He stood on the landing outside his parents’ bed and dressing rooms, debating whether or not to put his nose in and say a reassuring word. Opening the landing window, he listened. The rumble from Piccadilly was all the sound he heard, and with the thought, “If these motorcars increase, it’ll affect house property,” he was about to pass on up to the room always kept ready for him when he heard, distant as yet, the hoarse rushing call of a news vendor. There it was, and coming past the house! He knocked on his mother’s door and went in.

His father was sitting up in bed, with his ears pricked under the white hair which Emily kept so beautifully cut. He looked pink, and extraordinarily clean, in his setting of white sheet and pillow, out of which the points of his high, thin, nightgowned shoulders emerged in small peaks. His eyes alone, grey and distrustful under their withered lids, were moving from the window to Emily, who in a wrapper was walking up and down, squeezing a rubber ball attached to a scent bottle. The room reeked faintly of the eau de cologne she was spraying.

“All right!” said Soames, “it’s not a fire. The Boers have declared war⁠—that’s all.”