He pushed back his chair and rose.  “Shall we join the others?” he said.

He moved so that he was between her and the other room, his back to the open doors.  “You think I ought to?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered firmly, as if she were giving a command.  But he read pity also in her eyes.

“Well, have you two settled the affairs of the kingdom?  Is it all decided?” asked Airlie.

“Yes,” he answered, laughing.  “We are going to say to the people, ’Eat, drink and be wise.’”

He rearranged his wife’s feather and smoothed her tumbled hair.  She looked up at him and smiled.

Joan set herself to make McKean talk, and after a time succeeded.  They had a mutual friend, a raw-boned youth she had met at Cambridge.  He was engaged to McKean’s sister.  His eyes lighted up when he spoke of his sister Jenny.  The Little Mother, he called her.

“She’s the most beautiful body in all the world,” he said.  “Though merely seeing her you mightn’t know it.”

He saw her “home”; and went on up the stairs to his own floor.

Joan stood for a while in front of the glass before undressing; but felt less satisfied with herself.  She replaced the star in its case, and took off the regal-looking dress with the golden girdle and laid it carelessly aside.  She seemed to be growing smaller.

In her white night dress, with her hair in two long plaits, she looked at herself once more.  She seemed to be no one of any importance at all:  just a long little girl going to bed.  With no one to kiss her good night.

She blew out the candle and climbed into the big bed, feeling very lonesome as she used to when a child.  It had not troubled her until to-night.  Suddenly she sat up again.  She needn’t be back in London before Tuesday evening, and to-day was only Friday.  She would run down home and burst in upon her father.  He would be so pleased to see her.

She would make him put his arms around her.

CHAPTER VIII

She reached home in the evening.  She thought to find her father in his study.  But they told her that, now, he usually sat alone in the great drawing-room.  She opened the door softly.  The room was dark save for a flicker of firelight; she could see nothing.  Nor was there any sound.

“Dad,” she cried, “are you here?”

He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.

“It is you,” he said.  He seemed a little dazed.

She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.

“Give me a hug, Dad,” she commanded.  “A real hug.”

He held her to him for what seemed a long while.  There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.

“I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it,” she laughed, when at last he released her.  “Do you know, you haven’t hugged me, Dad, since I was five years old.  That’s nineteen years ago.  You do love me, don’t you?”