bility, as
she followed my aunt upstairs.

"It's dark, but there's a sort of dignity," said Beatrice very
distinctly, regarding the hall with serene tranquillity, and allowing
the unwilling feet on the stairs to widen their distance from us. She
stood a step up, so that she looked down a little upon me and over me at
the old hall.

She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyond
ear-shot.

"But how did you get here?" she asked.

"Here?"

"All this." She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at
hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. "Weren't you the housekeeper's
son?"

"I've adventured. My uncle has become--a great financier. He used to
be a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover. We're promoters
now, amalgamators, big people on the new model."

"I understand." She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinking
me out.

"And you recognised me?" I asked.

"After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn't place you,
but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped me to remember."

"I'm glad to meet again," I ventured. "I'd never forgotten you."

"One doesn't forget those childish things."

We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and confident
satisfaction in coming together again. I can't explain our ready zest in
one another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we had no doubt in
our minds that we pleased each other. From the first we were at our ease
with one another. "So picturesque, so very picturesque," came a voice
from above, and then: "Bee-atrice!"

"I've a hundred things I want to know about you," she said with an easy
intimacy, as we went up the winding steps....

As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace she
asked questions about my aeronautics. My aunt helped with a word or so
about my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a most
indesirable and improper topic--a blasphemous intrusion upon the angels.
"It isn't flying," I explained. "We don't fly yet."

"You never will," she said compactly. "You never will."

"Well," I said, "we do what we can."

The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of
about four feet from the ground. "Thus far," she said, "thus far--AND NO
FARTHER! No!"

She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite conclusively,
and coughed shortly. "Thank you," she said to her ninth or tenth cake.
Beatrice bur