take her for?  If only she could make it up to him somehow.  She would have liked to reach over and pull him down into her arms, mother him and tell him not to mind—­there was something so intolerably pathetic about his effort to sit soberly straight—­but she resisted this impulse savagely.  The alcohol in her own veins was responsible for this.  She could not quite trust herself not to go maudlin.  So she froze herself tight and huddled away from him into her own corner.

She did not think beyond the address she had given to the chauffeur until they pulled up at her door.  Then she turned to Rush and asked, “Where shall he take you?  Are you staying at a hotel?”

“I am going to take you home,” he said precisely.

She saw she did not dare to let him go.  There was no telling what serious trouble he might get into, in his illicit civilian dress, if she turned him adrift now.  So she said, simply, “Well, here we are.  Come in.”

She opened the street door with her latch-key, and punched on the hall lights.  She dreaded the two flights of stairs, but with the help of the banister rail he negotiated them successfully enough.  And then he was safely brought to anchor in her sitting-room.  It was plain he had not the vaguest idea where he was.

“I’ll make some coffee,” she said.  “That will—­pull us both together.  And it won’t take a minute because it’s all ready to make for breakfast.”

She was not gone, indeed, much longer than that, but when she came back from her kitchenette he had dropped like a log upon her divan, submerged beyond all soundings.  So she tugged him around into a more comfortable position, managed to divest him of his dinner-jacket and his waistcoat, unbuttoned his collar and shirt-band, took off his shoes, and covered him up with an eiderdown quilt.  Then she kissed him—­it was five years since she had done that—­and went, herself, to bed.

At ten o’clock the next morning she sat behind her little breakfast table—­it was daintily munitioned with a glass coffee machine, a grapefruit and a plate of toast—­waiting, over The Times, for Rush to wake up.  She looked more seraphic than ever, enveloped in a white turkish toweling bathrobe and with her hair in a braid.  Her brother lay on the divan just as she had left him the night before.  Presently the change in his breathing told her that he was struggling up out of the depths of sleep.  She looked over at him and saw him blinking at the ceiling.  When his gaze started round her way, she turned her attention to the busy little coffee machine which opportunely needed it.

It was a minute or two before he spoke.  “Is that really you, Mary?”

She smiled affectionately at him and said, “Hello,” adding with just an edge of good-humored mischief, “How do you feel?”

He turned abruptly away from her.  “I feel loathsome,” he said.