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astonishment: it looked absolutely palatial with its deep carpets, tall curtains, and golden ancestors – had they done all this in one day, or had they been secretly preparing for weeks? She heard Beaufort still shouting excitedly down the passage: ‘Father! Father! Wherever are you?’ and suddenly, from far away, a deep voicereplied slowly and incredulously: ‘Is it me you are calling so hysterically, Beaufort?’ The poor boy’s tone became flustered at once: she heard him say, almost pleadingly, ‘Well, Father, it’s an emergency, you see; a man has disappeared.’ ‘Then, pray,’ replied the deep voice, drawing closer, ‘compensate for his absence with presence of mind.’
    Miss Paradise barely had had time to adjust her look to the awesomeness of the voice when Beaufort threw the door open and his father came in. What an entry; what a man! – a full-length portrait stepping slowly out of an Edwardian picture book, so beautifully dressed and blending so many time-honoured characteristics: the carriage of a duke, the perspicuity of a great surgeon, the courtesy of a sultan, the steel of an imperial governor. And what a sheen on his fine, mature features and on his good boots – real boots, not shoes: the sight of it all struck Miss Paradise as forcefully as if an undertaker had come in. ‘You may go, Beaufort,’ the vision boomed, looking first at and then quickly away from Miss Paradise with princely tact. ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the breathless boy, withdrawing immediately with an ashamed expression. Oh! how quaint! how charming! how different from Lolly! ‘She is Miss Paradise, Father,’ he panted out, as he disappeared.
    The father waited to hear the door click. Then, without hesitation, he advanced across the carpet, extended the polished white fingers of his right hand and felt Miss Paradise’s pulse. While he listened, his head slightly cocked, to the beat of that sundered kettle-drum, he expelled from his face all such feeble answers to crisis as worry, doubt, even sorrow: in their place he set placid but inexorable stringency of attention, and his brown eyes, directed full upon Miss Paradise, shone with such a walnut finish that she could see herself reflected in them – thin, concave, a mere petal.
    ‘Kindly sit down, Miss Paradise,’ he said, gently exchanging her pulse for the sort of chair in which a woman can sit without having to be eternally pulling down the front of her skirt or keeping her knees braced at right angles. ‘Be so good as to tell me the story, as briefly and clearly as your condition will permit.’
    Miss Paradise told him what she had told Beaufort.
    ‘So you are a very, very anxious woman,’ he said when she had finished.
    ‘Well, shouldn’t I be, don’t you think?’
    ‘You have telephoned the police, of course?’
    ‘No, I haven’t. Thinking he was here …’
    ‘I can see what a shock you have received,’ said Captain Mallet. ‘In your normal state you would never for an instant suppose that your brother could pay a formal call on total strangers and stay with them for twenty-four hours. However, since the alternative seemed to be his having stayed in the bomb-crater over a similar period, you decided to come straight to the house. You could not face the crater. You are hoping against hope. Forgive my grimness. I do not blame you.’ He went to a table, raised a speaking-tube and, when a gurgle came from it, said sharply and simply: ‘Drag the crater.’ Then he returned to Miss Paradise, saying: ‘I am deliberately assuming the worst. There is no reason whatever to believe that it has happened.’
    ‘The police …’ said Miss Paradise.
    ‘That is the next step, of course. Unfortunately, our telephone is not connected yet. But my son can carry any message in his motor-car with equal speed.’
    This made Miss Paradise smile. ‘He is a nice boy,’ she said.
    The captain started, as if she had irresistibly diverted his train of thought. ‘He is a