"Oh?" said Mr. Kane, sufficiently interested to suspend the opening of the newspaper. "Does she say how Adrian is?"
"No, she doesn't mention him - oh yes, she does! "Tell him I am relying on him to help me to spare Adrian any unnecessary anxiety. He is frailer than I like, and this wretched weather is doing him no good."'
Mr. Kane held his stepfather in considerable affection, but his response to this lacked enthusiasm. "If Timothy's up to mischief again, and Mother thinks I'm going to remonstrate with him, there's nothing doing!" he said.
"Darling Jim, you know perfectly well you'll have to, if he really is entangled with some frightful creature. I must say, it does sound pretty dire!"
"My dear girl, I've already heard all about the dizzy blonde from Mother!" said Mr. Kane, opening The Times. "Mother doesn't like her style, or her background, or anything about her, and I daresay she's quite right. But why she has to go into a flap every time Timothy makes a mild pass at some good-looking wench is something I shall never fathom." He folded the paper to his satisfaction, and began to fill a pipe before settling down to a happy ten minutes with Our Golf Correspondent. "Your're just as bad," he added severely. "You both of you behave as though Timothy were a kid in his first year at Cambridge. Well, I don't hold any brief for young Timothy, but I should call him a pretty hard-boiled specimen, myself. What's more, he's twenty-seven, and if he can't protect himself from designing blondes now he never will."
"Anyone would think, to hear you, that you didn't care what became of him!" remarked Mrs. Kane. "Besides, it isn't the blonde: it's another girl."
"Fast worker!" observed Mr. Kane.
Mrs. Kane paid no heed to this, but went on reading her mother-in-law's letter, a frown slowly gathering between her brows. She looked up at the end, and said seriously: "Jim, really this isn't funny! He's going to marry her!"
"Timothy?" said Mr. Kane incredulously. "Rot!"
"He told your mother so himself."