"Is she anything like what people make her out to be?"
Eric smiled tolerantly.
"I don't know enough of what people make her out to be," he replied. Sybil was smiling mysteriously and exasperatingly to herself.… "Is the guv'nor working?" he asked his mother.
Eric prowled through the hall to his father's big work-room. Sir Francis was sitting bent over a litter of papers, with a green eye-shade clamped to his lined forehead and an ill-smelling corn-cob drooping from beneath his unassertive grey moustache. In an arm-chair before the fire Geoff was contentedly dozing with the bog-mud steaming from his boots and a half-cleaned gun across his knees. By his side an elderly retriever peered reflectively into the flames and from time to time yawned silently.
"'Evening, everybody," said Eric. "I've been sent to hunt you off to dress, father. You asleep, Geoff? If not, how are you?"
Sir Francis pulled off the eye-shade and held out his hand with a wintry smile. The boy in the arm-chair turned on to his other side and dropped asleep again with a disgusted grunt.
"He's got about a year to make up," explained Sir Francis. "The Grand Fleet doesn't do much sleeping. Well, Eric, what news?"
"Everything very much as usual," was the answer.
"Everything's always very much as usual here," said his father, as he turned out the reading-lamp.
He sighed as he said it, and Eric tried to calculate the number of years in which he had come down like this for the week-end—to be met, before the era of motor-cars, by a fat pony and a governess cart, to be greeted by his mother with affection which he never seemed able to repay, to drift into the library and detach his lank, unaging father from his studies. Sir Francis had accepted marriage and the presence of a wife as he would have accepted a new house and strange house-keeper; children had been born; after the publication of his Smaller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary the friend of a friend had recommended him, through a friend's friend, for a knighthood, and he had bestirred himself with wide-eyed, childish surprise for the investiture and a congratulatory dinner at the Athenæum, returning to Lashmar Mill-House grievously unsettled and discontented for as much as a week. He had talked of running up to London occasionally, of having these fellows down for the week-end; he had complained that he was growing rusty and losing touch with the world. Then the murmur of the mill-stream had drugged his senses, and he had settled to the Century Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, Volume VII E-G.