“Of course I’m awake. Been awake for hours. How’s Peter the Fourth?”
“Slept like a top.” The door opened, revealing Patricia, slipperless, golden hair falling about her white shoulders. “What on earth. . . .”
Garton, blushing furiously, fled: they heard him busy in the bath-room as they kissed good-morning.
“Funny fellow, isn’t he?” Peter explained his quondam servant’s presence. “And now let’s have a look at the heir.”
Arms linked, they passed into the curtained bed-room. Mauve-shaded candles burned on the white over-mantel, on the table by the lace-canopied cot. Blinking at the light, still only half awake, lay Peter the Fourth. The newly-weaned baby smiled happily at its parents. Peter the Fourth, they thought, would have his mother’s hair, his father’s eyes: Peter the Fourth, they thought . . . but what these two thought about their eight-months old son would fill a prologue, an epilogue, and a hundred chapters in between.
As Evelyn confided, early in the summer, to Primula: “I don’t believe a word of that gooseberry-bush story, Prim. I believe Mummy and the pater made that child themselves. They couldn’t be so gone on it”—(“gone on,” acquired from Garton, was the school-room word of the moment)—“if they’d just found it.”
Said Primula, sternly practical, “It must be frightfully difficult to make a baby. Think of its ears. . . .”
The two girls came running, fully dressed, into Patricia’s room just as Peter slipped off for his bath; stood chattering till Patricia shooed them away and rang for Elizabeth. . . .
§ 2
The Peter Jameson who breakfasted with his wife at a quarter to eight on Armistice Morning was a very different animal from the our Mr. Jameson whose taxi had driven up to 22 a. Lowndes Square, London, four and a half years previously. Grayed hair and lined face still betrayed convalescence, the weariness of war-time; but his eyes, his voice, the whole atmosphere of happiness he exuded, testified a change in the man’s mentality.