ind was full of Beatrice and this surprise.
I remembered her simply as a Normandy. I'd clean forgotten that Garvell
was the son and she the step-daughter of our neighbour, Lady Osprey.
Indeed, I'd probably forgotten at that time that we had Lady Osprey as a
neighbour. There was no reason at all for remembering it. It was amazing
to find her in this Surrey countryside, when I'd never thought of her
as living anywhere in the world but at Bladesover Park, near forty miles
and twenty years away. She was so alive--so unchanged! The same quick
warm blood was in her cheeks. It seemed only yesterday that we had
kissed among the bracken stems....

"Eh?" I said.

"I say he's good stuff," said my uncle. "You can say what you like
against the aristocracy, George; Lord Carnaby's rattling good stuff.
There's a sort of Savoir Faire, something--it's an old-fashioned phrase,
George, but a good one there's a Bong-Tong.... It's like the Oxford
turf, George, you can't grow it in a year. I wonder how they do it.
It's living always on a Scale, George. It's being there from the
beginning."...

"She might," I said to myself, "be a picture by Romney come alive!"

"They tell all these stories about him," said my uncle, "but what do
they all amount to?"

"Gods!" I said to myself; "but why have I forgotten for so long? Those
queer little brows of hers, the touch of mischief in her eyes--the way
she breaks into a smile!"

"I don't blame him," said my uncle. "Mostly it's imagination. That and
leisure, George. When I was a young man I was kept pretty busy. So were
you. Even then--!"

What puzzled me more particularly was the queer trick of my memory
that had never recalled anything vital of Beatrice whatever when I
met Garvell again that had, indeed, recalled nothing except a boyish
antagonism and our fight. Now when my senses were full of her, it seemed
incredible that I could ever have forgotten....

III

"Oh, Crikey!" said my aunt, reading a letter behind her coffee-machine.
"HERE'S a young woman, George!"

We were breakfasting together in the big window bay at Lady Grove that
looks upon the iris beds; my uncle was in London.

I sounded an interrogative note and decapitated an egg.

"Who's Beatrice Normandy?" asked my aunt. "I've not heard of her
before."

"She the young woman?"

"Yes. Says she knows you. I'm no hand at old etiquette, George, but
her line is a bit unusual. Practically she says she's going to make her
mother--"