lying in a wide curve around its blue bay. It is softer and milder
than here. A bend of the coast makes so much difference. But why am
I telling you all this, when of course you know it! I forget that
anyone knows Cornwall but Mrs. Talcott and my guardian and me. But
you have not seen this bit of the coast, and it excites me to think
that I shall introduce you to our cliffs and to Les Solitudes. If
only my guardian were here! It is not itself, this place, without
her. It is not to see Les Solitudes if you do not see the great
music-room opening its four long windows on the sea and sky; and my
guardian sitting in the shade of the verandah looking over the sea.
But Mrs. Talcott and I will do the honours as best we may and tell
you everything about my guardian that you will wish to know. Let us
hear beforehand the day you are coming; for the cook makes
excellent cakes, and we will have some baked specially for you. How
very nice to see you again.--Sincerely yours,

"Karen Woodruff."

CHAPTER IX

On a chill, sunny morning in April, Gregory Jardine went out on to his
balcony before breakfast and stood leaning there as was his wont,
looking down over his view. The purpling tree-tops in the park emerged
from a light morning mist. The sky, of the palest blue, seemed very high
and was streaked with white. Spring was in the air and he could see
daffodils shining here and there on the slopes of green.

He had just read Karen Woodruff's last letter, and he was in the mood,
charmed, amused and touched, that her letters always brought. Never, he
thought, had there been such sweet and such funny letters; so frank and
so impersonal; so simple and so mature. During these months of their
correspondence the thought of her had been constantly in his mind,
mingling now not only with his own deep and distant memories, but, it
seemed, with hers, so that while she still walked with him over the
hills of his boyhood and stooped to look with him at the spring gushing
from under the bracken, they also brushed together the dry, soft snow
from the trailing arbutus, or stood above the sea on the Cornish
headlands. Never in his life had he so possessed the past and been so
aware of it. His youth was with him, even though he still thought of his
relation to Karen Woodruff as a paternal and unequal one; imagining a
crisis in which his wisdom and knowledge of the