The Gaskell-Walkers returned from their very long honeymoon a few days later and spent the night at Happy House, their own house being not quite ready for them.

It having rained without ceasing for a week at the Lakes, the young man had taken his bride to North Devon, where he had hired a car and they had spent a delightful time tearing over the country as fast as they could go, which happened to be Mr. Gaskell-Walker's higher form of enjoyment. He had made notes of the distance traversed each separate day, and to Mrs. Walbridge's bewildered mind, it seemed as if they had been nowhere, but had spent their time going from or to different places. However, her pretty daughter was in blooming health, and displayed her airs and graces in an artless and becoming way like some pretty bird. Wracked with worry, almost unbearably anxious about her new work, on which subject her publishers had maintained a silence which looked ominous. Mrs. Walbridge gave herself up to delight for a few hours in watching the happiness of these young people and hearing their comfortable plans for the future. She had never seen the house in Campden Hill, but Hermione had been taken there shortly before her wedding, and was delighted with everything about it. The drawing-room was apparently the only drawing-room in London that was over twenty feet long, and the art treasures, about which the young woman talked vaguely, but with immense satisfaction, seemed to be various and valuable.

"There is a whole room full of Chinese dragons," Gaskell-Walker told her at dinner, "wicked-looking, teethy devils of all sizes. I used to be awfully frightened of them when I was a kid."

"And the loveliest Indian screens, mother, you know, that dull, crumbly-looking wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl."

Mrs. Walbridge had no idea of the exact income of her son-in-law, but she knew that the young couple intended to keep three servants and that Billy was partner in a fairly prosperous, though new, stockbroking firm in Throgmorton Street. He was not so sympathetic to her as Maud's husband. Moreton Twiss was young and full of boyish high spirits and a kind of innocent horse-play, that even the arrival of Hilary had in no wise quieted; and for some reason his untidy black hair and twinkling eyes were dearer to her than the correct smartness of the more conventional Gaskell-Walker.

Gaskell-Walker was ten or twelve years older than the other man, although he had married the younger daughter, and being extremely short-sighted, he wore pince-nez, without which his mother-in-law had never seen him. She was one of those people who prefer eyes to be unglazed. However, everything pointed to happiness being in store for Hermy, for she and her husband were very much in love with each other, he rather more than she was, which her mother felt to be as things should be. And the little dinner was very pleasant, Paul being at his best, which was very good, so good that he rarely produced it for family use, and Hermy, being a daughter for any mother's eyes to rest upon with pride, in her pretty sapphire-blue frock, with the charming diamond pendant her husband had given her for her wedding present, blinking on her lovely bosom.

"What news from Guy?" the bride asked, as they lingered in the old-fashioned way over their walnuts and port.

"I had a beautiful letter from him only this afternoon. I am going to show it to you. He's very well and seems to have made some nice friends amongst the officers."

Gaskell-Walker laughed. "Trust Master Guy to make friends," he said, cracking a nut with care, his over-manicured nails flashing as he did so. "Easier to make than to keep them in his case."

"Like the Governor," commented Paul carelessly.

"Children, children," Mrs. Walbridge glanced with anxious eyes from the one to the other, "I do wish you wouldn't speak of your father so—or Guy either, Paul, if you don't mind."

Gaskell-Walker bowed courteously. "I am sorry, Mrs. Walbridge," he answered, plainly meaning what he said, "I was only chaffing. We always tease the brat about his new intimate friends, and I didn't mean to say a word against him."

"Is father really better?" Hermione put in, smiling at her mother over the top of her glass. "I hear he is carrying on anyhow with Clara Crichell. Who was it told us so, Billy?"

"Oh, shut up, Hermy," put in Paul with a glance at his mother, who, however, had paid no attention to the remark.

It was a peculiarity of Mrs. Walbridge's children that, while each one of them individually was capable of hurting her a dozen times a day, not one of them could bear one of the others to inflict the slightest scratch on her.

