precisely what he would have avoided by catching the 9:05 at Waterloo last night.

"I shan't be in to lunch for a few days, Mrs. Worfolk, no—er—nor to dinner either as a matter of fact. No—in fact I'll be down in the country. I must see after things there, you know," he added with an attempt to suggest as jovially as possible a real anxiety about his new house.

"The country, oh yes," repeated Mrs. Worfolk grimly; John saw the beech-woods round Ambles blasted by his housekeeper's disapproval.

"You wouldn't care to—er—come down and give a look round yourself, Mrs. Worfolk? My sister, Mrs. Curtis—"

"Oh, I should prefer not to intrude in any way, sir. But if you insist, why, of course—"

"Oh no, I don't insist," John hurriedly interposed.

"No, sir. Well, we shall all have to get used to being left alone nowadays, and that's all there is to it."

"But I shall be back in a few days, Mrs. Worfolk. I'm a Cockney at heart, you know. Just at first—"

Mrs. Worfolk shook her head and waddled tragically to the door.

"There's nothing else you'll be wanting this morning, sir?" she turned to ask in accents that seemed to convey forgiveness of her master in spite of everything.

"No, thank you, Mrs. Worfolk. Please send Maud up to help me pack. Good heavens," he added to himself when his housekeeper had left the room, "why shouldn't I be allowed a country house? And I suppose the next thing is that James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor will all be offended because I didn't go tearing round to see them the moment I arrived. One's relations never understand that after the production of a play one requires a little rest. Besides, I must get on with my new play. I absolutely must."

John's tendency to abhor the vacuum of success was corrected by the arrival of Maud, the parlor-maid, whose statuesque anemia and impersonal neatness put something in it. Before leaving for America he had supplemented the rather hasty preliminary furnishing of his new house by ordering from his tailor a variety of country costumes. These Maud, with feminine intuition superimposed on what she would have called her "understanding of valeting," at once produced for his visit to Ambles; John in the prospect of half 

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