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Lodden Lodge, Wargrave, is a square, comfortable, late Victorian house, ivy-covered, backing on a quiet side-road and fronting the Thames mainstream with sloping close-clipped lawns.

Peter arrived towards tea-time; found his wife and Francis (over-immaculate in creased white trousers and buckskin shoes), just sitting down to the silver-laid sun-dappled table under the willow-trees.

“Where’s your brother, Jack?” asked Peter.

“He’s not coming after all,” said Patricia. “I had a wire this morning. Manœuvres, I expect.”

“Don’t you believe it, Pat,” put in Francis. “He’s off to fight the good fight in Ulster. What a lark! Fancy Teddy Carson, mounted on a ‘sable destrier,’ charging the guns.”

“Idiot!” commented Peter; and added, “Confound the fellow. That spoils our four for tennis.”

“We shall be all right for tennis.” Patricia filled the cups; passed them. “Violet and her husband have invited themselves for the week-end.”

“Oh Lord,” began Peter; but—catching his wife’s eye—desisted. After all, Rawlings didn’t play such a bad game of tennis; and Violet’s bridge, though not pleasant, was perfect. Tea over, Peter changed into flannels; came down to find Evelyn and Primula, barelegged, muslin-frocked and sun-bonneted, waiting for him.

“We want to go on the river,” they chorused, “we want to go on the river.”

“It’s too late for the river,” said Patricia.

“It isn’t too late. It isn’t too late. Is it Daddy? …”

“They do like him, don’t they?” Francis said to their mother. Peter, over-ruling her objections, had picked up the two laughing bundles; packed them into the cushioned punt; and was now poling slowly out into main stream.

“Why shouldn’t they?” laughed Patricia. But, all the same, she felt a little twinge of jealousy. The children meant so much to her, so little to Peter. Yet, at a lift of the finger, they would desert her for him. … Perhaps it was because that finger so seldom lifted. … If only one of them had been a boy!

She watched her husband’s strong figure, black now against the glow of the water, bending to the pole as he met the current. The punt glided under the railway bridge, out of sight.

“Of course they ought to have been boys.” Francis Gordon’s voice interrupted her reverie. He seemed—as often when they were quite alone—to have dropped the mask of superciliousness. She looked at him; wondered how much he realized. A disturbing person, this new cousin of hers. Almost uncanny at times, this way in which his mind seemed to penetrate her thoughts. … And again that night, at table in the long low dining-room, she speculated about this man.

He sat, facing the sunset, immaculate as ever but unusually silent. Every now and then, it seemed to her as though his eyes saw—beyond the rose glow of the horizon—into vision-land. “He’s thinking about that girl,” she reasoned, “the girl whose photograph we saw at the flat.” And then, remembering the eyes of a man she had once seen at a revivalist meeting, she began to doubt her theory of a love-affair.

Sunset darkled to twilight, twilight to blackness, as they finished dinner.

Patricia, pleading tiredness, went upstairs early; heard, as she undressed in the cool fragrance of the river-night, the sound of canvas-chairs, dragging first across the gravel, then over grass; saw the points of two cigars burning redly under the willow-trees.

“Beckmann, Coronas,” announced Peter. “Good, aren’t they?”

“Very,” admitted Francis.

For nearly ten minutes, neither spoke. It was a night for confidences. Silent save for the river-chuckle; star-dusted; peaceful. But the two Englishmen smoked on; reticent, each busy with his own dreaming: the one seeing a great business, world-wide, endless in opportunity: the other, vignetted in silver radiance against the sable background of his thought, the features of a girl—of a girl five thousand miles removed from England—a girl for whose sake and without hope of reward he had vowed himself to the dissatisfying god of Work.

“Why don’t you get married again?” asked Peter suddenly.

“Only because I can’t afford it,” lied Francis Gordon.