“I fancy it is going to be influenza,” he observed at intervals, shivering.  “I feel extraordinarily weak, and ache all up my back.  I fancy I have a high temperature, only Peter has broken the thermometer.  You were a hundred and four, I think, Peter, the day you went to bed.  I rather expect I am a hundred and five.  But I suppose I shall never know, as it is impossible to afford another thermometer.  I feel certain it is influenza; and in that case I must give up all hope of getting that job from Pickering, as I cannot possibly go and see him to-morrow.  Not but that it would be a detestable job, anyhow; but anything to keep our heads above water....  My headache is now like a hot metal band all round my head, Peggy.”

“Poor old boy,” said Peggy.  “Take some more phenacetine.  And do go to bed, Hilary.  If you have got flu, you’ll only make yourself as bad as Peter did by staying up too long.  You’ve neither of you any more sense than Tommy here, nor so much, by a long way, have they, little man?  No, Kitty, let him be; you’d only drop him on the floor if I let you, and then he’d break, you know.”

Silvio was kneeling up on the window-seat by Peter’s side, taking an interest in the doings of the street.

Peggy said, “Well, Larry, what’s the news of the great world?”

“It’s raining,” said Silvio, who had something of the mournful timbre of Hilary’s voice in his.

Peggy said, “Oh, darling, be more interesting!  I’m horribly afraid you’re going to grow up obvious, Larry, and that will never do.  What else is it doing?”

“There’s a cat in the rain,” said Silvio, flattening his nose against the blurred glass, and manifestly inclined to select the sadder aspects of the world’s news for retail.  That tendency too, perhaps, he inherited from Hilary.

Presently he added, “There’s a taxi coming up the street,” and Peggy placed Thomas on Peter’s knees and came to the window to look.  When she had looked she said to Peter, “It must be nearly six o’clock” (the clock gained seventeen minutes a day, so that the time was always a matter for nicer calculation than Peggy could usually afford to give it); “and if Hilary’s got flu, I should think Tommy’d be best out of the room....  I haven’t easily the time to put him to bed this evening, really.”

Peter accepted the suggestion and conveyed his son from the room.  As he did so, someone knocked at the front door, and Peggy ran downstairs to open it.

She let in the unhappy noise of the rain and a tall, slim person in a fur coat.

Peggy was surprised, and (most rarely) a little embarrassed.  It wasn’t the person she had looked for.  She even, in her unwonted confusion, let the visitor speak first.

He said, “Is Mr. Peter Margerison in?” frostily, giving her no sign of recognition.

“He is not, Lord Evelyn,” said Peggy, hastily.  “That is, he is busy with the baby upstairs.  Will I take him a message?”