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in hospital.
    All this took some time to get out; after which Doris left the room and went upstairs. When after some minutes she did not come down from her bedroom, Phillip, who thought that she should have remained out of courtesy, said to his mother, “Mr. Willoughby and I will go for a walk, and try and get something more for lunch. Also, I must ask Mrs. Neville if she will look after Sprat for me, and there’s the question of dog biscuits.”
    “Don’t be long, will you, Phillip?” She remembered not to say ‘dear’ just in time. “Your father will be home early today.” Thank goodness, she thought, that Dr. Dashwood had recently got married, and appeared to have lost his terrible habit of drinking whiskey, and giving large glasses of it to young soldiers.
    *
    Yet she need not have worried, she told Papa in the afternoon. The two young men came back in plenty of time, with an extra loaf, half a pound of Cheddar cheese, a large tin of sardines and half a pound of butter, all put into Phillip’s haversack by Hern the grocer, who would not hear of payment, so Phillip was going to send him a box of cigars by post from London.
    “It turned out better than I expected, Papa. You know how Dickie does not like to see the children’s friends in the house, atleast at meal times, when he comes home tired. However, he was in a good mood; it was quite like old times.”
    Thomas Turney wondered what old times, and was about to make some sardonic remark when he checked the thought. Hetty went on happily, “The four young people have gone up to London to see Romance at the Lyric Theatre, and Phillip has promised not to be late. Dickie remarked that he saw a great improvement in Phillip’s whole bearing and attitude. He seemed much more manly, he said. Oh, I knew everything would come right one day!”
    “How old is Phillip now, Hetty?” asked Thomas Turney’s elder sister.
    “He will be twenty-three in April, Aunt Marian.”
    “Dear me,” said the old lady. “It seems only yesterday that he had his twenty-first birthday party! Time seems to go so slowly, and then suddenly, before we know where we are, it is gone.” She suppressed a sigh.
    Miss Marian Turney was doing her best to do nothing to upset Tom. Nowadays he was inclined to be so critical of very small things about her. She had been in his house too long, she knew; but where else could she go? Her income was but £8 aquarter, from her father’s will. She sat primly upright, ready to speak only if spoken to, as in childhood three-quarters of a century before.
    “I asked Phillip particularly to come straight home after the theatre, with the two girls,” Hetty was saying. “Dickie is not on duty this week-end, and badly needs a good night’s rest. He can never settle down, you know, until he knows that everyone is in bed.”
    The three came back at half-past eleven. Richard had not waited up for them, but lay on his bed in his blue-flowered dressing gown, twenty-first birthday present from his two younger sisters, Viccy and Dora, in the ’eighties. His carpet slippers waited side by side neatly below the brass bed, ready to be drawn out as soon as three pairs of feet had gone down the passage. When three bedroom doors had been shut, only then would he dare go downstairs and shoot upper and lower bolts of the front door, put the chain across, and turn off the gas-cock in the coal cellar—for safety, should a bomb drop on the house.
    Only then would he be able to feel easy, despite the chronic anxiety of his mind aggravated by insufficient food.
    In the morning Elizabeth, the elder daughter, said to her mother, “I don’t like the look of Bill Willoughby—that awful stutter! There’s something wrong with him—he can never look you in the eyes. Like Phillip—shifty, if you ask me!”
    *
    All types and ages of junior officers were now reporting to the Orderly Room. Gone were the days of one-man medical boards at Caxton Hall, with their one, two, and three