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but by resulting mental derangement in his prospective host he was unprepared to be amused. Timmy’s account of his father’s condition had been vague – and probably slightly alarmist; here was Toplady decently pressing for exacter information. Waiting with some keenness for Timmy’s reply. Winter felt slightly uncomfortable; and it was this perhaps that prompted him to stick his head once more into the corridor and look round. He was just in time for something odd.
    He saw an eye. Quite far away – beyond the end compartment which he knew housed Bussenschutt – and appearing cautiously from a little recess which led to a lavatory, he saw an eye and exactly as much of a man’s face as an eye must carry with it if it is to peer successfully round a corner. The effect was curiously unreal – suggestive, it occurred to Winter, less of cautious observation than of a pictorial convention of cautious observation on the cover of a magazine – and it was fleeting; in a moment the eye was seconded by an uncertain nose, half of a close-cropped grey moustache and the corresponding half of a rather less uncertain mouth. Then the whole man came into view – a middle-aged man clad with casual and well-worn elegance – and stepped hurriedly down the corridor. Reaching the neighbourhood of Mrs Birdwire’s and Lady Pike’s compartment, and as if suddenly infected by the brute creation still intermittently vociferous within, he dropped on his hands and knees and scampered briskly past. Then he rose to his feet with deftness and dignify, glanced rapidly into several compartments, murmuring aloud the while. He came nearer, paused to allow Winter to withdraw his head, turned in through the open door, and – still murmuring – sat down. He looked absently round – first at Timmy, then at Toplady, and then at Winter. Finally his glance returned to Timmy and broke into friendly recognition. ‘Hullo’, he said, ‘how are you?’
    ‘Gerald Winter and Hugo Toplady,’ said Timmy formally, ‘– my father.’

 
     
3
     
    Mr Eliot – the student of Pope, creator of the Spider, and parent doomed to the bin – preserved in middle-age the athletic slimness of his son. But though spare rather than rotund he gave something of the impression of a child’s balloon – of a delicate equilibrium, vibrating with the promise of rising gently into the air at a touch, and this buoyancy carrying with it in its turn the suggestion of deflatability. Mr Eliot, it might be hazarded, possessed the sort of good spirits that are the more engaging for being of a sort peculiarly vulnerable to the arrows of fate. And he was indeed probably shy; he had the rapid social instinct which the shy and cultivated must develop. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘that Timmy is bringing you down to stop with us?’
    Winter and Toplady made the grateful murmurings of those who feel that their position is being regularized. Timmy said something about his telegram. Mr Eliot nodded with a vagueness which was still perhaps tact. ‘I had to run up to town,’ he said; ‘a thing that doesn’t often happen nowadays. But Belinda will have got the wire and be sending someone to the station. I’m afraid’ – and he addressed Winter – ‘that this is a very tedious train. Sometimes I’ve thought of writing to the company.’ He paused on the polite implication that this was an issue on which Winter might say the wisely definitive word. ‘But I’ve no doubt’, he added practically, ‘that its vagaries are directed at dividends, and I’m a shareholder myself. Still, it’s very tedious, particularly if one isn’t used to it,’ and Mr Eliot smiled, clearly finding the tediousness of his train among this world’s soothing and satisfactory things.
    With considerable relief Winter determined that Mr Eliot was demonstrably sane. But he felt an impulse of irritation against the romancing of Timmy. And it was perhaps as a reflex to this that he said, not wholly kindly: ‘I