They left the Park behind, and skirting Primrose Hill came to a terrace facing the North. At the third porch Jill produced a key, and fitting it in the lock, noiselessly opened the door.
"In you go, Roddy, the coast's quite clear..."
The boy slipped past and up the narrow stairs.
Then she turned to Peter with a sudden hesitation. "If you don't mind waiting here I'll go and find Mother."
McTaggart stood in the gloomy hall, watching the girl, as she walked down the passage with her long, boyish step, opened a door beyond and closed it behind her and a sound of voices drifted across to him.
He was just beginning to regret his sudden impulse when the door was reopened and a man appeared. Tall and very blond, dressed with studied care in a coat that curved in to his narrow waist, the light from above fell on his face, weakly good-looking, with a loose under lip and sentimental eyes of a pale greenish hue, thickly shadowed by long fair lashes.
"H'are you, McTaggart." He drawled out the greeting in a thin, light voice that somehow matched his hair. He held out a limp hand with carefully tended nails. McTaggart shook it like a terrier with a rat.
"You'll find Mrs. Uniacke in he-are," he went on. McTaggart silently following in his wake experienced a sudden tingling in his toes.
Within the little study that faced on a strip of garden suggestive of cats a lady was seated before a littered desk, piled up with pamphlets which she was directing.
She rose as he entered, and came forward quickly--passing her tall daughter--with outstretched hand.
Slight and fragile, with wide dark eyes, something bird-like in the eager poise of the head--reminded McTaggart instinctively of a linnet--the last type imaginable of the "Militant Suffragette."
"I'm so glad to see you," her voice was sweet and low. "You're quite a stranger, Peter!--And only yesterday Stephen was saying he thought you had left town."
"I _have_ been away," McTaggart replied--"down in Devonshire--and when I met Jill near Regent's Park, I was tempted to walk across and look you up. Especially," he added with his sunny smile, "when I heard my friend Roddy would be at home."
"Very much at home," Stephen interposed, conscious of Jill's swift glance of disgust--"the window, you observe, bears silent witness to it." He pointed a slender finger at the broken pane. Then went on smoothly: "You'll stay to lunch, of course." But Peter ignored him, his eyes on his hostess.