He paused to finish his inspection, ending up with the nursery
toy-cupboard on the mantel-piece.

"Hullo! I don't know this one of Jack Waring," he exclaimed on reaching
a cabinet photograph in a silver frame.

Barbara lighted a cigarette and came beside him, resting her hand on one
shoulder and looking over the other at the photograph, her hair brushing
against his cheek.

"He---- Give me another match, Eric; this is burning all down one
side---- It's good, don't you think?"

"The best I've ever seen of him, poor chap. I must get his sister to
give me one."

"And don't forget that you're going to find out whether they've had any
news of him, will you? Johnny Carstairs asked the Foreign Office to make
enquiries through Copenhagen and Madrid, but he hasn't been able to find
out anything."

"I should be afraid there's nothing to find out," Eric murmured. "He's
been missing for weeks."

"But if he's been wounded or lost his identification disc--a hundred
things. And it takes months to get news sometimes. D'you like my pig
family, Eric?"

"Not among Waterford glass," he answered. "Except as part of the general
setting for you."

She replaced the photograph, laughing, and took his arm, leading him
round the room and giving him the history of her trophies, until a
footman knocked and announced that luncheon was on the table.

Eric spent the next five minutes being pushed round a large library,
which seemed to contain twice as many voices as people, and introduced
to a second person before he had fixed the identity of the first. Lady
Crawleigh was timorous and subdued, with an air of having been all her
life interrupted in the middle of her sentences and with a compensating
pair of flashing pigeon's eyes which seemed to miss nothing.

"I'm so glad Babs gave us the opportunity of meeting you," she said to
Eric. "I enjoyed your play so much. Your first, wasn't it? It must be a
glorious sensation to make such a success at the outset."

("She takes in a thousand times more than she ever gives out," Eric said
to himself; then he found himself being spun through the rest of the
family. "Wonder what she does with it?")

Lord Crawleigh interrupted an indignant, staccato conversation with
Lady Maitland, who was holding her own with emphatic shakes of a massive
head, to touch finger-tips and introduce him to his sister--the whole
done cholerically and with the air of transacting a great deal of
tiresome business in a