between the cushions of
the seat and the side of the carriage. This last memory evoked a little
chuckle of laughter. That nurse had been a strong disciplinarian.

The memories linked together, forming a more connected whole. He recalled
places farther afield than those caught sight of from the window of the
train. He remembered a copse yellow with primroses, a pond where he had
fished for sticklebacks, a bank with a robin's nest in it. He remembered
a later visit with an aunt. He must then have been fourteen or
thereabouts. There had been a small girl, staying with her aunt at a
neighbouring farm, who had accompanied him on his rambles. Despite her
tender age--she couldn't have been more than five years old--she had been
the inventor of their worst escapades. It was she who had egged him on to
the attempt to cross the pond on a log of wood, racing round it to shout
encouragement from the opposite side. The timely advent of one of the
farm-labourers alone had saved him from a watery grave. It was she who
had invented the bows and arrows with which he had accidentally shot the
prize bantam, and it was she who had insisted on his going with her to
search for pheasants' eggs, a crime for which he barely escaped the
penalty of the law.

He remembered her as a fragile fair-haired child, with a wide-eyed
innocence of expression, utterly at variance with her true character. In
spite of her nobly shouldering her full share of the blame, he had
invariably been considered sole culprit, which he most assuredly was not,
though weight of years should have taught him better. But then, one could
hardly expect the Olympians to lay any measure of such crimes at the door
of a grey-eyed, fair-haired angel. And that was what she had appeared to
mere superficial observation. It required extreme perspicacity of vision,
or great intimacy, to arrive at anything a trifle nearer the truth. He
sought in the recesses of his memory for her name. That it had suited her
admirably, and that it was monosyllabic, was all he could remember. After
a few minutes fruitless search, he abandoned it as hopeless, and pulled
pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket.

Presently he saw the square tower and pinnacles of Exeter Cathedral above
some trees, and the train ran into the station. Antony watched the people
on the platform with interest. They were English, and it was thirteen
years since he had been in England. He listened to the fragmentary
English sentenc