air 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
smelled 'fuggy.' People seemed to be lurking everywhere, and he plucked
Soames by the sleeve.

"I say, Uncle, you're not going to let those beastly papers in, are you?"

Soames gave him the sideway look which had reduced many to silence in its
time.

"In here," he said. "You needn't take off your furs, Winifred."

Val entered behind them, nettled and with his head up. In this
confounded hole everybody--and there were a good many of them--seemed
sitting on everybody else's knee, though really divided from each other
by pews; and Val had a feeling that they might all slip down together
into the well. This, however, was but a momentary vision--of mahogany,
and black gowns, and white blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all rather
secret and whispery--before he was sitting next his mother in the front
row, with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and taking
off his gloves for the last time. His mother was looking at him; he was
suddenly conscious that she had really wanted him there next to her, and
that he counted for something in this business.

All right! He would show them! Squaring his shoulders, he crossed his
legs and gazed inscrutably at his spats. But just then an 'old Johnny'
in a gown and long wig, looking awfully like a funny raddled woman, came
through a door into the high pew opposite, and he had to uncross his legs
hastily, and stand up with everybody else.

'Dartie versus Dartie!'

It seemed to Val unspeakably disgusting to have one's name called out
like this in public! And, suddenly conscious that someone nearly behind
him had begun talking about his family, he screwed his face round to see
an old