“Holly will have hers, too. Val’s going to drive a ‘bus, he says—and—er—young—well, dear, that’s all! My love to Kit. There are a tremendous lot of milk-cans in the Park already, Smither says. She went out this morning into Park Lane to have a look. It’s all rather thrilling, don’t you think?”
“At the House they say it’ll mean another shilling on the income tax before it’s over.”
“Oh, dear!”
At this moment a voice said: “Have they answered?” And, replacing the receiver, Winifred again sat, placid. Park Lane! From the old house there—home of her youth—one would have had a splendid view of everything—quite the headquarters! But how dreadfully the poor old Pater would have felt it! James! She seemed to see him again with his plaid over his shoulders, and his nose glued to a window-pane, trying to cure with the evidence of his old grey eyes the fatal habit they all had of not telling him anything. She still had some of his wine. And Warmson, their old butler, still kept ‘The Pouter Pigeon,’ on the river at Moulsbridge. He always sent her a Stilton cheese at Christmas, with a memorandum of the exact amount of the old Park Lane port she was to pour into it. His last letter had ended thus:
“I often think of the master, and how fond he was of going down the cellar right up to the end. As regards wine, ma’am, I’m afraid the days are not what they were. My duty to Mr. Soames and all. Dear me, it seems a long time since I first came to Park Lane.
“Your obedient servant,
“GEORGE WARMSON.
“P. S. – I had a pound or two on that colt Mr. Val bred, please to tell him—and came in useful.”
The old sort of servant! And now she had Smither, from Timothy’s, Cook having died—so mysteriously, or, as Smither put it: “Of hornwee, ma’am, I verily believe, missing Mr. Timothy as we did”—Smither as a sort of supercargo—didn’t they call it, on ships? – and really very capable, considering she was sixty, if a day, and the way her corsets creaked.