A spasm of pain crossed her husband’s face.  ’I wish I could feel it far away.  After all, Ursula, it is the sacrifice of the young that gives people like us leisure and peace to think.  Our duty is to do the best which is permitted to us, but that duty is a poor thing compared with what our young soldiers are giving!  I may be quite wrong about the war . . .  I know I can’t argue with Letchford.  But I will not pretend to a superiority I do not feel.’

I went to bed feeling that in Jimson I had struck a pretty sound fellow.  As I lit the candles on my dressing-table I observed that the stack of silver which I had taken out of my pockets when I washed before supper was top-heavy.  It had two big coins at the top and sixpences and shillings beneath.  Now it is one of my oddities that ever since I was a small boy I have arranged my loose coins symmetrically, with the smallest uppermost.  That made me observant and led me to notice a second point.  The English classics on the top of the chest of drawers were not in the order I had left them.  Izaak Walton had got to the left of Sir Thomas Browne, and the poet Burns was wedged disconsolately between two volumes of Hazlitt.  Moreover a receipted bill which I had stuck in the Pilgrim’s Progress to mark my place had been moved.  Someone had been going through my belongings.

A moment’s reflection convinced me that it couldn’t have been Mrs Jimson.  She had no servant and did the housework herself, but my things had been untouched when I left the room before supper, for she had come to tidy up before I had gone downstairs.  Someone had been here while we were at supper, and had examined elaborately everything I possessed.  Happily I had little luggage, and no papers save the new books and a bill or two in the name of Cornelius Brand.  The inquisitor, whoever he was, had found nothing . . .  The incident gave me a good deal of comfort.  It had been hard to believe that any mystery could exist in this public place, where people lived brazenly in the open, and wore their hearts on their sleeves and proclaimed their opinions from the rooftops.  Yet mystery there must be, or an inoffensive stranger with a kit-bag would not have received these strange attentions.  I made a practice after that of sleeping with my watch below my pillow, for inside the case was Mary Lamington’s label.  Now began a period of pleasant idle receptiveness.  Once a week it was my custom to go up to London for the day to receive letters and instructions, if any should come.  I had moved from my chambers in Park Lane, which I leased under my proper name, to a small flat in Westminster taken in the name of Cornelius Brand.  The letters addressed to Park Lane were forwarded to Sir Walter, who sent them round under cover to my new address.  For the rest I used to spend my mornings reading in the garden, and I discovered for the first time what a pleasure was to be got from old books.  They recalled and amplified that vision