gaff, and sulkily
remarking, "I must go."

Sabre fidgeted to see the words put into action. He wanted Bagshaw to be
off. He wanted to resume his sudden intention of remedying his normal
relations with Mabel and the afternoon promised better than the
intention had thus far seen. That niggling over the unexpectedness of
his return,--well, of course it was unexpected and upsetting of her
household routine; but the unexpectedness was over and the letter
incident over, and Mabel, thanks to her guest, delightfully mooded.
Good, therefore, for the afternoon. When the dickens was this chap
going?

Then Bagshaw, rising sulkily, "Well, you'd better come up and have a
look round."

And Mabel, animatedly, "I'd like to"; and to Sabre, "You won't care to
come, Mark."

Sabre said, "No, I won't."

X

Throughout dinner--Mabel returned only just in time to get ready for
dinner--Sabre examined with dispassionate interest the exercise of
trying to say certain words and being unable to say them. They conversed
desultorily; in their usual habit. He told himself that he was speaking
several hundred "other" words; but the intractable words that he desired
to utter would not be framed. He counted them on his fingers under the
table. Only seven: "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" Only seven.
He could not say them. The incident they brought up rankled. He had come
home to take a day off with her. She knew he was there at the luncheon
table to take a day off with her. It had interested her so little, she
had been so entirely indifferent to it, that she had not even expressed
a wish he should so much as attend her on the inspection with Bagshaw.
The more he thought of it the worse it rankled. She knew he was at home
to be with her and she had deliberately walked off and left him....
"Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" No. Not much. He couldn't. He
visualised the impossible seven written on the tablecloth. He saw them
in script; he saw them in print; he imagined them written by a finger on
the wall. Say them--no.

Mabel left him sitting at the table with a cigarette. There came
suddenly to his assistance in the fight with the stubborn seven, abreast
of the thoughts in the office that had brought him home, a realisation
of her situation such as he had had that first night together in the
house, eight years before; there she was in the morning room, alone. She
had given up her father's home for his home--and there she was: a hap