"The kid's having a grand time," Paul went on to his sister, "with Fred and Elsie Ford. Balls and dinners every night and adorers by the dozen, so Archie Pratt told me. He had been down there—he's a cousin of Elsie's, you know. He says the kid's the success of the place. Seemed rather smitten himself, I thought."

"I loathe Archie Pratt," murmured Hermione, "he smells of white rose and is always talking about biplanes and monoplanes."

"He is an A1 airman," put in her husband, "they say he is down for a D.S.O. for that Italian business. By the way, Paul, I hear the Armistice is most certainly going to be signed next week."

Paul nodded. "Yes, according to the paper it is, but some of these duffers will probably put it off."

"No. I have it pretty straight. It really is going to be. The Hun cannot possibly hold out any longer. It's funny the way they cling to that figure-head of the Kaiser. But his nerve seems to be completely broken. He won't be able to stick it out."

Mrs. Walbridge pushed back her chair. "Guy says they expect it to be signed on Monday or Tuesday—the French expect it, I mean."

"What is Guy going to do then?" asked Gaskell-Walker, as he opened the door.

His mother-in-law looked at him vaguely. "Do? I don't know. I suppose he'll go back to the City. Mr. McCormick promised to take him back, but I don't know—he hasn't said anything about it. I'll get his letter."

They went upstairs to the girl's room, for Paul had long since established his Æsthetic inability to sit in "the mausoleum," as he called the drawing-room, and there, among the pretty modern knick-knacks and pictures, the mother read her soldier son's letter.

It was a good letter, unoriginal and typical in its lack of grumbling and rather artificial cheerfulness. The writer called his friends and comrades by odd nicknames, vegetable and otherwise; he gave the details of the food, and the delights of sleeping in a bed once more after eighteen months of trench life. Then at the last there was something over which Mrs. Walbridge hesitated for a moment—something which was plainly very important to her. Billy Gaskell-Walker got up.

"I'll just go down and get a cigar out of my coat pocket," he said kindly.

But Mrs. Walbridge stopped him. "No, no, Billy, don't go," she said, "I'd like you to hear because you are going to be brothers now." She could not tell him that it was Paul before whom she had hesitated to read the more intimate part of the letter.

Paul sat at the far end of the room, reading a newspaper, his smoothly brushed hair gleaming over the back of Grisel's favourite chair.

"Of course, you know that Guy has been rather foolish," his mother went on after a pause, putting on her spectacles again. "But he is only twenty-one, after all, and that's not so very old, is it?"

Curiously enough the stranger, the man who was nothing to her or to her boy by blood, understood her better and was closer to her at that moment than either her son or her daughter. Gaskell-Walker drew his chair a little nearer and took his cigarette out of his mouth, a queer little unpremeditated act of homage which she noticed and for which she was grateful.

"A man of twenty-one," he said slowly, "is not a man at all, he's only a child, and Guy is so good-looking, he's so full of what women call charm——" he broke off with an expressive shrug, and after smiling gratefully at him, and lowering her voice a little that she might not disturb Paul's study of the Evening Standard, his mother-in-law went on with the letter, reading in a low, moved voice:

"'Dear old Mum, I shall be awfully glad to get back. I've been thinking quite a lot lately and I can see better than I used to what a selfish young cub I've always been to you. Of course, it's your own fault that we're all such pigs. You've been too good to us!'—That," the reader broke off to say, "is ridiculous.—'But then I've just sort of taken everything for granted. It's been part of nature that you should sit up in the little garret room, slaving away at writing books to do things and buy things for us. It never struck me before that you don't have much of a time, but it does now, and when I come back I'm going to try to be a little more decent to you. It isn't that I didn't love you——'" Her voice fell still lower and she shot another nervous glance at the back of Paul's immovable head. "'I always did—we all do, of course. It's just possible that we're all selfish without meaning to be and I've been the worst, because, of course, Paul has been working for years and has no time to do very much, and it's different with the girls. But I'd give something nice now, when I think about it all out here, if I hadn't always been such a hound about going upstairs for you and down to the kitchen and little things like that. Your poor old feet must have been pretty tired sometimes chasing about doing things for us, and in future I'm going to do the chasing.'"

