ic stress. Yet never until lately had he seen so
much of any woman not frankly middle-aged without being conscious that
he _was_ a man and she a woman, and this added, at all events, a certain
piquancy to the situation.

Yet he had never felt this with Jan.

Quite a number of times in the course of his thirty years he had fallen
in love in an agreeably surface sort of way without ever being deeply
stirred. Love-making was the pleasantest game in the world, but he had
not yet felt the smallest desire to marry. He was a shrewd young man,
and knew that marriage, even in the twentieth century, at all events
starts with the idea of permanence; and, like many others who show no
inclination to judge the matrimonial complications of their
acquaintance, he would greatly have disliked any sort of scandal that
involved himself or his belongings.

He was quite as sensitive to criticism as other men in his service, and
he knew that he challenged it in lending his flat to Mrs. Tancred. But
here he felt that the necessities of the case far outweighed the
possibilities of misconception, and after Jan came he thought no more
about it.

Yet in a young man with his somewhat cynical knowledge of the world, it
was surprising that the thought of his name being coupled with Jan's
never crossed his mind. He forgot that none of his friends knew Jan at
all, but that almost every evening they did see her with him in the
car--sometimes, it is true, accompanied by the children, but quite as
often alone--and that during her visit his spare time was so much
occupied in looking after the Tancred household that his friends saw
comparatively little of him, and Peter was, as a rule, a very sociable
person.

Therefore it came upon him as a real shock when people began to ask him
point-blank whether he was engaged to Jan, and if so, what they were
going to do about Tancred's children. Rightly or wrongly, he discerned
in the question some veiled reflection upon Jan, some implied slur upon
her conduct. He was consequently very short and huffy with these
inquisitive ones, and when he was no longer present they would shake
their heads and declare that "poor old Peter had got it in the neck."

If so, poor old Peter was, as yet, quite unconscious of anything of the
kind.

Nevertheless he found himself constantly thinking about her. Everything,
even the familiar streets and roads, served to remind him of her, and
when he went to bed he nearly always drea