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West could generally guess from the expression of Jane’s or Mary’s face how long she had been in Astwood Place. Disappointment, harassment, and sullen discontent were the stages through which each new comer passed before reaching the tearful catastrophe.

From the serene appearance of the young person who to-day let him in, West judged she was but recently arrived.”Mrs. Catterson was out,” for which he was not sorry; but “the Master was at home,” which he had expected, having heard in the City that Catterson had not been at his office for some days.

He found him huddled up over the drawing-room fire, spreading out his thin hands to the blaze. Half lost in the depths of the chair, sitting with rounded shoulders and sunken head, he seemed rather some little shrunken sexagenarian than a man still under thirty.

Gladys, with a picture-book open on her knee, sat on a stool against the fender. She did not move as West came in, but raising her eyes considered him, as was her wont, with a steadfast neutrality.

Catterson, turning, jumped up to greet him with something of his old buoyancy of manner; but the change which a few weeks had made in his face gave West a fresh shock. Nor could he disguise this painful impression sufficiently quickly.

“You think I’m looking ill, eh?” asserted Catterson, but with an eagerness which pleaded for a denial.

West lied instantly and heartily, but Catterson was not taken in.

“You think it’s all U P with me, I see,” he said, returning to the chair, and his former attitude of dejection.

This was so exaggerated a statement of his thoughts that West tried absolute candour.

“I don’t think you’re looking very fit,” he said; “but what you want is change. This dark, damp, beastly weather plays the deuce with us all. You should run down to Brighton for a few days. A man was telling me only last night that Brighton all this week has been just a blaze of sunshine.”

“Oh, Brighton!” Catterson repeated, hopelessly, “I’m past that.” With the finger-tip of one hand he kept probing and pressing the back of the other as it lay open upon his knee, searching for symptoms of the disease he most dreaded.

To change the channel of his thoughts, West turned to the little girl who still mutely envisaged him.

“Well, Gladys, have you forgotten, as usual, who I am?”

“No, I haven’t… you’re Mithter Wetht,” she told him, the piping drawl now complicated by a lisp, due to the fact that she had lost all her front teeth.

“Where’s Sonny?” he asked her.”I’ve got something for him,” and he put the packet of sweets down on the table.

She reflected a moment as to who Sonny might be; then, “Thyril’th a naughty boy,” she said.”He’th had a good… whipping… and hath been put to bed.”

“Oh poor old chap!” West exclaimed ruefully, “and on his birthday too. What has he done?”

But Gladys only repeated, “He’th a… very… naughty boy,” in tones of dogmatic conviction. She seemed to detect the guest’s sympathy with the culprit, and to resent it.

Voices and laughter were heard on the stairs. Nettie entered in her bonnet and furs, preceded by a big, overdressed woman, whom West easily identified as Mrs. Reade. They had been shopping, and both were laden with small, draper’s parcels.

Nettie did not seem pleased to find the drawing-room occupied. She gave West a limp hand without looking at him, which was one of her exasperating habits when put out, and then she attacked her husband for keeping up so big a fire. The heat of the room was intolerable, she said; it was enough to make any one ill. She threw off her wraps with an exaggeration of relief, peevishly altered the position of a chair which West had pushed aside inadvertently, and began to move about the room, in the search, as he knew well, of some fresh grievance. Catterson followed her for a second or two with tragic eyes. Then he turned to the fire again.”To me it seems very cold,” he murmured; “I’ve not been warm all day.”