“They won’t want me to give evidence or anything?”

“No, dear; it’s all arranged.”  And she patted his hand.  The determined front she was putting on it stayed the turmoil in Val’s chest, and he busied himself in drawing his gloves off and on.  He had taken what he now saw was the wrong pair to go with his spats; they should have been grey, but were deerskin of a dark tan; whether to keep them on or not he could not decide.  They arrived soon after ten.  It was his first visit to the Law Courts, and the building struck him at once.

“By Jove!” he said as they passed into the hall, “this’d make four or five jolly good racket courts.”

Soames was awaiting them at the foot of some stairs.

“Here you are!” he said, without shaking hands, as if the event had made them too familiar for such formalities.  “It’s Happerly Browne, Court I. We shall be on first.”

A sensation such as he had known when going in to bat was playing now in the top of Val’s chest, but he followed his mother and uncle doggedly, looking at no more than he could help, and thinking that the place smelled ‘fuggy.’  People seemed to be lurking everywhere, and he plucked Soames by the sleeve.

“I say, Uncle, you’re not going to let those beastly papers in, are you?”

Soames gave him the sideway look which had reduced many to silence in its time.

“In here,” he said.  “You needn’t take off your furs, Winifred.”

Val entered behind them, nettled and with his head up.  In this confounded hole everybody—­and there were a good many of them—­seemed sitting on everybody else’s knee, though really divided from each other by pews; and Val had a feeling that they might all slip down together into the well.  This, however, was but a momentary vision—­of mahogany, and black gowns, and white blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all rather secret and whispery—­before he was sitting next his mother in the front row, with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and taking off his gloves for the last time.  His mother was looking at him; he was suddenly conscious that she had really wanted him there next to her, and that he counted for something in this business.

All right!  He would show them!  Squaring his shoulders, he crossed his legs and gazed inscrutably at his spats.  But just then an ‘old Johnny’ in a gown and long wig, looking awfully like a funny raddled woman, came through a door into the high pew opposite, and he had to uncross his legs hastily, and stand up with everybody else.

‘Dartie versus Dartie!’