“Hello kiddie!” said Jack. “Come here and make a footstool of your uncle, and see what your Aunt Vicky’s been thinking of. Come on then, amble up this road.” He took her on his knee, and fished out of his pocket a fine sort of hat-band that Victoria had contrived with ribbon and artificial flowers and wooden beads. Gladys sat for a moment or two shyly on her uncle’s knee, and he held her there as if she were a big pillow he was scarcely conscious of holding. Her stepfather sat exactly as if the child did not exist, or were not present. It was neutrality brought to a remarkable pitch. Only Somers seemed actually aware that the child was a little human being--and to him she seemed so absent that he didn’t know what to make of her. Rose came out bringing beer and sausage rolls, and the girl vanished away again, seemed to evaporate. Somers felt uncomfortable, and wondered what he had been brought for. “You know Cornwall, do you?” said William James, the Cornish singsong still evident in his Australian speech. He looked with his light-grey, inscrutable eyes at Somers. “I lived for a time near Padstow,” said Somers. “Padstow! Ay, I’ve been to Padstow,” said William James. And they talked for a while of the bleak, lonely northern coast of Cornwall, the black huge cliffs with the gulls flying away below, and the sea boiling, and the wind blowing in huge volleys: and the black Cornish nights, with nothing but the violent weather outside. “Oh, I remember it, I remember it,” said William James. “Though I was a half-starved youngster on a bit of a farm out there, you know, for everlasting chasing half a dozen heifers from the cliffs, where the beggars wanted to fall over and kill themselves, and hunting for a dozen sheep among the gorse-bushes, and wading up to my knees in mud most part of the year, and then in summer, in the dry times, having to haul water for a mile over the rocks in a wagon, because the well had run dry. And at the end of it my father gave me one new suit in two years, and sixpence a week. Ay, that was a life for you. I suppose if I was there still he’d be giving me my keep and five shillin’ a week--if he could open his heart as wide as two half-crowns, which I’m doubting very much.” “You have money out here, at least,” said Somers. “But there was a great fascination for me, in Cornwall.” “Fascination! And where do you find the fascination? In a little Wesleyan chapel of a Sunday night, and a girl with her father waiting for her with a strap if she’s not in by nine o’clock? Fascination, did you say?” “It had a great fascination for me--magic--a magic in the atmosphere.” “All the fairy tales they’ll tell you?” said William James, looking at the other man with a smile of slow ridicule. “Why ye didn’t go and believe them, did ye?” “More or less. I could more easily have believed them there than anywhere else I’ve been.”