oss....

Husband and wife regarded the abandoned room in silence for a time, and
when Mr. Britling spoke he lowered his voice.

"I don't see Billy," he said.

"Perhaps he has gone out of the window," said Mrs. Britling also in a
hushed undertone....

"Well," said Mr. Britling abruptly and loudly, turning away from this
first intimation of coming desolations, "let us go down to our hockey!
He had to go, you know. And Billy will probably come back again when he
begins to feel hungry...."

Section 11

Monday was a public holiday, the First Monday in August, and the day
consecrated by long-established custom to the Matching's Easy Flower
Show in Claverings Park. The day was to live in Mr. Britling's memory
with a harsh brightness like the brightness of that sunshine one sees at
times at the edge of a thunderstorm. There were tents with the exhibits,
and a tent for "Popular Refreshments," there was a gorgeous gold and
yellow steam roundabout with motor-cars and horses, and another in green
and silver with wonderfully undulating ostriches and lions, and each had
an organ that went by steam; there were cocoanut shies and many
ingenious prize-giving shooting and dart-throwing and ring-throwing
stalls, each displaying a marvellous array of crockery, clocks, metal
ornaments, and suchlike rewards. There was a race of gas balloons, each
with a postcard attached to it begging the finder to say where it
descended, and you could get a balloon for a shilling and have a chance
of winning various impressive and embarrassing prizes if your balloon
went far enough--fish carvers, a silver-handled walking-stick, a bog-oak
gramophone-record cabinet, and things like that. And by a special gate
one could go for sixpence into the Claverings gardens, and the sixpence
would be doubled by Lady Homartyn and devoted next winter to the
Matching's Easy coal club. And Mr. Britling went through all the shows
with his boys, and finally left them with a shilling each and his
blessing and paid his sixpence for the gardens and made his way as he
had promised, to have tea with Lady Homartyn.

The morning papers had arrived late, and he had been reading them and
re-reading them and musing over them intermittently until his family had
insisted upon his coming out to the festivities. They said that if for
no other reason he must come to witness Aunt Wilshire's extraordinary
skill at the cocoanut shy. She could beat everybody. Well, one must not
miss a