Sir Peter's voice and decided they were on the whole
loud enough to be normal.

At eleven o'clock she and Winn between them assisted Sir Peter to bed.

This was a sharp and fiery passage usually undertaken by the toughest of
the gardeners.

Winn however managed extraordinarily well. He insisted on occasional
pauses and by a home truth of an appallingly personal nature actually
silenced his father for the last half flight.

Sir Peter breakfasted in his room.

He had had a bad night. He wouldn't, as he explained to his wife, have
minded if Winn had been a puny chap; but there he was, sound and strong,
with clear hard eyes, broad, straight shoulders and a grip of iron, and
yet Taylor, that little village hound of an apothecary, said once you
had microbes it didn't matter how strong you were--they were just as
likely to be fatal as if you were a narrow-chested epileptic.

Microbes! The very thought of such small insignificant creatures getting
in his way filled Sir Peter with fury. He had always hated insects. But
the worst of it was in the morning he didn't feel angry, he simply felt
chilled and helpless. His son was hit and he couldn't help him. It all
came back to that. There was only one person who could help a sick man,
and that person was his wife. Theoretically Sir Peter despised and hated
women, but practically he leaned on his wife as only a strong man can
lean on a woman; without her, he literally would not have known which
way to turn. His trust in her was as solid as his love for a good stout
ship. In every crisis of his life she had stood by his side, bitter
tongued, hard-headed, undemonstrative and his as much as any ship that
had sailed under his flag.

If she had failed him he would have gone down, and now here was his
son's wife--another woman--presumably formed for the same purpose,
leaking away from under him at the very first sign of weather.

He thought of Estelle with a staggered horror; she had looked soft and
sweet--just the woman to minister to a knocked-out man. The trouble with
her was she had no guts.

Sir Peter woke his wife up at four o'clock in the morning to shout this
fact into her ear. Lady Staines said, "Well--whoever said she had?" and
apparently went to sleep again. But Sir Peter didn't go to sleep:
Estelle reminded him of how he had once been done over a mare, a
beautiful, fine stepping lady-like creature who looked as if she were
made of velvet and steel, no vice in her and