Tea had been finished and put away, and the family was disposed about the dining-room engaged in various evening occupations; Phoebe sat at the table working at some mathematical problem, Clementina was reading with her chin on her fist and a frown on her brow; Lady Ella, Miriam and Daphne were busy making soft washing cloths for the wounded; Lady Ella had brought home the demand for them from the Red Cross centre in Burlington House.  The family was all downstairs in the dining-room because the evening was chilly, and there were no fires upstairs yet in the drawing-room.  He came into the room and exchanged greetings with Lady Ella.  Then he stood for a time surveying his children.  Phoebe, he noted, was a little flushed; she put passion into her work; on the whole she was more like Eleanor than any other of them.  Miriam knitted with a steady skill.  Clementina’s face too expressed a tussle.  He took up one of the rough-knit washing-cloths upon the side-table, and asked how many could be made in an hour.  Then he asked some idle obvious question about the fire upstairs.  Clementina made an involuntary movement; he was disturbing her.  He hovered for a moment longer.  He wanted to catch his wife’s eye and speak to her first.  She looked up, but before he could convey his wish for a private conference with her, she smiled at him and then bent over her work again.

He went into the back study and lit his gas fire.  Hitherto he had always made a considerable explosion when he did so, but this time by taking thought and lighting his match before he turned on the gas he did it with only a gentle thud.  Then he lit his reading-lamp and pulled down the blind—­pausing for a time to look at the lit dressmaker’s opposite.  Then he sat down thoughtfully before the fire.  Presently Ella would come in and he would talk to her.  He waited a long time, thinking only weakly and inconsecutively, and then he became restless.  Should he call her?

But he wanted their talk to begin in a natural-seeming way.  He did not want the portentousness of “wanting to speak” to her and calling her out to him.  He got up at last and went back into the other room.  Clementina had gone upstairs, and the book she had been reading was lying closed on the sideboard.  He saw it was one of Chasters’ books, he took it up, it was “The Core of Truth in Christianity,” and he felt an irrational shock at the idea of Clementina reading it.  In spite of his own immense changes of opinion he had still to revise his conception of the polemical Chasters as an evil influence in religion.  He fidgeted past his wife to the mantel in search of an imaginary mislaid pencil.  Clementina came down with some bandage linen she was cutting out.  He hung over his wife in a way that he felt must convey his desire for a conversation.  Then he picked up Chasters’ book again.  “Does any one want this?” he asked.

“Not if I may have it again,” consented Clementina.