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three-quarters of himself head downwards down the hole and reached the ball by a convulsive stretching which threatened every moment to precipitate him upside down into the horrible hole.
    It was the little boys in whom Agatha took most interest, although the little girls claimed a good share. She knew the tidy ones and the untidy ones, and the prim ones and the tomboyish ones, and, with typical partiality, she liked the tidy ones best. Her heart was really wrung with agony when a disaster occurred to the primmest and tidiest of them all, when that self-satisfied, smug ten-year-old found her drawers slipping down there in the road with a whole lot of people about. It was into the front garden of No. 37 that she retired, and Agatha, with yearning sympathy, watched her putting matters right while cowering behind the stunted privet bushes.
    Strange that children should thus hold her fascinated. Agatha had never before thought about children; she had been too preoccupied with two maids and a house to look after, and the little she had known about the method of arrival selected by children had displeased her. She had felt a sort of contempt for the shapeless, helpless wives upon whom she had sometimes called—Mr. Brown’s fellow-Nonconformists were prolific fathers—and she despised wailing babies, and wet babies, and sick babies. All the babies she knew fell into one of these three categories, and children were always quarrelsome, or stupid, or self-assertive. It was all different now; Agatha, stitching a thousand tucks into one ridiculous nightgown, or implanting wonderful embroidery into the corners of a flannel day-gown, thought of few things besides children. But then of course she was a prisoner for the time, and prisoners, by common report, take interest in spiders and mice and things like that, just as Agatha did.
    There was another matter in which she took an interest, though. One day while casually glancing through the newspaper a name caught her eye, and with a slight sense of shock she looked again. The name was that of Lieutenant-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez, and it occurred half-way down a list headed ‘Naval Appointments’. Agatha may perhaps have seen that column before, but it had conveyed nothing to her. She had not realized before that by its aid she would be able to follow Samarez’s professional career, and the discovery stimulated her attention. She found there was another column which sometimes appeared, headed ‘Movements of HM Ships’, and with the aid of these two she could trace Samarez hither and thither wherever the Lords of Admiralty might send him. After that Agatha always bought her own newspaper instead of depending on casual readings of Mrs. Rodgers’s, and it was for these items that she always looked first. It became her hobby, just as children had become her main interest.
    Day passed after day, and week after week. The chair by the first-floor front window had become a second nature to her, just as had her evening walks by side streets. It had almost begun to seem as if she had done nothing else all her life than await the arrival of the son she so confidently expected, and as if she would do anything else. It called for quite an effort to make herself realize that her time was at hand. Doctor Walters of course treated the affair in a far more matter-of-fact manner, and it was the businesslike solemnity of his visits which did most to impress Agatha with the need to complete her arrangements.
    Within the last few weeks a new portent had appeared in Salisbury Road, next to Colchester Road. A board had spread itself with wide-open welcoming arms there, bearing the legend ‘Nursing Home—Surgical, General, Maternity’. Until that era nursing homes in the suburbs had been almost non-existent. Suburban people, if they were ill, went into hospitals; if they were only not quite so ill they struggled back to life or on to death in their own rabbit hutches of houses; nine hundred and