Impossible to pretend that there was anything there that she could want! He collected the most hopeful of them and laid them out on the bed—a pocket-knife, three books, a photograph frame (rubbed at the edges), a watch chain that had seemed at first to be silver but now most certainly wasn’t, a leather pocket-book, a red blotting pad—not a very brilliant collection. He did not now dare to look at the book at all. He put it away in the bottom of the chest of drawers. He thought that perhaps if he did not see it nor take it out of its brown paper until the actual day that it would be easier to give. But he had imagination as, in later years, he was to find to his cost, and the book grew and grew in his mind, the pictures flaming like suns, the spirit of the book smiling at him, saying to him with confidential friendship: “We belong to one another, you and I. No one shall part us.” Then Helen said to him: “What are you going to give Mary on her birthday?” “Why?” he asked suspiciously. “I only wanted to know. I’ve got mine. Everyone knows you went into St. Mary’s and bought something. Mary herself knows.” That was the worst of being part of a family. Everyone knew everything! “Perhaps it wasn’t for Mary,” he said. Helen sniffed. “Of course, if you don’t want to tell me,” she said, “I don’t care to know.” Then he discovered the little glass bottle with the silver stopper. It had been given him two years ago on his birthday by a distant cousin who happened to be staying with them at the time. What anybody wanted to give a _boy_ a glass bottle with a stopper for Jeremy couldn’t conceive. Mary had always liked it, had picked it up and looked at it with longing. Of course she knew that it had been his for two years. He looked at it, and even as Adam, years ago, with the apple, he fell. III Mary’s birthday came, and with it a day of burning, glowing colour. The first early autumn mists were hanging like veils of thinly-sheeted bronze before the grass wet with heavy dew, the sky of azure, the sea crystal pale. In the mist the rectory was a giant box of pearl. The air smelt of distant fires.