“Is it?  I thought you’d gone.”

“Oh no, I decided to stay after all.  I found out that the trams go all night.”

We walked in together.

“I won’t be more autobiographical than I can help,” I said, “but I must say it’s a hard life, a doctor’s.  One is called away in the middle of a dance to a difficult case of—­of mumps or something, and—­well, there you are.  A delightful evening spoilt.  If one is lucky, one may get back in time for a waltz or two at the end.

“Indeed,” I said, as we began to dance; “at one time to-night I quite thought I wasn’t going to get back here at all.”

THE THINGS THAT MATTER

Ronald, surveying the world from his taxi—­that pleasant corner of the world, St James’s Park—­gave a sigh of happiness.  The blue sky, the lawn of daffodils, the mist of green upon the trees were but a promise of the better things which the country held for him.  Beautiful as he thought the daffodils, he found for the moment an even greater beauty in the Gladstone bags at his feet.  His eyes wandered from one to the other, and his heart sang to him, “I’m going away—­I’m going away—­I’m going away.”

The train was advertised to go at 2.22, and at 2.20 Ronald joined the Easter holiday crowd upon the platform.  A porter put down his luggage and was then swallowed up in a sea of perambulators and flustered parents.  Ronald never saw him again.  At 2.40, amidst some applause, the train came in.

Ronald seized a lost porter.

“Just put these in for me,” he said.  “A first smoker.”

“All this lot yours, sir?”

“The three bags—­not the milk-cans,” said Ronald.

It had been a beautiful day before, but when a family of sixteen which joined Ronald in his carriage was ruthlessly hauled out by the guard, the sun seemed to shine with a warmth more caressing than ever.  Even when the train moved out of the station, and the children who had been mislaid emerged from their hiding-places and were bundled in anywhere by the married porters, Ronald still remained splendidly alone ... and the sky took on yet a deeper shade of blue.

He lay back in his corner, thinking.  For a time his mind was occupied with the thoughts common to most of us when we go away—­thoughts of all the things we have forgotten to pack.  I don’t think you could fairly have called Ronald over-anxious about clothes.  He recognized that it was the inner virtues which counted; that a well-dressed exterior was nothing without some graces of mind or body.  But at the same time he did feel strongly that, if you are going to stay at a house where you have never visited before, and if you are particularly anxious to make a good impression, it is a pity that an accident of packing should force you to appear at dinner in green knickerbockers and somebody else’s velvet smoking-jacket.

Ronald couldn’t help feeling that he had forgotten something.  It wasn’t the spare sponge; it wasn’t the extra shaving-brush; it wasn’t the second pair of bedroom slippers.  Just for a moment the sun went behind a cloud as he wondered if he had included the reserve razor-strop; but no, he distinctly remembered packing that.