Against its obstinacies Kitty’s was valiant but absolutely useless. With her arms round its neck--a little struggling thing with dark eyes and black hair, in her little white woollen sweater--she would attempt to impede the lamb’s progress across a garden-bed. But the clinching of her white teeth availed nothing at all. She would be dragged across the moist earth, and left upon her back like a little St. Lawrence amongst the flames of the yellow crocuses. And at these struggles Katya Lascarides presided with absolute deafness and with inflexible indifference; indeed, after their first meeting, when Ellida Langham had brought the child with her nurse to the gloomy, if tranquil, London hotel, where Katya had taken from Mrs. Van Husum a parting which lasted three days, and ended in Mrs. Van Husum’s dissolving into a flood of tears--at the end of that meeting Ellida had softly reproached Katya for the little notice she had taken of what was, after all, the nicest child in London. But cool, calm, tall, and dressed in a grey that exactly matched her eyes, Katya “took charge.” And, during the process, whilst she said, “I shall want this and that,” or “The place must be on a hill; it must face south-west; it must be seven miles from the sea; it must be a farm, with plenty of live-stock but no children,” Ellida watched her, silent, bewildered, and admiring. It seemed so improbable that she should have a sister so professional, so practical, so determined. Yet there it was. And then they descended, Katya and Kitty alone, into the intense silence of the farm that was found. It was on a hill; it faced south-west; it was seven miles from the sea, and the farmer’s wife, because she was childless, surrounded herself with little animals whose mothers had died. And there the child played, never hearing a word, in deep silence with the wordless beasts. This had lasted three weeks. The gate was behind Katya’s back as she smiled at the rolling hills below the garden. She smiled because the night before she believed she had overheard Kitty talking to the lamb; she smiled because she was exhausted and quivering and lonely. She knitted the green necktie, her eyes upon the April landscape, where bursts of sunlight travelled across these veil-like films of new leaves that covered tenderly the innumerable hedgerows. And suddenly she leaned forward; the long fingers holding the knitting-needles ceased all motion. She had heard a footstep--and she knew every footstep of the farm....