“Not a scrap.”

“I hope they won’t worry you much. I must take you about to get the things tomorrow. Good night; kiss me.”

With that kiss, soft and hot, between his eyes, and those words, “I hope they won’t worry you much,” in his ears, he sat down to a cigarette, before a dying fire. The heat was out of him⁠—the glow of cutting a dash. It was all a damned heart-aching bore. “I’ll be even with that chap Jolly,” he thought, trailing up the stairs, past the room where his mother was biting her pillow to smother a sense of desolation which was trying to make her sob.

And soon only one of the diners at James’ was awake⁠—Soames, in his bedroom above his father’s.