A few days afterwards Lady Davidstow arrived back from England, and on the first evening of her return, after dusk had fallen, Archie was sitting on the floor against her knee in front of the one open fire-place in the house, where pine-logs fizzed and smouldered and burst into flame, and glowed into a core of heat. Sometimes, for that pleasant hour before bed-time, she read to him, but to-night there had been no reading, for she had been telling him of the week she had passed at home. They had moved up to London while she was there, and London was miry and foggy and cold. "Altogether disgusting, dear," she said. "You don't want to go there, do you?" "Not an atom," said Archie firmly. "I like this place better than any I have ever been in." "I'm so glad, Archie. I was afraid you would dislike it after the frost went." Archie was staring dreamily at the fire, and suddenly he knew that Martin was here, and he looked quickly round wondering if, by any new and lovely miracle, he should see the boy whose face was now familiar to him from the photograph. But there was nothing visible; only the firelight leaped on the wooden walls. "What is it, Archie?" asked his mother. Suddenly Archie felt that he could preserve his secret no longer. As on the day in church when he wanted his mother to share with him the pleasure of that glorious comedian, the man with the wagging beard, so now he wanted her to share with him the secret joy of Martin's presence. "Mummy, I want to tell you about Martin," he said. "You know whom I mean: Martin, my brother." "Archie, who has been telling you about Martin?" she asked. Archie laughed. "Why, Martin, of course. It's too lovely. Once he called me out loud, and he writes for me. He's written for me three times, once at home and twice here. I knew he was particularly here, the moment we got here. And last time he told me about what he had hidden under the pine-tree, and I found it. Don't you want to see it? I hid it away in the paper in my portmanteau. Oh, and what is a test? He said it was a test." "A test? A test is a proof." Archie laughed again. "That makes sense," he said. "Now shall I show you the test? I kept it all together with what he wrote to me about it first." He came back in a moment with his precious possession. "Look, that's what he wrote on the paper of my letter to Miss Bampton," he said. "He said there was a circle cut on the pine-tree, and I found it, and I dug as he told me, and found this. Look! Isn't it lovely, and that's Martin's photograph, isn't it?"