And then, when the meal finally did begin Mrs. Maldon’s serviette and silver serviette-ring had vanished.  Impossible to find them!  Mr. Batchgrew had of course horribly disarranged the table, and in the upset the serviette and ring might have fallen unnoticed into the darkness beneath the table.  But no search could discover them.  Had the serviette and ring ever been on the table at all?  Had Rachael perchance forgotten them?  Rachael was certain that she had put them on the table.  She remembered casting away a soiled serviette and replacing it with a clean one in accordance with Mrs. Maldon’s command for the high occasion.  She produced the soiled serviette in proof.  Moreover, the ring was not in the serviette drawer of the sideboard.  Renewed search was equally sterile....  At one moment Mrs. Maldon thought that she herself had seen the serviette and ring on the table early in the evening; but at the next she thought she had not.  Conceivably Mr. Batchgrew had taken them in mistake.  Yes, assuredly, he had taken them in mistake—­somehow!  And yet it was inconceivable that he had taken a serviette and ring in mistake.  In mistake for what?  No!...

Mystery!  Excessively disconcerting for an old lady!  In the end Rachel provided another clean serviette, and the meal commenced.  But Mrs. Maldon had not been able to “settle down” in an instant.  The wise, pitying creatures in their twenties considered that it was absurd for her to worry herself about such a trifle.  But was it a trifle?  It was rather a denial of natural laws, a sinister miracle.  Serviette-rings cannot walk, nor fly, nor be annihilated.  And further, she had used that serviette-ring for more than twenty years.  However, the hostess in her soon triumphed over the foolish old lady, and taken the head of the board with aplomb.

And indeed aplomb had been required.  For the guests behaved strangely—­unless it was that the hostess was in a nervous mood for fancying trouble!  Julian Maldon was fidgety and preoccupied.  And Louis himself—­usually a model guest—­was also fidgety and preoccupied.  As for Rachel, the poor girl had only too obviously lost her head about Louis.  Mrs. Maldon had never seen anything like it, never!

III

Julian, having opened the case, disclosed twin brier pipes, silver-mounted, with alternative stems of various lengths and diverse mouthpieces—­all reposing on soft couches of fawn-tinted stuff, with a crimson, silk-lined lid to serve them for canopy.  A rich and costly array!  Everybody was impressed, even startled.  For not merely was the gift extremely handsome—­it was more than a gift; it symbolized the end of an epoch in those lives.  Mrs. Maldon had been no friend of tobacco.  She had lukewarmly permitted cigarettes, which Louis smoked, smoking naught else.  But cigars she had discouraged, and pipes she simply would not have!  Now, Julian smoked nothing but a pipe.  Hence in his great-aunt’s parlour he had not smoked; in effect he had been forbidden to smoke there.  The theory that a pipe was vulgar had been stiffly maintained in that sacred parlour.  In the light of these facts did not Mrs. Maldon’s gift indeed shine as a great and noble act of surrender?  Was it not more than a gift, and entitled to stagger beholders?  Was it not a sublime proof that the earth revolves and the world moves?