He stood on the landing outside his parents’ bed and dressing rooms, debating whether or not to put his nose in and say a reassuring word.  Opening the landing window, he listened.  The rumble from Piccadilly was all the sound he heard, and with the thought, ’If these motor-cars increase, it’ll affect house property,’ he was about to pass on up to the room always kept ready for him when he heard, distant as yet, the hoarse rushing call of a newsvendor.  There it was, and coming past the house!  He knocked on his mother’s door and went in.

His father was sitting up in bed, with his ears pricked under the white hair which Emily kept so beautifully cut.  He looked pink, and extraordinarily clean, in his setting of white sheet and pillow, out of which the points of his high, thin, nightgowned shoulders emerged in small peaks.  His eyes alone, grey and distrustful under their withered lids, were moving from the window to Emily, who in a wrapper was walking up and down, squeezing a rubber ball attached to a scent bottle.  The room reeked faintly of the eau-de-Cologne she was spraying.

“All right!” said Soames, “it’s not a fire.  The Boers have declared war—­that’s all.”

Emily stopped her spraying.

“Oh!” was all she said, and looked at James.

Soames, too, looked at his father.  He was taking it differently from their expectation, as if some thought, strange to them, were working in him.

“H’m!” he muttered suddenly, “I shan’t live to see the end of this.”

“Nonsense, James!  It’ll be over by Christmas.”

“What do you know about it?” James answered her with asperity.  “It’s a pretty mess at this time of night, too!” He lapsed into silence, and his wife and son, as if hypnotised, waited for him to say:  ’I can’t tell—­I don’t know; I knew how it would be!’ But he did not.  The grey eyes shifted, evidently seeing nothing in the room; then movement occurred under the bedclothes, and the knees were drawn up suddenly to a great height.

“They ought to send out Roberts.  It all comes from that fellow Gladstone and his Majuba.”

The two listeners noted something beyond the usual in his voice, something of real anxiety.  It was as if he had said:  ’I shall never see the old country peaceful and safe again.  I shall have to die before I know she’s won.’  And in spite of the feeling that James must not be encouraged to be fussy, they were touched.  Soames went up to the bedside and stroked his father’s hand which had emerged from under the bedclothes, long and wrinkled with veins.

“Mark my words!” said James, “consols will go to par.  For all I know, Val may go and enlist.”

“Oh, come, James!” cried Emily, “you talk as if there were danger.”

Her comfortable voice seemed to soothe James for once.

“Well,” he muttered, “I told you how it would be.  I don’t know, I’m sure—­nobody tells me anything.  Are you sleeping here, my boy?”