“But, of course, she must go back to the Hall,” he said.  “You wouldn’t like to get us into trouble, would you, Miss Brenda?  You see,” he pushed his chair back once more, in the throes of his effort to explain himself, “your father would turn me out, if there was any fuss.”

He was going on, but his wife, with a sudden magnificent violence, scattered the web she and her daughter had been weaving.

“And that might be the best thing that could happen to us, Alfred,” she said.  “Oh!  I’m so sick and tired of these foolish Jervaises.  They are like the green fly on the rose trees.  They stick there and do nothing but suck the life out of us.  You are a free man.  You owe them nothing.  Let us break with them and go out, all of us, to Canada with Arthur and Brenda.  As for me, I would rejoice to go.”

“Nancy!  Nancy!” he reproached her for the third time, with a humouring shake of his head.  They were past the celebration of their silver wedding, but it was evident that he still saw in her the adorable foolishness of one who would never be able to appreciate the final infallibility of English standards.  He loved her, he would make immense personal sacrifices for her, but in these matters she was still a child, a foreigner.  Just so might he have reproached Anne at three years old for some infantile naughtiness.

“It may come to that,” Arthur interjected, gloomily.

“You’re talking like a fool, Arthur,” his father said.  “What’d I do at my age—­I’ll be sixty-one next month—­trapesing off to Canada?” He felt on safer ground, more sure of his authority in addressing his son.  He was English.  He might be rebellious and need chastisement, but he would not be swayed by these whimsical notions that sometimes bewitched his mother and sister.

“But, father, we may have to go,” Anne softly reminded him.

“Have to?  Have to?” he repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding in his voice.  “He hasn’t been doing anything foolish, has he?  Nothing as can’t be got over?”

It was his wife who replied to that.  “We’ve had our time, Alfred,” she said.  “We have to think of them now.  We must not be selfish.  They are young and deeply in love, as you and I were once.  We cannot separate them because we are too lazy to move.  And sixty?  Yes, it is true that you are sixty, but you are strong and your heart is still young.  It is not as if you were an old man.”

Arthur and Brenda looked acutely self-conscious.  Brenda blushed and seemed inclined to giggle.  Arthur’s face was set in the stern lines of one who hears his own banns called in church.

Banks leaned back in his chair and stared apprehensively at his wife.  “D’ye mean it, Nancy...?” he asked, and something in his delivery of the phrase suggested that he had come down to a familiar test of decision.  I could only infer that whenever she had confessed to “meaning it” in the past, her request had never so far been denied.  I guessed, also, that until now she had never been outrageous in her demands.