"Bless him," put in Hermione lazily, "he's a good child. We must kill the fatted calf for him when he comes home. Billy, we'll have a beautiful party——."

Gaskell-Walker nodded. "Bravo, Brat," he approved gently. "We mustn't tease him any more. Perhaps," he added thoughtfully, "I might get him a job in Throgmorton Street. Don't think much of McCormick, anyway.

"There's a little more," went on Mrs. Walbridge, who had not listened to this conversation, but was bending over her letter, partly, it struck her son-in-law, to hide her eyes, "it's about—about that poor girl—you know."

Paul turned round in his chair and rested his chin on its black satin back.

"Francine, you mean"—he laughed with a little sneer, "what about her? The youth seems to be making his soul in earnest, but I have my doubts as to whether the lady will be satisfied with the rÔle he offers her."

"Oh, shut up, Paul, you're a cat," Hermione almost snapped, in her unusual vehemence. "Unless, I am very much mistaken you liked the girl yourself till the Brat came along and wiped your eye."

"Shut up, you two. Go on, Mrs. Walbridge," interrupted Gaskell-Walker. "The girl's no worse than most young fellow's first adventure. Go and chew your bone on the mat, you two, if you've got to squabble. I want to hear what the Brat says."

After a pained look at her elder son, Mrs. Walbridge went on with the letter, Paul walking ostentatiously indifferent to the piano and turning over the music on top of it as she did so.

"'I know you have been worried to death about my silly scrape with that girl, but it really wasn't so bad as you all thought. I can't tell you about it in a letter, but I will when I see you and then you'll see that I wasn't quite such an ass as most people imagined. Anyhow, I straightened it all out the best way I could before I went back after my last leave, and I know you'll be glad to hear that I didn't treat her badly.' That's all he said about her. Then he asks about his bullfinch—we've not told him it died—and sends his love to everyone." Her voice shook a little as she read on. "'Tell old Paul I'm awfully glad to hear he's doing so well, and hope he'll soon be able to get out of that cursed bank. I wish he'd write to me, letters are a great boon out here. Give the girls each a kiss and tell Billy that a little stick won't do Mrs. Hermy any harm, when she goes through her manners at home!' Isn't it a very nice letter, Billy?"

"It is indeed, Mrs. Walbridge, there's good stuff in the Brat, and for one, I'm going to do my best to help it come out. He'll have a good time at our house—we both like entertaining, and I've done pretty well this year, and it'll be nice for him to have a cheery place to go to, full of young people. We must get some pretty flappers to amuse him, Hermy, and then he won't want to go wasting his time in silly places."

Paul turned. "I rather think," he drawled, "that we haven't, in spite of all these virtuous plans, heard the last of the excellent Francine. Good-night, Gaskell-Walker." He left the room, closing the door very softly behind him.

"I do wish," snapped Hermy, "that Paul would slam the door when he's furious, like a Christian. That cat-footed way of his drives me mad."

A little later Mrs. Walbridge accompanied her guests to their room, where everything had been prepared for them with the most minute and loving care.

"There's the cold milk, Billy, on your side, and Hermy's hot milk is in the thermos. The windows are open at the top about a foot. Is that right?"

Hermione kissed her mother, who, after a minute's hesitation, kissed her again.

"That's poor little Guy's kiss," the elder woman said. "Oh, Hermy, I'm so glad he's coming home."

Mrs. Walbridge then held out her hand to her son-in-law. "Good-night. Billy, it's nice having you here. You've been very kind about Guy. It has made me happy."

Gaskell-Walker peered closely into her face, for he had taken his glasses off. He was a selfish man, and not particularly tender-hearted, selfishness after forty having a tendency to grow a thick membrane over the feelings. But something in her face touched him.

"Good-night, dear Mrs. Walbridge," he said gently. "Will you allow your new son-in-law to kiss you good-night?" And he bent and kissed her on her soft cheek.