The whole Britling family, who were lamenting the loss of their Belgians, welcomed the coming of the twenty-five with great enthusiasm.  It made them feel that they were doing something useful once more.  For three days Mrs. Britling had to feed her new lodgers—­the kitchen motors had as usual gone astray—­and she did so in a style that made their boastings about their billet almost insufferable to the rest of their battery.  The billeting allowance at that time was ninepence a head, and Mr. Britling, ashamed of making a profit out of his country, supplied not only generous firing and lighting, but unlimited cigarettes, cards and games, illustrated newspapers, a cocoa supper with such little surprises as sprats and jam roly-poly, and a number of more incidental comforts.  The men arrived fasting under the command of two very sage middle-aged corporals, and responded to Mrs. Britling’s hospitalities by a number of good resolutions, many of which they kept.  They never made noises after half-past ten, or at least only now and then when a singsong broke out with unusual violence; they got up and went out at five or six in the morning without a sound; they were almost inconveniently helpful with washing-up and tidying round.

In quite a little time Mrs. Britling’s mind had adapted itself to the spectacle of half-a-dozen young men in khaki breeches and shirts performing their toilets in and about her scullery, or improvising an unsanctioned game of football between the hockey goals.  These men were not the miscellaneous men of the new armies; they were the earlier Territorial type with no heroics about them; they came from the midlands; and their two middle-aged corporals kept them well in hand and ruled them like a band of brothers.  But they had an illegal side, that developed in directions that set Mr. Britling theorising.  They seemed, for example, to poach by nature, as children play and sing.  They possessed a promiscuous white dog.  They began to add rabbits to their supper menu, unaccountable rabbits.  One night there was a mighty smell of frying fish from the kitchen, and the cook reported trout.  “Trout!” said Mr. Britling to one of the corporals; “now where did you chaps get trout?”

The “fisherman,” they said, had got them with a hair noose.  They produced the fisherman, of whom they were manifestly proud.  It was, he explained, a method of fishing he had learnt when in New York Harbour.  He had been a stoker.  He displayed a confidence in Mr. Britling that made that gentleman an accessory after his offence, his very serious offence against pre-war laws and customs.  It was plain that the trout were the trout that Mr. Pumshock, the stock-broker and amateur gentleman, had preserved so carefully in the Easy.  Hitherto the countryside had been forced to regard Mr. Pumshock’s trout with an almost superstitious respect.  A year ago young Snooker had done a month for one of those very trout.  But now things were different.