“I hope she will.”  Christine glanced towards the window; it was rapidly getting dusk.  “I hope she will,” she said again apprehensively.  “I should hate having to stay here by myself.”  She shivered a little as she spoke.  She turned to him suddenly.

“Are you—­married?” she asked interestedly.

He laughed.

“No. . . .  Why do you ask?”

“I was only wondering.  I hope you don’t think it rude of me to have asked you.  I was only thinking that—­if you were married and had any children, this is such a lovely house for them.  When we were all little we used to have such fine times.  There is a beautiful garden and a great big room that runs nearly the length of the house upstairs, which we used to have for a nursery.”

“You had brothers and sisters, then?”

“No—­but Jimmy was always here; and Gladys—­Gladys is the friend I am expecting—­she is like my own sister, really!”

“I see.”  His eyes watched her with an odd sort of tenderness in them.  “And so you have known Jimmy a great many years?” he asked.

“All my life.”

“Then you know his brother as well?”

“I have met him—­yes; but I dare say he has forgotten all about me.”

“He will be very pleased with Jimmy’s choice of a wife,” he answered her quickly.  “He always had and idea that Jimmy would bring home a golden-haired lady from behind the footlights, I think,” he added laughingly.

He broke off suddenly at sight of the pain in little Christine’s face.  There was an awkward silence.  Christine herself broke it.

“Shall we go and look over the house before it gets quite dark?”

She had taken off her coat and furs; she moved to the door.

Kettering followed silently.  He was fully conscious that in some way he had blundered by his laughing reference to a “golden-haired lady of the footlights”; he felt instinctively that there was something wrong with this little girl and her marriage—­that she was not happy.

He tried to remember what sort of a fellow Jimmy had been in the old days; but his memory of him was vague.  He knew that Horace had often complained bitterly of Jimmy’s extravagance—­knew that there had often been angry scenes between the two Challoners; but he could not recall having heard of anything actually to Jimmy’s discredit.

And, anyway, surely no man on earth could ever treat this little girl badly, even supposing—­even supposing——­

“It’s not such a very big house,” Christine was saying, and he woke from his reverie to answer her.  “But it’s very pretty, don’t you think?” She opened a door on the left.  “This used to be our nursery,” she told him.  They stood together on the threshold; the room was long and low-ceilinged, with a window at each end.

A big rocking-horse covered over with a dust-sheet stood in one corner; there was a doll’s house and a big toy box together in another.  The whole room was painfully silent and tidy, as if it had long since forgotten what it meant to have children playing there—­as if even the echoes of pattering feet and shrill voices had deserted it.