The drive to Harrow, through traffic and tramlines for the most part, gave little opportunity for conversation.

“Are you very worried?” she managed to ask.

“Yes,” he confessed, “I am.”

They drew up, at about six in the afternoon, before an unpretentious, comfortable villa in an unpretentious, comfortable side-street. It was the usual English suburban home, a doll’s house of red-brick and stucco: two lime trees sheltered the little iron gate; on either side of the gravelled path which led to the front door, tiny well-clipt lawns gave on to laurel-bushes. As they came up the path, a half-seen figure moved behind the muslin curtains of the dining-room window.

Ringing the ivory knob of a well-polished brass bell-push, they were welcomed by a maid in cap-and-apron; ushered, through a marble-papered hall with a mahogany hat-stand, into an over-furnished room (piano and sofa prominent) whose long French windows looked out on “the garden”—a narrow strip of lawn ending in a fence crowned with trellis-work and scant ivy.

“Mrs. Simpson will be down in a moment,” announced the maid.

She came in, a little faded woman, light-haired—the pallor of her accentuated by the obviously new black dress. An open-faced gold locket with the miniature of her dead husband hung from a gold chain at her breast.

“This is very good of you,” began Mrs. Simpson.

Condoling with her, Peter felt—for the first time—a real sorrow at loss of his partner. He remembered “Tom” bringing his wife to dinner at Lowndes Square, remembered how Pat had laughed at his calling her “mother.”

“Won’t you sit down?” said Mrs. Simpson; and began to talk about the illness, the funeral. “Poor man, he was worried you know. Worried! The work got too much for him. I used to say to him, ‘Tom, don’t go to the office today.’ But he would go. And the trains are so crowded now—these soldiers. Often, he’d have to stand up the whole way home. Then the raids used to keep him awake.”

To Patricia, she seemed a pathetic figure; to Peter, she grew rapidly irritating. Sorrow disappeared. He had come there to talk money-matters, not to hear about the “dear departed.” The front had hardened him to death: death was just an incident, a daily incident: one did not mention the dead.

“Tell me, Mrs. Simpson,” he interrupted, not unsympathetically. “About money? Are you all right? You know it will take some little time to get the estate settled up. I thought of going to see the executors tomorrow.”

“It’s very good of you to take so much trouble, Mr. Jameson. Very good of you indeed. But I’ve got enough to go on with. And my brother-in-law tells me....”

In her narrow way she was shrewd—with the shrewdness of the English middle-class. Business, taboo in Lowndes Square, had always been the staple topic of conversation at “The Limes.” Mrs. Simpson knew all about Nirvana, about Hagenburg, about the partnership deed; knew too, exactly what she wanted.

And she wanted her money out of Jamesons; wanted it in War Loan. This, without any definite statement beyond, “She hoped he wouldn’t have to sell the business,” and “It seemed very difficult, his being at the front,” she made very clear to the astute mind of Peter Jameson.

Yet she pressed them to have some tea, which they refused; pressed them to come again. The visit, the car at the gate, flattered her vanity. “Tom,” she said to herself, “had always thought very highly of young Peter. Tom would be glad that young Peter and his wife had been to see her. But Tom would not like her to leave his money in the business.”

She walked to the gate with them; said what a beautiful evening it was; watched the car glide off round the corner of St. John’s road. Then she turned back to her lonely house, her lonely life. For Tom Simpson’s “mother” had only been a joke between them; and now, he would never joke with her again....