“Mr. Direck!” came her voice, full of confidence. (Of such moments is the heroic life.) The ball shot behind the hurtling Teddy.  Mr. Direck stopped it with his foot, a trick he had just learnt from the eldest Britling son.  He was neither slow nor hasty.  He was in the half-circle, and the way to the goal was barred only by the dust-cloak lady and Mr. Lawrence Carmine.  He made as if to shoot to Mr. Carmine’s left and then smacked the ball, with the swiftness of a serpent’s stroke, to his right.

He’d done it!  Mr. Carmine’s stick and feet were a yard away.

Then hard on this wild triumph came a flash of horror.  One can’t see everything.  His eye following the ball’s trajectory....

Directly in its line of flight was the perambulator.

The ball missed the legs of the lady with the noble nose by a kind of miracle, hit and glanced off the wheel of the perambulator, and went spinning into a border of antirrhinums.

“Good!” cried Cecily.  “Splendid shot!”

He’d shot a goal.  He’d done it well.  The perambulator it seemed didn’t matter.  Though apparently the impact had awakened the baby.  In the margin of his consciousness was the figure of Mr. Britling remarking:  “Aunty.  You really mustn’t wheel the perambulator—­just there.”

“I thought,” said the aunt, indicating the goal posts by a facial movement, “that those two sticks would be a sort of protection....  Aah! Did they then?”

Never mind that.

“That’s game!” said one of the junior Britlings to Mr. Direck with a note of high appreciation, and the whole party, relaxing and crumpling like a lowered flag, moved towards the house and tea.

Section 5

“We’ll play some more after tea,” said Cecily.  “It will be cooler then.”

“My word, I’m beginning to like it,” said Mr. Direck.

“You’re going to play very well,” she said.

And such is the magic of a game that Mr. Direck was humbly proud and grateful for her praise, and trotted along by the side of this creature who had revealed herself so swift and resolute and decisive, full to overflowing of the mere pleasure of just trotting along by her side.  And after tea, which was a large confused affair, enlivened by wonderful and entirely untruthful reminiscences of the afternoon by Mr. Raeburn, they played again, with fewer inefficients and greater skill and swiftness, and Mr. Direck did such quick and intelligent things that everybody declared that he was a hockey player straight from heaven.  The dusk, which at last made the position of the ball too speculative for play, came all too soon for him.  He had played in six games, and he knew he would be as stiff as a Dutch doll in the morning.  But he was very, very happy.

The rest of the Sunday evening was essentially a sequel to the hockey.