monkish appetite, Edith and Frida eat very little."

Perhaps Hilda did manage to make a small profit; at any rate, she seemed reconciled to the presence of the Armitages and gave up declaring that she was a cipher. The fatigue of moving in had made Laurence's company, while he was suffering from the reaction, almost bearable. Frida, apart from a habit she had of whispering at great length in her mother's ear, was a nice uninquisitive child, and Edith, when she was not whispering back to Frida or echoing Laurence, was still able to rouse in her brother's heart feelings of warm affection. Old Mrs. Touchwood had acquired from some caller a new game of Patience, which kept her gently simmering in the lamplight every evening; Harold had discovered among the odds and ends of salvage from the move a sixpenny encyclopedia that, though it made him unpleasantly informative, at any rate kept him from being interrogative, which John found, on the whole, a slight advantage. Janet Bond had written again most seriously about Joan of Arc, and the film company had given excellent terms for The Fall of Babylon. Really, except for two huffy letters from his sisters-in-law in London, John was able to contemplate with much less misgivings a prospect of spending all the winter at Ambles. Beside, he had secured his dog-cart with a dashing chestnut mare, and was negotiating for the twenty-acre field.

Yes, everything was very jolly, and he might even aim at finishing the first draft of the second act before Christmas. It would be jolly to do that and jolly to invite James and Beatrice and George and Eleanor, but not Hugh—no, in no circumstances should Hugh be included in the yuletide armistice—down to Ambles for an uproarious jolly week. Then January should be devoted to the first draft of the third act—really it should be possible to write to Janet Bond presently and assure her of a production next autumn. John was feeling particularly optimistic. For three days in succession the feet of the first act had been moving as rhythmically and regularly toward the curtain as the feet of guardsmen move along the Buckingham Palace Road. It was a fine frosty morning, and even so early in the day John was tapping his second egg to the metrical apostrophes of Uncle Laxart's speech offering to take his niece, Joan, to interview Robert de Baudricourt. Suddenly he noticed that Laurence had not yet put in his appearance. This was strange behavior for one who still preserved from the habit of many early services an excited punctuality for his breakfast, and lightly he asked Edith what had become of her husband.

"He hopes to begin working again at 

 Prev. P 55/268 next