Dr. Tremayne's house was the very first when you entered Durracombe by the road from the south. Its green front door with the brass plate stood in the High Street, but its garden wall overtopped the river, and its side windows looked out over the fields to the open country. People coming to fetch the doctor on a black night could see his red surgery lamp from the top of the hill a whole mile away. It seemed to hold out promise of help like a kind hand stretched across the darkness of the river. For the last forty years Durracombe and district had depended upon Dr. Tremayne. Time had, of course, brought changes, and the dark-haired man who drove a high gig in the 'eighties was now grey and elderly, and did his rounds in a two-seater car. Quite apart from medicines the mere sight of him seemed to do his patients good. His very atmosphere was electric, and he had that true gift of healing that helps people to get well of their own accord. Certainly no one within a radius of thirty miles was a greater favourite than "the dear old doctor", and his small biscuit-coloured motor was a familiar feature on the country roads. His three children were married and settled down in various parts of the globe. None had followed their father's profession; so, though he might be proud of a son who was a judge in India, a barrister in London, or a successful civil engineer in Canada, he could claim no help in his practice from his own family. His wife, grey-haired and elderly too, was somewhat of an invalid, and most of the housekeeping was done by Jessop, an invaluable old servant who attended to the surgery, took patients' messages, sterilized instruments, washed medicine bottles, could give first aid in an emergency, and was generally almost as great a feature of the practice as the doctor himself. It was to this rather old-fashioned household that Mavis and Merle, sworn to the most exemplary behaviour, were sent for three months in the hope that in the soft Devonshire air Mavis would catch no more bad bronchial colds, and would have a chance of setting up her health and growing the two extra inches which she still needed to set her head on the same level with Merle's. To the two girls everything in Durracombe seemed delightful. The mildness of the climate amazed them. After the nip of Whinburn's perpetual east wind, lifeless hedgerows, and desolate winter fields, it felt like a sudden jump into spring to find campion, herb robert, and dead-nettle blooming by the road-sides, catkins waving on the hazel bushes, clumps of snowdrops and Christmas roses under the apple trees, violets beneath the sheltered wall, primroses peeping through last year's dead leaves, and the missel thrush chanting a triumphant song in the yew tree that overhung the river.