He looked genuinely shocked. "Hungry! Why, it isn't any time since you were eating."
"Yes, it is. It's ages. You forget how long you've been sitting downstairs talking. Besides, I've fed Mooey. There's practically all the good of my own supper gone. Anyway . . . will you, Piers?"
He thought, as he descended the steps into the basement: "I'm spoiling her. Before the kid came she'd never have dreamed of sending me downstairs for food for her at this hour. She'd have jolly well got it herself. She's getting just like those American wives in the magazines."
Nevertheless, he sought earnestly in the pantry for something to stay her. He could hear Mrs. Wragge's bubbling snore from the room beyond the kitchen. He could hear the old kitchen clock ticking the night away as eagerly as though the game were fresh to it instead of seventy years repeated. He lifted an enormous dish cover. Under it three sausages. He looked between two plates turned together. Cold salmon. He opened a door. The last of the joint, cold boiled potatoes, beetroots in their own juice, the carcass of a fowl—that looked promising. No, high! Whew! He shut the door. . . . What quantities of bread and buns all tumbled together in the bread-box! He chose a bun, split it, buttered it. That was that. Rather doubtfully he laid a sausage beside it. Cold rice pudding, packed with raisins. That was the thing! A saucer of that with cream. . . . Ha! What was this? Plum cake. He cut a slab and devoured it like a schoolboy. Indigestible, that stuff, for a nursing mother. . . .
Pheasant, round-eyed, sat up in bed. "Oh, how scrumptious!"
She clutched him and kissed him before she ate.
The light out, Pheasant snuggling close to him. Mooey making comfortable little noises in his sleep like a puppy. The rain beating on the windows, accentuating the snugness and warmth of the indoors, the peace. The peace. Why was it that at times like these Eden's face should come out of the darkness to trouble
