sheet before it puffed into flame. Another letter, to her? Was he dissatisfied, perhaps, with the letter he had written her before leaving London? How little he had guessed, while writing it, that he would be interrupted half way through it, and by her. His eyes shone, and his undisciplined hair stood up at the back like a schoolboy's. He didn't know or care. He was happy.
There in that cottage room, Judy felt the influence of the woman who had furnished it. She had put into it all the little personal odds and ends that she had loved. There was her work table, there her favorite chair. There was the writing table where she had sat penning the novels that had educated her son. Novels, Chip had said, that she would have hated. But he was wrong. There, on the mantelpiece with its tasseled, red velvet draping, were pictures of Chip as a baby, as a schoolboy, as a youth at Sandhurst, where he had acquired that absurd nickname of his, and as a First Lieutenant about to take his part in the South African war, from which campaign he had returned to find her gone. He had left everything as she had left it, and Judy was disposed to love him for it. Books were scattered about the room, and it had the air of being much lived in and much worked in.
