Mrs Turner kept her eyes on the bead bag she was making, an occupation that certainly necessitated close attention. "Don't you think, Joe ..." she began, and then stopped, picking up a bead on the point of her needle with a slightly exaggerated intentness.
"No, no, of course not," her brother said. "It was only that I thought, as Arthur's uncle, he might care to know—to hear, that is...."
"Oh! rather. I should," Arthur put in, as the sentence failed to get itself completed. "I should be very glad of your advice."
"I was only going to say," his uncle responded, "speaking from my own experience, you know, that the life here, jolly enough as it is in many ways, does not offer much scope for a young fellow with any ambition. There's Hubert, for instance—he's—he's getting lazy—can't blame him; got nothing much to do except play golf—but it's hardly the life one would have chosen for him, eh?"
Arthur smiled. "But I'm not proposing to stay here permanently, uncle," he said. "Six months or a year at the outside. I've been having rather a strenuous time you see, and I thought a rest of sorts might do me good."
Joe Kenyon and his sister exchanged a glance that Arthur could not interpret; they might have been recalling some old and rather terrible reminiscence.
"My father said that, did he?" Kenyon said. "Six months or a year at the outside?"
Arthur nodded. He could not possibly tell them why that limit had been assigned.
Mrs Turner sighed and returned to her niggling beads. He brother leaned back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke. Arthur longed to warn him that the ash was again in danger of falling.