“Oh, Daddy!  Aren’t you caught!  I led you on purpose!”

Looking up, Mr. Bosengate saw his small son lying along a low branch above him—­like the leopard he was declaring himself to be (for fear of error), and thought blithely:  ‘What an active little chap it is!’ “Let me drop on your shoulders, Daddy—­like they do on the deer.”

“Oh, yes!  Do be a deer, Daddy!”

Mr. Bosengate did not see being a deer; his hair had just been brushed.  But he entered the rosery buoyantly between his offspring.  His wife was standing precisely as he had imagined her, in a pale blue frock open at the neck, with a narrow black band round the waist, and little accordion pleats below.  She looked her coolest.  Her smile, when she turned her head, hardly seemed to take Mr. Bosengate seriously enough.  He placed his lips below one of her half-drooped eyelids.  She even smelled of roses.  His children began to dance round their mother, and Mr. Bosengate,—­firmly held between them, was also compelled to do this, until she said: 

“When you’ve quite done, let’s have tea!”

It was not the greeting he had imagined coming along in the car.  Earwigs were plentiful in the summer-house—­used perhaps twice a year, but indispensable to every country residence—­and Mr. Bosengate was not sorry for the excuse to get out again.  Though all was so pleasant, he felt oddly restless, rather suffocated; and lighting his pipe, began to move about among the roses, blowing tobacco at the greenfly; in war-time one was never quite idle!  And suddenly he said: 

“We’re trying a wretched Tommy at the assizes.”

His wife looked up from a rose.

“What for?”

“Attempted suicide.”

“Why did he?”

“Can’t stand the separation from his wife.”

She looked at him, gave a low laugh, and said: 

“Oh dear!”

Mr. Bosengate was puzzled.  Why did she laugh?  He looked round, saw that the children were gone, took his pipe from his mouth, and approached her.

“You look very pretty,” he said.  “Give me a kiss!”

His wife bent her body forward from the waist, and pushed her lips out till they touched his moustache.  Mr. Bosengate felt a sensation as if he had arisen from breakfast, without having eaten marmalade.  He mastered it, and said: 

“That jury are a rum lot.”

His wife’s eyelids flickered.  “I wish women sat on juries.”

“Why?”

“It would be an experience.”

Not the first time she had used that curious expression!  Yet her life was far from dull, so far as he could see; with the new interests created by the war, and the constant calls on her time made by the perfection of their home life, she had a useful and busy existence.  Again the random thought passed through him:  ‘But she never tells me anything!’ And suddenly that lugubrious khaki-clad figure started up among the rose bushes.  “We’ve