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must….”
    “But is he there?” The voice was edged with anxiety now, all the deference gone. “Is Mervyn there? With you?”
    “No. No, he’s not,” I answered. I was beginning to feel bewildered. “I thought—that is, we were expecting him this evening, but Sarah tells me he’s had to put it off. We’re so sorry, we’d all been looking forward….”
    “Oh! Oh yes, of course!” The relief in the voice was unmistakable . “Yes, that’s right. I knew he’d changed his plans. But then, when he still didn’t come home, I began to wonder if he had come to you after all? You see, I was expecting him home before this. He’s not usually as late as this.”
    “No. I see.”
    I didn’t know what to say. She sounded a silly, muddled sort of a woman, and I was sorry for Mervyn, having to arrange his life to fit in with her whims and anxieties. It wasn’t my business, of course, but all the same I found myself saying, rather sharply:
    “We were very disappointed that he couldn’t come. We were looking forward to it so much. We’d invited several friends specially to meet him.”
    “To meet him? Specially to meet Mervyn ?”
    “Well, yes. Naturally. As you can imagine, we are all very excited about the engagement, and everyone’s very eager to meet Sarah’s fiancé.”
    “ Engagement ? Fiancé ?Oh, but Mrs Erskine, I think there must be some little misunderstanding. Sarah is a very sweetgirl, I am sure, and I daresay she and Mervyn are very good friends; but more than that—Oh no!”
    Her voice sounded quite different now; it was brisk and assured. I have noticed before how the thinking of even the most woolly-minded of people becomes clear and precise as soon as their real interests are threatened. She no longer sounded muddled; she sounded like a woman who knows when she is being attacked, and exactly how to defend herself .
    “Oh no! There’s nothing like that in it,” she repeated, with finality; and then, disingenuously: “Sarah is there, did you say? With you, at home? Right now?”
    “She is,” I assured her drily. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to talk to her yourself?”
    “No. Oh no. That’s all right. I’ll take your word for it. Besides, I’m sure Mervyn will be in any minute now. I’m sure there’ll turn out to be some perfectly ordinary explanation ….”
    There will indeed, my good woman, I thought grimly, as I rang off. The perfectly ordinary explanation will turn out to be that your son is a grown man who chooses for himself what to do with his evenings, and what time to come in.
    All the same, I felt uneasy. What was all this about the couple not being engaged? And why had Mervyn made such a point of having to spend the weekend with his mother, if he wasn’t in fact planning to do so? Was he two-timing our daughter? I decided to say nothing to Sarah about any of it. It wasn’t my business—and as things turned out, it would have been quite pointless to worry her, for only ten minutes later Mrs Redmayne rang again, sounding greatly relieved, to say that her son had just that moment come in: he had been held up in the traffic … this, that, and the other. Anyway, all was well.
    I told her I was glad, thanked her for letting me know, and rang off. I had an impulse to ask to speak to the young man himself—to try to find out from his own lips whether or not he considered himself engaged to Sarah; but Irealised at once that this would be the height 01 tactlessness. The probability was that he simply hadn’t got round to breaking the news to his mother yet; and for this, in the circumstances, I could hardly blame him.

CHAPTER IV
    A S IT TURNED out, my guess was correct. The following afternoon, the Saturday, Sarah and I had a long talk, in the course of which she admitted that Mrs Redmayne hadn’t yet been told of the engagement.
    “Though I believe she knows really,” Sarah went on. “Mervyn says he’s sure she does, he can sense it, though she doesn’t say