painted
white, which Duncan apparently liked very much, from the way he looked
at it. From two of the chimneys I could see smoke going up in the
quiet air. In the windows I could see lights, rose-shaded and warm,
and beyond the shrubbery somewhere back in the garden a workman was
driving nails. His hammer fell and echoed like a series of
rifle-shots. From the garage chimney, too, came smoke, and it was
plain from the sounds that somebody inside was busy tuning up a
car-engine.

I sat staring at the grounds, at the cobble-stone walls, at the
tapestry-brick house with the high-shouldered French cornices. It
began to creep over me how it meant service, how it meant protection,
how it meant guarded lives for me and mine, how it stood an amazingly
complicated piece of machinery which took much thought to organize and
much money to maintain. And the mainspring behind it all, I
remembered, was the man sitting at the mahogany wheel so close to me.
Light and warmth and comfort and safety--they were all to come from
the conceiting and the struggling of my Dour Man, fighting for an
empty-headed family who were scarcely worth it. He was, after all, the
stoker down in the hole, and without him everything would stop. So
when I saw that he was studying my face with that intent sidelong
glance of his, I reached over and put my hand on his knee, as I had
done so often, in the old days.

He looked down, at that, with what was almost an appearance of
embarrassment.

"I want to play my part," I said with all the earnestness of my
earnest old heart, as he let in his clutch and we started up the
winding drive.

"It ought to be a considerable part," he said as we drew up under a
bone-white porte-cochere where a small-bodied Jap stood respectfully
impassive and waiting to open the door for us.

My husband got down out of the car. I sat wondering why I should feel
so much like a Lady Jane Grey approaching the headsman's _makura_.

"Come on, kids!" Duncan called out with a parade of joviality, like a
cheer-leader who realized that things weren't going just right. For
Dinkie, I could see, was shrinking back in the padded seat. His
underlip was trembling a trifle as he sat staring at the strange new
house. But Poppsy, true little woman that she was, smiled
appreciatively about at the material grandeurs which confronted her.
If she'd had a tail, I'm sure, she'd have been wagging it. And this so
tickled her dad that he lifted her out of the