Other children, as they grew up, had a succession of delicious summers to look back upon, and could make comparisons, and wonder which was happiest; but Vera had only one season of surpassing joy to remember. She remembered it now, and contrived to draw a thick curtain over all other memories. Aunt Mildred was full of compliments. "This air evidently suits you, child," she said, when her niece had been with her a week. "You look ten years younger than when I saw you last in London." * * * * * These two who had begun to be tired of each other were lovers again--and even memory was kind--even memory, the slow torture of thoughtful minds. They recalled the joys of fifteen years ago; and the joys of to-day were almost the same. Instead of the thirteen two barb there were half a dozen hunters--thoroughbreds of fine quality, the disappointments of Claude's racing stud--instead of the dinghy there was Okehampton's forty-ton cutter, a rakish craft that had begun life at Cowes, another disappointment. There was the sea, and there was the moorland, and there were the patches of wood on the skirts of the park, that had seemed boundless forests to Vera in her twelfth year. Her twelfth year? She remembered Claude's affected contempt for her youth. "Why, you are only a dozen--and not a round dozen, only eleven and a half. No wonder your cousins in the school-room look down upon you. If there were still a nursery, you would be there, sitting on a high chair at tea, your cheeks smeared with jam, and a bib tied under your chin." She remembered all his foolish speeches now, and what serious insults they had seemed to her, or to the child that she had once been--that innocent child whose identity with herself was so hard to believe. They were happy again, they were lovers again. Here they could say to each other, "Do you remember?" Here memory was a gentle nymph, and not an avenging fury. For Vera, who had hunted with her husband every year since their marriage, a season at Grantham, a season in the Shires, and two winters in the Campagna, it might seem a small thing to ride with Claude and a handful of squireens and farmers rattling up the cubs in the woods, yet she found it pleasant to rise before the dawn, and creep through the silent house and out into the crisp morning air, and to spring on to a horse that seemed to skim the ground in an ecstasy of motion. Flying could hardly be better than to sit on this light, leaping creature, and see the dewy wood rush by, and the startled rabbits flash across the path; or to be lifted into the air as the thoroughbred stood on end at the whirr and rush of a pheasant.