A stave played by a ’cello called them to supper, and, as they returned to the hall, a burst of earnest music from the whole orchestra partially drowned the clap of thunder that again marked Richard’s passage through the door.  Sarah Brown felt sure that Lady Arabel arranged this on purpose.  The wizard’s mother obviously had great difficulty in not noticing the phenomena connected with her son, and she wore a striving smile and a look of glassy and well-bred unconsciousness whenever anything magic happened.

At the end of the hall the orchestra, arranged neatly in a crescent, was busily employing its violins in a unanimous melody of so rude and destructive a nature that it seemed as if every string must be broken.  This mania spread until even the outlying bassoons, triangles, and celestas were infected.  A piercing note of command, however, from a clarinet caused a devastating dumbness to fall suddenly on every instrument except the piano, which continued self-consciously alone.  The pianist looked at the ceiling mostly, but one note seemed to be an especial favourite with him, and whenever he played it he looked closely and paternally at it, almost indeed applying his nose to it.  All at once, just as Sarah Brown was beginning to imagine that she could catch the tune and the time, the music ceased, apparently in the middle of a bar.  Richard sneezed once or twice.  That unsophisticated wizard was evidently enjoying himself in the practice of his art.  One felt that magic was not encouraged in the Army, and that the supernatural orgy in which he was now indulging was the accumulated reaction after long self-control.  Strange noises of unnatural laughter, for instance, proceeded from distant corners of the hall, and each of the electric lights in turn winked facetiously.  The string of the double bass broke loudly, and the new string which its devotee laboriously inserted also broke at once.  The performer looked appealingly at Lady Arabel, but she refrained from meeting his eye.  A blizzard of butterflies enveloped the table.  This was evidently rather a difficult trick, for the spell collapsed repeatedly, and from one second to another Sarah Brown was never quite sure whether there were really Purple Admirals drowning in her soup or not.

“You are so lucky,” sighed the witch, “plenty of room and every facility.  I myself am so dreadfully cramped and hampered.  I often have to boil my incantations over a spirit lamp, and even that is becoming difficult—­no methylated.”

“Not really lucky,” said Richard.  “In France the smallest pinch of magic seems to make the N.C.O. sick, and that’s why I never got my stripe.  To keep my hand in, I once did a little stunt with the sergeant’s cigarette:  it grew suddenly longer as he struck a match to light it, and went on growing till he had to ask me to light it for him, and then it shrank up and burnt his nose.  Of course he couldn’t really bring the thing home to me, but somehow—­well, as I say, I never got my stripe.”