ing as he re-entered
the dining-room; he had seized his cap in the hall and put it on.

"Better give me an address," said the Alderman.

"You might wire during the day," George said, scribbling on a loose leaf
from his pocket-book, which he had to search for in unfamiliar pockets.

"The idea had occurred to me," the Alderman smiled.

"Au revoir, mater."

"But you've got plenty of time!" she protested.

"I know," said he. "I'm not going to be late. I haven't the slightest
notion where Headquarters are, and supposing the taxi had a break-down!"

He divined from the way in which she kissed him good-bye that she was
excessively proud of him.

"Mater," he said, "I see you're still a girl."

As he was leaving, Mr. Clayhanger halted him.

"You said something in your last letter about storing the furniture,
didn't you? Have ye made any inquiries?"

"No. But I've told Orgreave. You might look into that, because--well,
you'll see."

From the hall he glanced into the dining-room and up the stairs. The
furniture that filled the house had been new ten years earlier; it had
been anybody's furniture. The passage of ten years, marvellously swift,
had given character to the furniture, charged it with associations,
scarred it with the history of a family--his family, individualized it,
humanized it. It was no longer anybody's furniture. With a pang he
pictured it numbered and crowded into a warehouse, forlorn, thick with
dust, tragic, exiled from men and women.

He drove off, waving. His stepfather waved from the door, his mother
waved from the dining-room; the cook had taken the children into the
drawing-room, where they shook their short, chubby arms at him, smiling.
On the second floor the back of the large rectangular mirror on the
dressing-table presented a flat and wooden negative to his anxious
curiosity.

In the neighbourhood of Wimbledon the taxi-driver ascertained his
destination at the first inquiry from a strolling soldier. It was the
Blue Lion public-house. The taxi skirted the Common, parts of which were
covered with horse-lines and tents. Farther on, in vague suburban
streets, the taxi stopped at a corner building with a blatant, curved
gilt sign and a very big lamp. A sentry did something with his rifle as
George got out, and another soldier obligingly took the luggage. A
clumsy painted board stuck on a pole at the entrance to a side-passage
indicated that George had indeed arrived at his Headquarters. He