e daughter,
replied in an absent voice:

"Not very nice."

They were passing under a young oak tree, where the path wound round to
the rosery and summer-house. Something shot down and clawed Mr.
Bosengate's neck. His little daughter began to hop and suffocate with
laughter.

"Oh, Daddy! Aren't you caught! I led you on purpose!"

Looking up, Mr. Bosengate saw his small son lying along a low branch
above him--like the leopard he was declaring himself to be (for fear of
error), and thought blithely: 'What an active little chap it is!' "Let me
drop on your shoulders, Daddy--like they do on the deer."

"Oh, yes! Do be a deer, Daddy!"

Mr. Bosengate did not see being a deer; his hair had just been brushed.
But he entered the rosery buoyantly between his offspring. His wife was
standing precisely as he had imagined her, in a pale blue frock open at
the neck, with a narrow black band round the waist, and little accordion
pleats below. She looked her coolest. Her smile, when she turned her
head, hardly seemed to take Mr. Bosengate seriously enough. He placed
his lips below one of her half-drooped eyelids. She even smelled of
roses. His children began to dance round their mother, and Mr.
Bosengate,--firmly held between them, was also compelled to do this,
until she said:

"When you've quite done, let's have tea!"

It was not the greeting he had imagined coming along in the car. Earwigs
were plentiful in the summer-house--used perhaps twice a year, but
indispensable to every country residence--and Mr. Bosengate was not sorry
for the excuse to get out again. Though all was so pleasant, he felt
oddly restless, rather suffocated; and lighting his pipe, began to move
about among the roses, blowing tobacco at the greenfly; in war-time one
was never quite idle! And suddenly he said:

"We're trying a wretched Tommy at the assizes."

His wife looked up from a rose.

"What for?"

"Attempted suicide."

"Why did he?"

"Can't stand the separation from his wife."

She looked at him, gave a low laugh, and said:

"Oh dear!"

Mr. Bosengate was puzzled. Why did she laugh? He looked round, saw that
the children were gone, took his pipe from his mouth, and approached her.

"You look very pretty," he said. "Give me a kiss!"

His wife bent her body forward from the waist, and pushed her lips out
till they touched his moustache. Mr. Bosengate felt a sensation as if he
had arisen from breakfast, without having ea