Free Random Harvest by James Hilton

yourselves, either now or later.”  Without offering to serve us he placed the tray on a table and walked out of the room, pausing at the door to deliver a quizzical good-night.
    We returned the salutation and then, as soon as the door closed, looked at each other rather uneasily.  “I didn’t hear him come in,” said Woburn, after a pause.  “He didn’t knock.”
    “Good servants don’t—except at bedroom doors.”
    “Oh?  I don’t know things like that.  My mother never had a servant.”
    “Now who’s being an inverted snob?  My mother had ONE servant, whom we called the skivvy.  That sets us both pretty equal so far as Stourton’s concerned.”
    “You probably went to a good school, though.”
    I mentioned the name of my school and agreed that it was generally considered fairly good.  “As good as Netherton, which is where Rainier went.  Anyhow, from a social angle, the main thing is the accent—which you and I both seem to have.  Nobody’s going to ask us where we picked it up.”
    “I don’t mind if they do.  I was at a board school up to the age of twelve—then I won a scholarship to a suburban grammar school.  I took a London degree last year, working in the evenings.  I never try to conceal the truth.”
    “CONCEAL it?  I should think you’d boast about it.”
    “I suppose that’s really what I AM doing.  Will you have a drink?”
    “Yes, please.”
    He began to mix them and presently, while working off a certain embarrassment, added:  “How does that fellow Sheldon strike you?”
    I said I thought he was the kind of person one could avoid a decision about by calling him a character.  “Maybe the keeper of the family skeleton,” I added.
    “No—because if there were one, Rainier would take a perverse delight in dragging it out of the cupboard for everyone to stare at.”
    We laughed and agreed that that might well be so.
    It was past eleven before we yawned our way upstairs.  When I reached my room I found it full of cool air and moonlight; in the vagrant play of moving curtain shadows I did not at first see Rainier sitting by the window in an armchair.  He spoke as I approached:  “Don’t let me scare you—I’m only admiring your view.  It’s exactly the same as mine, so that isn’t much of an excuse. . . .
    How did you and Woburn get along?”
    “Quite well.  I like him.  An intelligent young fellow.”
    “Spoken with all the superiority of thirty to twenty?”
    “No, I don’t think so.  I DO like him, anyhow.”
    “He’s my wife’s protégé.  She wants to see him get on in the world— made me root him out of a municipal library to do this card-indexing job. . . .  Yes, he might go far, as they say, if there’s anywhere far to go these days.”
    “That’s the trouble, and he probably realizes it as much as we do.”
    “Well, we can’t change the world for him, but it’s nice to have him around—company for Helen, if nothing else.  I like him too, for that matter.  I like most boys of his age—and of your age.  Wish I had an army of ‘em.”
    “What would you do with an army of them?”
    “Something better, I hope, than have them catalogue books or write biographies of my ancestors.”  He read my thoughts enough to continue:  “I daresay you’re rather surprised at my lack of enthusiasm for the family tree.  That may be because I didn’t have a very satisfactory home life.  When I was a small boy my father was just something distant and booming and Olympian—a bit of a bully in the house, or at least a bit of a Bultitude (if you remember your Vice-Versa)--all of which made it fortunate for the family that he wasn’t much in the home at all.  My mother died when I was ten.”
    “But you liked HER?”
    “I loved her very dearly.  She was a delicate, soft-voiced, kind-hearted, sunny-minded, but rather helpless woman—but then most women would have been helpless against my father.  HE loved her, I’ve no doubt, in his