“That’s your own fault,” Richard told him.  “I’ve often wondered why you didn’t try your luck abroad.  You’d have been sure to hold your own.  Well, anyway, come in and have some tea.  I don’t know what mother would say to me if she came in and found I’d let you stay out in the cold.  She’d be awfully upset.”

“Do you think she would?” the man in uniform asked, and seemed to ponder.  He looked up at the grey sky and shivered. “’Tis getting coldish.  And the cloth this uniform is made from isn’t the sort that keeps out cold weather.  God knows I don’t want to grumble at the uniform I wear for Jesus’ sake, but me having been in the drapery, I can’t help noticing when a thing is cheap.”  He stared down at his toes for a time, lifting alternately his heels and pressing them down into the wet gravel; then raised his head and said nonchalantly:  “Well, old man, I think I will come in after all.”  But he halted yet again when he got one foot over the threshold.  “Mind you, I’m not coming in just because it’s cold,” he began, but Richard, exclaimed, “Yes, yes!  Of course I know you’re not!” and gripped him by the arm and pulled him into the room.  He did not seem to resent the rough treatment at all, and went over at once to the woman in uniform, and, looking happily about him, cried:  “Isn’t this a lovely home?  I always say there’s nobody got such a nice home as my mother.”

His voice whistled; and Ellen in her mind’s eye saw a vision of some clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise.  She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard, meaning to tell him by a smile that she would help him to be kind to Roger.  But Richard was still occupying himself with the window, examining with an air of irascibility a stain of blood which his cut finger had left on the white paint near the lock.  His eyes travelled from it to the muddy footprints of the two who had come in from the garden and to the spatter of earth-daubed leaves on the polished floor, and his mouth drew down at the corners in a grimace of passion that made Ellen long to run to him and kiss him and bid him not give way to the madness of order so prevalent in this house.  But he did not even look at her, so she could do nothing for him.

He went forward to Roger, determinedly sweetening his face, and shook his hand heartily.  “It’s good that you should have turned up just at this moment, for I’m going to be married before long to Miss Melville, whom I met in Scotland when I was working at Aberfay.  Ellen, this is my brother, Roger.”

Roger took Ellen’s hand and then seemed to remember something.  After exchanging a portentous glance with the woman in uniform, he looked steadfastly into her face and said sombrely:  “I hope all’s well with you, sister!  I hope all’s well with you!”