I pushed the door open and we went inside. The garden with its uncut grass looked sordid and forlorn. I was sorry Hugo should come to it like that.
I opened the door of the house with my latchkey, and lifted the children out. Eleanor ran tumbling up the steps and across the hall, Rachel I had to carry. I set her on a chair in the hall and came back for the perambulator.
Hugo helped me to lift it up the steps, and past the umbrella stand.
He hung up his hat and coat, and shut the door. I watched him as though it was a dream. It seemed so strange to see him there. I took him downstairs to the dining-room where tea was being laid.
‘We have shut the drawing-room up,’ I said, ‘because of the coal,’ and I wished I need not have him in that room where the ugly sideboard was. It looked so dull that room, and so crowded up now we used it altogether, and I wanted to have Hugo in a beautiful room.
I left him there while I went upstairs with the children. Their undressing and preparing for tea seemed to take longer than usual that day.
When I came downstairs, Mrs. Sebright was there. I had quite forgotten that she was coming to tea.
Mrs. Sebright asked Hugo about his journey, about the length of his leave, about his billets in France. Hugo answered her questions quietly, smiling very faintly his hesitating smile. Mrs. Sebright talked about submarine warfare; she asked him if he knew what the latest inventions for catching submarines were; Hugo did not know.
Mrs. Sebright seemed to find no difficulty in talking to Hugo. She asked him things that I could not have asked.
I could not talk to him at all while she was there. I sat and watched him while he talked to her. I felt the precious moments slipping away, precious, irrevocable moments, and wondered what it was that had happened to him.