Fellow-members of the Sixth Form, and close friends, Eves and Templeton were spending the holidays together by force of circumstances. The latter was an orphan, and lived with his aunt. She, having embraced the temporary career of lecturer on food economy, had arranged that her nephew should undertake voluntary farm work with Giles Trenchard, whose wife was an old family servant of the Templetons’, and at whose farm, in the Dorset village we will call Polstead, Miss Templeton had visited more than once. Eves’s parents were in India, and the London lawyer in whose guardianship he was placed raised no objection when he proposed to spend the holidays with his friend. Five Oaks Farm was of no great size, and had been the property of the Trenchard family for generations. The present owner, a hale old yeoman whose features were framed for perennial cheerfulness, had latterly looked rather careworn. A year before the war an epidemic among his cattle had caused him heavy losses. Both his sons had joined the Army and were now fighting in France, a constant source of anxiety. Being short-handed, he was glad enough to avail himself of the voluntary help of the two strapping schoolboys of seventeen, and they had already, though only three days at the farm, firmly established themselves in the good graces of both host and hostess by their readiness to turn their hands to any kind of work. Templeton, however, had not come to this remote rural spot merely to work on the land. He had a serious belief that he was cut out for an inventor, the only ground for which was an astonishing fertility of ideas. At school he was always in hot water with the masters; he would rather construct an automatic hair-cutter than a Latin prose. The prospect of a six or seven weeks’ stay in the quiet village, with the sea within a mile, held promise for Templeton of many opportunities for working out his ideas. There were hours of leisure even on the farm, and Mr. Trenchard, whom he had at once taken into his confidence, was impressed by his earnestness and put an old barn at his disposal, pleasing himself with the hope that some great invention would spring to birth on Five Oaks Farm. Templeton took himself very seriously, and, as often happens, attracted to himself a very unlike character in Tom Eves, to whom life was one delightful comedy; even the flint-hearted lawyer was matter for jokes—except at end of term. While having a genuine admiration for Templeton, Eves’s humorous eye was quick to see the lighter side of his friend’s experiments, and he shared in them for the sake of the fun which he did not often trouble to disguise. That evening, when work was over, Eves and Templeton strolled down to the seashore together to discuss plans for the smoke machine.