trace of your mother!"

Then he set Timmy down rather carefully and delicately on the edge of the
shabby Turkey carpet, and stepped forward, into the dining-room.

"I wonder if I may have a cup of tea? Is Preston still here?"

"Preston's married. She has five children. Mother says it's four too
many, as her husband's a cripple." Timmy waited a moment. "We haven't got
a parlourmaid now. Mother says we lead the simple life."

"The devil you do!" cried Radmore, diverted, and then, not till then, did
he suddenly become aware that he and his godson were not alone.

"Why, Betty!" he exclaimed in a voice he tried to make quite ordinary,
"I didn't see you. Have you been there the whole time?"--the whole time
being but half a minute at the longest.

And then he strode across the room, and, taking her two hands in his
strong grasp, brought her forward, rather masterfully, to the window
through which he had just come.

"You're just the same," he said, but there was a doubtful note in his
voice, and then as she remained silent, though she smiled a little
tremulously, he went on:--

"Nine years have made an awful difference to me--nine years _and_ the
war! But Beechfield, from what I've been able to see of it, seems exactly
the same--not a twig, not a leaf, not a stone out of place!"

"We didn't expect you for another hour at least," said Betty, in her
quiet, well-modulated voice.

She was wondering whether he remembered, as she now remembered with a
kind of sickening vividness, the last time they had been together in this
room--for it was here, in the dining-room of Old Place, that they had
spent their last miserable, heart-broken moment together, a moment when
all the angry bitterness had been merged in wild, piteous tenderness, and
heart-break...

"I had a bit of luck," he answered cheerfully, "as I went out of the
house where I had managed to get on to a telephone, there came a car down
the road, and I asked the man who was driving it if he would give me a
lift. My luck held, for he was actually breaking his journey for half an
hour here, at Beechfield!"

He was talking rather quickly now, as if at last aware of something
painful, awkward, in the atmosphere.

"Others all out?" he asked. "Perhaps you'll show me my room, godson?"

"Wouldn't you like to see Nanna?" asked Timmy officiously. "She's so
looking forward to seeing you. She wants to thank you for the big
Shetland shawl she supposes you sent her last Chris