There was so little that he knew about her, only what Nanny could tell. He never saw anyone who had known her, and Mamma was always trying, ever since she had told him by letter how he was not her son, to put herself in Mummy’s place. How silly to go on calling her by that name, she had been dead nearly nineteen years now; it was so sentimental. But the word was fresh, it clung about the gloves. They had been cold so long, those gloves. From what Nanny said she had been so happy in the house, going about lightly from place to place. One really did not know anything about her; Nanny had only seen her once and her stories were only what the other servants had told her. They would have been seated round in the kitchen waiting for the funeral, and they would have talked and talked, weeping in turns, and Nanny had learnt what she knew in that way. There were none of them left; he had never known them, for Mamma had sent them all away when she had married Father and gone to India. But apparently she had whistled most beautifully; Nanny’s descriptions never went beyond “beautiful,” and he could hear her going about whistling gently till the house was full of shadows. She must have linked everything up with it. And then apparently she had played the piano quite beautifully. Such ages ago he had been at Noat, only a few months, but still--the misery of those days, their dreariness, and with their strange exaltations now and then. So much depended on whether people were nice to you or not. And the Art Society with the marionette shows. There had been no one at J. W. P.’s to mind about such things. It was getting cold out here. Heat drew one out, one was with a companion. Just as their glow against each other would draw them out--June and he. Mummy would have helped, then and now. She would have had such a gentle understanding, so that when he came back from Noat for the holidays they would have sat by the fire and talked it out. What evenings, and what quiet grey days with the colours in the fields washed into luminous clarity, and the calm in the trees. She would have understood all that with her tender whistling, and they would have walked, perhaps, silently happy together to the top of Swan’s Wood. Or down to the river with its surprises and the quietly-flowing water. For she would have seen things by the light of intuitions, often wrong, but no less enchanting, and by discovering things in other people she would have shown herself. How silly people were to think a grey day sad; it was really so full of happiness, while the sun only made things reflect the sun, and so not be themselves. Dew came in the morning with the light sky above and sent pearl colours over the fields, and so made him think of her, who was so like that herself.