a reassuring word.
Opening the landing window, he listened. The rumble from Piccadilly
was all the sound he heard, and with the thought, 'If these motor-cars
increase, it'll affect house property,' he was about to pass on up to
the room always kept ready for him when he heard, distant as yet, the
hoarse rushing call of a newsvendor. There it was, and coming past the
house! He knocked on his mother's door and went in.

His father was sitting up in bed, with his ears pricked under the
white hair which Emily kept so beautifully cut. He looked pink, and
extraordinarily clean, in his setting of white sheet and pillow, out
of which the points of his high, thin, nightgowned shoulders emerged in
small peaks. His eyes alone, grey and distrustful under their withered
lids, were moving from the window to Emily, who in a wrapper was walking
up and down, squeezing a rubber ball attached to a scent bottle. The
room reeked faintly of the eau-de-Cologne she was spraying.

"All right!" said Soames, "it's not a fire. The Boers have declared
war--that's all."

Emily stopped her spraying.

"Oh!" was all she said, and looked at James.

Soames, too, looked at his father. He was taking it differently from
their expectation, as if some thought, strange to them, were working in
him.

"H'm!" he muttered suddenly, "I shan't live to see the end of this."

"Nonsense, James! It'll be over by Christmas."

"What do you know about it?" James answered her with asperity. "It's a
pretty mess at this time of night, too!" He lapsed into silence, and his
wife and son, as if hypnotised, waited for him to say: 'I can't tell--I
don't know; I knew how it would be!' But he did not. The grey eyes
shifted, evidently seeing nothing in the room; then movement occurred
under the bedclothes, and the knees were drawn up suddenly to a great
height.

"They ought to send out Roberts. It all comes from that fellow Gladstone
and his Majuba."

The two listeners noted something beyond the usual in his voice,
something of real anxiety. It was as if he had said: 'I shall never see
the old country peaceful and safe again. I shall have to die before
I know she's won.' And in spite of the feeling that James must not be
encouraged to be fussy, they were touched. Soames went up to the
bedside and stroked his father's hand which had emerged from under the
bedclothes, long and wrinkled with veins.

"Mark my words!" said James, "consols will go to par. For all I know,
Val