She pushed back her hair. Her back ached. She felt very tired. She wanted to get back to Gran’papa. She could hear the thin scrape of his bow, and the fiddle’s stray uncertain notes as he tuned it. And then, suddenly, swiftly, joyously, it broke into the thrice-familiar tune— _Duncan Gray cam’ here to woo, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t, On blythe yule night when we were fou, Ha, ha, the wooing o’t._ She knew the words by heart, in the unintelligent fashion in which one knows the words of a song. But today they caught her ear, rang in her mind to the staccato of the fiddle, significant, suggestive. She had often wondered that it should be such a favourite tune with Gran’papa. Today she knew why. The music, like strong sunlight shining on a palimpsest, revealed beneath her mind’s modernity an older picture, faint and faded, of a shadowy, gallant young Gran’papa, quarrelling deliciously, a fiddle under his chin, with a slim girl who was called Anne (like _Anne_, the ‘elegant little woman’ in _Persuasion_) and sat at a pianoforte fingering out the accompaniment of an old song. She had a sweet voice and wore a dress of lavender print, but her smooth golden hair, as the impression faded again, was not golden at all, but red, a dull, beautiful red, matching exactly, as Laura was aware, with the beech leaves under which she sat as she bickered with Justin and made it up again, one spring, not sixty springs, ago. “Laura—you’ve shut your new skirt in the cupboard door! You never look.” “Sorry, Auntie.” “Well, as I was saying—I went down to the kitchen directly after breakfast and I said——” Gran’papa had been playing that day too. They could see him at his window, sawing vigorously, from where they sat.... Justin had made one of his comical remarks about it.... It seemed such ages ago, now—that spring.... It had been the last of the happy times.... It was soon after that, that things began to go wrong ... badly wrong.... Her thoughts roamed achingly over all the trivial, tragical wrong that she and Justin had done each other in the eternity that was not two years—not two years.... Gran’papa had sixty years to retrace. Her thoughts hovered over Gran’papa awhile and then back again to Justin. He was hard.... She didn’t think she could be so cruel to her worst enemy as Justin was to her.... Not a word.... Not a message.... And not to want a word!... Yet he was essentially a kindly man. It was a queer lack of imagination, she supposed.... She supposed he never thought of her at all.... It was just—over—for him.... It never occurred to him that she loved him still ... that she lived in hell.... But it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have cared if he could have understood, she told herself in sudden passionate defence of him. He couldn’t help it—it was the way he was made....