The cab threaded its way swiftly along Buckingham Palace Road towards the Mall. As they passed the long front of the Palace the traveller turned his head resolutely away, that he might not see the alien uniforms at the gates and the eagle standard flapping in the sunlight. The taxi driver, who seemed to have combative instincts, slowed down as he was turning into the Mall, and pointed to the white pile of memorial statuary in front of the palace gates.
“Grossmutter Denkmal, yes,” he announced, and resumed his journey.
Arrived at his destination, Yeovil stood on the steps of his house and pressed the bell with an odd sense of forlornness, as though he were a stranger drifting from nowhere into a land that had no cognisance of him; a moment later he was standing in his own hall, the object of respectful solicitude and attention. Sprucely garbed and groomed lackeys busied themselves with his battered travel-soiled baggage; the door closed on the guttural-voiced taxi driver, and the glaring July sunshine. The wearisome journey was over.
“Poor dear, how dreadfully pulled-down you look,” said Cicely, when the first greetings had been exchanged.
“It’s been a slow business, getting well,” said Yeovil. “I’m only three-quarter way there yet.”
He looked at his reflection in a mirror and laughed ruefully.
“You should have seen what I looked like five or six weeks ago,” he added.
“You ought to have let me come out and nurse you,” said Cicely; “you know I wanted to.”
“Oh, they nursed me well enough,” said Yeovil, “and it would have been a shame dragging you out there; a small Finnish health resort, out of the season, is not a very amusing place, and it would have been worse for any one who didn’t talk Russian.”
“You must have been buried alive there,” said Cicely, with commiseration in her voice.