offered him a cigarette from a box on the table.
Lieutenant Banks thanked her very much, said that he didn't smoke, and talked for several minutes about the cigarette shortage, and also told a story of an uncle who had visited the East Coast and found all the shops full of cigarettes, matches, sweets and chocolates with nobody to buy them.
Valentine made the rejoinders long grown familiar and the General contributed an occasional observation.
Lieutenant Banks, looking disturbed and uneasy, still sat on.
Suddenly there sounded an outburst of barking from both the dogs. The spaniel subsided at a ferocious-sounding order from General Levallois, but the pup dashed forward excitedly, springing from side to side and making a deafening clamour.
The glass doors were pushed open and left swinging as Jess came in.
Her first greeting was for her dog.
"Hullo, aunt Sophy! Down, like a good dog, down! Darling little dog! Get down."
The puppy leapt upon her, trying to lick her face, and Jess picked it up and carried it bodily across the hall.
"Hallo!"
"This is Lieutenant Banks—my daughter Jessica."
Banks stood up and Jess said "Hallo" again and shifted the wriggling dog underneath one arm.
"Sorry about the awful row, uncle Reggie. Hallo, Sally!"
The spaniel's tail flumped upon the floor in acknowledgment.
"I say, what do you call your dog?" the young soldier demanded—speaking in a quite new, much more natural and animated voice.
"Aunt Sophy. Actually, she's the exact image of an aunt I have, called Sophy. Even mummie admits that. It isn't her sister, or anything like that. In fact she's a great-aunt."
"Does she know?"
"We don't think so. She's only once been here since I had the puppy and of course I said I hadn't yet decided on a name. Actually, she kept on making rather dim suggestions, like Rover and Tray and Faithful."
Lieutenant Banks began to laugh, and Jess laughed too.
Valentine felt relieved.
She leant back in her chair and looked at her younger daughter.
Primrose resented being looked at so intensely that her mother could hardly ever bear to do so, although no single word had passed between them on the subject.
Jess was not only quite unself-conscious, but she was scarcely sufficiently interested in people to notice whether they looked at her or whether they didn't. She was tall and slight, much fairer than Valentine had ever been, and with exactly Humphrey's squarely-shaped, open face, with a well-cut, firm, insensitive mouth, rather thick snub nose and big, straight-gazing brown eyes.
She looked her best in the clothes that she most often wore, riding-breeches and a high-necked wool jumper, under an open tweed riding-coat.
Her head was bare and her hair, which was flaxen and very pretty, was just shoulder-length and attractively curled at the ends.
Valentine wondered, as she wondered almost every day of her life, what Humphrey would think if he could suddenly walk into Coombe now, after twelve years.
Supposing he were able to come back?
The place was hardly altered at all. There was a painting of himself, that his mother had insisted upon having done from a photograph after his death and that now hung above Valentine's desk.
She had never liked it, and thought it a bad painting—shrill and crude in colouring and with only a superficial resemblance to the original. But she had never had it moved, even after the death of her mother-in-law.
It was almost the only new thing in the room except for the rose-patterned chintzes. The year before Humphrey died, and for several years afterwards, the covers had been blue, with a violet stripe.
Valentine remembered them clearly.
Humphrey, if he could come back, would expect to see that familiar colouring. And the Spanish leather screen that now stood opposite to where she was sitting had been in one of the spare bedrooms in Humphrey's day. It had been moved to its now permanent station in the hall when the General complained of a draught behind his habitual armchair.
The spaniel, Sally, had grown old and fat. She was nearly fourteen.
Humphrey had probably never seen her at all. But he had had two spaniels himself—both of them dead, now.
It was the people over whom Humphrey might well hesitate longest.
Jess, when he saw her last, had been a baby of five years old, backward of speech and not particularly pretty. He had not taken a great deal of notice of her, perhaps because he was disappointed that she had not been a boy.
Impossible that he should ever recognize that baby in the tall, sprawling, graceful figure of the seventeen-year-old Jess, whose artless use of a candidly vermilion lip-stick only served to emphasize her appearance of young, open-air innocence.
Humphrey would wonder who the officer was and would dismiss him with a phrase, "Not one of us, what."
Reggie? He'd know Reggie, of course, but the arthritis had only begun a year or two before Humphrey's death. Reggie hadn't been a cripple on two sticks before that. Seated, though, as he was now, he wouldn't have changed so very much. Humphrey would think he was on a visit. It wouldn't cross his mind that Reggie could be living at Coombe, paying a very small contribution to the household expenses and bringing with him his dog.
And then, thought Valentine as she had often thought before, there was herself. Humphrey would look first of all at her. She was the person he had cared for most in his life.
He had left her with brown hair—now it was heavily streaked with a silvery grey. There were lines round her eyes and her mouth, and she had lost her colour. She used a pale-rose lip-stick, whereas she had used none at all in his lifetime. Her figure had not altered: she was as slim as she had been at twenty. And yet there was a difference. It was a soft, pliant slimness still but it was, indefinably, not that of youth. One realized that, looking at Primrose or Jessica.
All the same, Humphrey would know her immediately. He would find her altered only in the sense of having grown older. To this conclusion Valentine always came, in her habitual fantasy of Humphrey's return to the home from which he had been carried, in his coffin, twelve years earlier.
Long ago she had been startled by, and had subsequently answered, the question with which her own heart had confronted her.
If that impossible return could take place, if Humphrey could come back, a living man, from the grave, would it awaken happiness in her?
Valentine knew without any doubt that the answer was No.
Humphrey had never given her either happiness or unhappiness. At best, their relationship had achieved a little pleasure, at most, some discontent.
Valentine, having known both happiness and unhappiness in her earliest youth,
