and a beautifully
neat roll.

'Travelling third!' he thought. 'Why will she do these things?'

Slightly flushed, she kissed Felix with an air of abstraction.

"How good of you to meet me, darling!"

Felix pointed in silence to the crowded carriage from which she had
emerged. Frances Freeland looked a little rueful. "It would have been
delightful," she said. "There was a dear baby there and, of course, I
couldn't have the window down, so it WAS rather hot."

Felix, who could just see the dear baby, said dryly:

"So that's how you go about, is it? Have you had any lunch?"

Frances Freeland put her hand under his arm. "Now, don't fuss, darling!
Here's sixpence for the porter. There's only one trunk--it's got a
violet label. Do you know them? They're so useful. You see them at
once. I must get you some."

"Let me take those things. You won't want this cushion. I'll let the
air out."

"I'm afraid you won't be able, dear. It's quite the best screw I've ever
come across--a splendid thing; I can't get it undone."

"Ah!" said Felix. "And now we may as well go out to the car!"

He was conscious of a slight stoppage in his mother's footsteps and
rather a convulsive squeeze of her hand on his arm. Looking at her face,
he discovered it occupied with a process whose secret he could not
penetrate, a kind of disarray of her features, rapidly and severely
checked, and capped with a resolute smile. They had already reached the
station exit, where Stanley's car was snorting. Frances Freeland looked
at it, then, mounting rather hastily, sat, compressing her lips.

When they were off, Felix said:

"Would you like to stop at the church and have a look at the brasses to
your grandfather and the rest of them?"

His mother, who had slipped her hand under his arm again, answered:

"No, dear; I've seen them. The church is not at all beautiful. I like
the old church at Becket so much better; it is such a pity your
great-grandfather was not buried there."

She had never quite got over the lack of 'niceness' about those ploughs.

Going, as was the habit of Stanley's car, at considerable speed, Felix
was not at first certain whether the peculiar little squeezes his arm was
getting were due to the bounds of the creature under them or to some
cause more closely connected with his mother, and it was not till they
shaved a cart at the turning of the Becket drive that it suddenly dawned
on him that she was in terror.