Also it became manifest that Mr. Van der Pant was cut off from all his family.  And suddenly he became briskly critical of the English way of doing things.  His wife and child had preceded him to England, crossing by Ostend and Folkestone a fortnight ago; her parents had come in August; both groups had been seized upon by improvised British organisations and very thoroughly and completely lost.  He had written to the Belgian Embassy and they had referred him to a committee in London, and the committee had begun its services by discovering a Madame Van der Pant hitherto unknown to him at Camberwell, and displaying a certain suspicion and hostility when he said she would not do.  There had been some futile telegrams.  “What,” asked Mr. Van der Pant, “ought one to do?”

Mr. Britling temporised by saying he would “make inquiries,” and put Mr. Van der Pant off for two days.  Then he decided to go up to London with him and “make inquiries on the spot.”  Mr. Van der Pant did not discover his family, but Mr. Britling discovered the profound truth of a comment of Herr Heinrich’s which he had hitherto considered utterly trivial, but which had nevertheless stuck in his memory.  “The English,” Herr Heinrich had said, “do not understanding indexing.  It is the root of all good organisation.”

Finally, Mr. Van der Pant adopted the irregular course of asking every Belgian he met if they had seen any one from his district in Antwerp, if they had heard of the name of “Van der Pant,” if they had encountered So-and-so or So-and-so.  And by obstinacy and good fortune he really got on to the track of Madame Van der Pant; she had been carried off into Kent, and a day later the Dower House was the scene of a happy reunion.  Madame was a slender lady, dressed well and plainly, with a Belgian common sense and a Catholic reserve, and Andre was like a child of wax, delicate and charming and unsubstantial.  It seemed incredible that he could ever grow into anything so buoyant and incessant as his father.  The Britling boys had to be warned not to damage him.  A sitting-room was handed over to the Belgians for their private use, and for a time the two families settled into the Dower House side by side.  Anglo-French became the table language of the household.  It hampered Mr. Britling very considerably.  And both families set themselves to much unrecorded observation, much unspoken mutual criticism, and the exercise of great patience.  It was tiresome for the English to be tied to a language that crippled all spontaneous talk; these linguistic gymnastics were fun to begin with, but soon they became very troublesome; and the Belgians suspected sensibilities in their hosts and a vast unwritten code of etiquette that did not exist; at first they were always waiting, as it were, to be invited or told or included; they seemed always deferentially backing out from intrusions.  Moreover, they would not at first reveal what food they liked or what they didn’t like, or whether they wanted