“What did you say, Nancy?” he asked with a puzzled air.  He was still standing at the head of the table and staring with obvious embarrassment at his wife.

She waved her hands at him.  “Sit down, Alfred,” she commanded him, and in her pronunciation of his name I noticed for the first time the ripple of a French “r.”  Possibly her manner of speaking his name was a form of endearment.  “All in good time, you shall hear about it directly.  Now, we are all very hungry and waiting for you.”  And without the least hint of a pause she turned to me and glided over an apology for the nature of the meal.  “We call it supper,” she said, “and it is just a farm-house supper, but better in its way, don’t you think, than a formal dinner?” She took me utterly into her confidence with her smile as she added, “Up at the Hall they make so much ceremony, all about nothing.  I am not surprised that you ran away.  But it was very original, all the same.”  She introduced me to the first course without taking breath, “Eggs and bacon.  So English.  Isn’t there a story of a man who starved to death on a walking-tour because he could no longer endure to eat eggs and bacon?  And when you have eaten something you must tell us what you have all four been doing while my husband and I were away.  So far as I can understand you have turned the universe completely inside out.  We came back believing that we return to the Farm, but I think it has become a Fortress....”

I ventured a glance at her husband.  These flickering allusions of hers to the tragedy that was threatening him, seemed to me indiscreet and rather too frivolous.  But when I saw his look of puzzled wonder and admiration, I began to appreciate the subtlety and wisdom of her method.  Using me as a convenient intermediary, she was breaking the news by what were, to him, almost inappreciable degrees.  He took in her hints so slowly.  He was not sure from moment to moment whether or not she was in earnest.  Nevertheless, I recognised, I thought, at least one cause for perturbation.  He had been perceptibly ruffled and uneasy at the reference to an understanding between his son and Brenda.  Probably the fear of that complication had been in his mind for some time past.

Mrs. Banks had slid away to the subject of local scenery.

“It is beautiful in its own way,” she was saying, “but I feel with Arthur that it has an air of being so—­preserved.  It is so proper, well-adjusted, I forget the English word ...”

I suggested “trim” as a near translation of “propre” and “bien-ajuste.”

“Trim, yes,” she agreed enthusiastically.  “My daughter tells me you are an author.  There are three lime trees in the pasture and the cattle have eaten the branches as high as they can reach, so that now the trees have the precise shape of a bell.  Even the trees in the Park, you see, are trim—­not, it is true, like Versailles, where the poor things are made to grow according to plan—­but all the county is one great landscape garden; all of England, nearly.  Don’t you agree with me?  One feels that there must always be a game-keeper or a policeman just round the corner.”