iseration he stood picking little bits of skin
off his fingers. Then noticing that his mother's lips were all awry,
he said impulsively: "All right, mother; I'll come. The brutes!" What
brutes he did not know, but the expression exactly summed up their joint
feeling, and restored a measure of equanimity.

"I suppose I'd better change into a 'shooter,"' he muttered, escaping to
his room. He put on the 'shooter,' a higher collar, a pearl pin, and his
neatest grey spats, to a somewhat blasphemous accompaniment. Looking at
himself in the glass, he said, "Well, I'm damned if I'm going to show
anything!" and went down. He found his grandfather's carriage at the
door, and his mother in furs, with the appearance of one going to a
Mansion House Assembly. They seated themselves side by side in the
closed barouche, and all the way to the Courts of Justice Val made but
one allusion to the business in hand. "There'll be nothing about those
pearls, will there?"

The little tufted white tails of Winifred's muff began to shiver.

"Oh, no," she said, "it'll be quite harmless to-day. Your grandmother
wanted to come too, but I wouldn't let her. I thought you could take
care of me. You look so nice, Val. Just pull your coat collar up a
little more at the back--that's right."

"If they bully you...." began Val.

"Oh! they won't. I shall be very cool. It's the only way."

"They won't want me to give evidence or anything?"

"No, dear; it's all arranged." And she patted his hand. The determined
front she was putting on it stayed the turmoil in Val's chest, and he
busied himself in drawing his gloves off and on. He had taken what he
now saw was the wrong pair to go with his spats; they should have been
grey, but were deerskin of a dark tan; whether to keep them on or not he
could not decide. They arrived soon after ten. It was his first visit to
the Law Courts, and the building struck him at once.

"By Jove!" he said as they passed into the hall, "this'd make four or
five jolly good racket courts."

Soames was awaiting them at the foot of some stairs.

"Here you are!" he said, without shaking hands, as if the event had made
them too familiar for such formalities. "It's Happerly Browne, Court I.
We shall be on first."

A sensation such as he had known when going in to bat was playing now in
the top of Val's chest, but he followed his mother and uncle doggedly,
looking at no more than he could help, and thinking that the place
smelle