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About a quarter past nine Cummins heard the front door slam. She paused in the act of drying a glass tumbler, and supposed that Mr Alex had gone out, and she allowed herself to wonder where he had gone and why. She was worried about her “Lamb”. She could not forget that face of his at the dinner-table, with its wide and restless eyes, and its air of flinching from something.

To Cummins her mistress was just Mrs St. George, Mr Alex’s mother, a figure that had grown so familiar that Cummins had ceased to wonder at it, but on this April night Cummins did wonder. It seemed to her that her mistress was a very unusual woman, so astoundingly cold and self-possessed, so unlike the kind of mother you expected to see upon the films or the stage. At dinner she behaved as though there was no war, and Mr Alex had just come down from Oxford—.

“She’s a queer one,” was Cummins’ comment. “You’d think she was made of marble.”

Cummins finished her washing up and her putting away, and left her pantry to sit by the fire and talk to the cook. There were no other servants in the house in the April of 1918, for the under-maid was on munitions, and the manservant had joined up in 1915. Cummins and the cook exchanged confidences, while upstairs Mrs St. George sat at her desk, and glanced through the notes she had made at certain of her committee meetings. She believed in being occupied, even when her son had left her with unaccountable suddenness, and had gone out mumbling that he was going to try and buy some cigarettes.

“May find a shop open.”

“Most unlikely.—Air-raids, remember—.”

But he had gone out, and she had heard the slamming of that door.

Ten o’clock struck, and Mr Alex had not returned, and the cook, yawning behind a fat red hand, declared that she was going to bed, but Cummins did not feel like bed. She was going to wait up for Mr Alex; she knew that he had no latchkey; she ascended to the hall, and after turning off the lights, sat down on the oak chair by the window. She pulled aside a fold of the heavy curtains, and raising the blind for a couple of inches, peered out into the square. It looked black as a piece of sable velvet, but above the tops of the houses opposite, the sky was pricked thick with stars.

“No moon—thank the Lord,” said Cummins feelingly.

But where was Mr Alex? The tall clock went on ticking, and the square was as silent as a graveyard, its windows curtained up, its pavements deserted, and Cummins began to have an unpleasant, creepy feeling. She dropped the blind, and rearranged the curtains, and rose and turned on one of the lights. The hands of the clock stood at half-past ten.

Cummins sat there and heard eleven strike. Mrs St. George’s hour for retiring was eleven, but the drawing-room door above remained shut.

And then, just when the large hand of the clock was on the quarter Cummins heard footsteps. They came along the side walk; they were rather hurried and irregular footsteps. There was a pause; some one stumbled against one of the steps; she could hear a hand groping and feeling at the door.

She went and opened it. She had to catch him by the arm. He swayed; he leaned against her; his cap was awry.

“Legs,—l’legs—all—funny—somehow. C-ummins. I—so—sorry—.”

She closed the doorway gently.

“O,—Mr Alex—my dear—.”

“M-mater—gone to bed?”

“No.”

Drunk though he was he looked scared.

“Shouldn’t have let go—like this—. She—she wouldn’t—.”

“Ssh,—my dear; you ought to be in bed.”

She got him across the hall and up the first flight of stairs. “Ssh—my dear—!” But there was no need for her to suggest silence, for Alex St. George, drunk though he was, had no desire to meet his mother. His getting drunk had been a sort of human protest. It had made him feel warm.

“Softly—old Cummins—.”

But Cummins’ surreptitious shepherding of her “Lamb” to his bedroom where a key could be turned in a lock, and excuses offered from behind a closed door, was not to be permitted. The drawing-room door opened when Cummins and Mr Alex were preparing to ascend the second flight of stairs, and Mrs St. George came out upon the landing.