Patricia drove on in silence for a few minutes; then she said: “A woman with six hundred a year and two children to educate, can’t indulge in the luxury of unpaid war-work, Francis. And besides there are heaps of people meeting the leave-trains now: it’s become quite fashionable.” “Then why not take a paid job?” he suggested. “Because other women”—she thought of Miss Macpherson—“not only need the money more than I, but can do the work a great deal better.” By now they had cleared the heat-haze which brooded over inner London. Up and out from his cloud-veils, clambered the sun. The laburnum trees in the little suburban gardens were all a-bloom with yellow. It promised a glorious day. And promise fulfilled itself. They left the last tram-lines of Brentford astern; emerged mile by mile into the full splendour of England’s Maying. The home-counties unrolled beneath their questing wheels in vista upon vista of young green fields, of pink and white hedgerows, of orchards all alight with blossoms, of silver river-reaches, of pleasant homes where pigeons fluttered dazzingly to age-reddened roofs and the lilac bloomed palest amethyst over the glowing emerald of close-clipped lawns. But there was never a pleasant home among those which Patricia’s house-agents had persuaded her to visit! § 4 “Never mind, Pat. It’s been a topping drive,” said Francis consolingly. It was nearly four o’clock; and his cousin’s wife had just emerged from her last disappointment—a drainless waterless abomination of mouldy stone-work, with acres of unkempt gardens, ten miles from anywhere among the bleak hills beyond Ipsden. “Where now?” he went on. “Home, I suppose,” said Patricia, drawing her map out of its case. “We’d better make for Henley, I think.” She felt tired, out of patience. The house-agents were idiots: three of the places they recommended turned out to be glaring brick villas on the outskirts of Reading; at the fourth—a converted farmhouse near Bix—a long-haired foreigner had informed her, after gibbering for three quarters of an hour, that “vot he vanted vas to sell de place, not to let it”; the fifth, as far as they could ascertain from the inn at Nettlebed which gave them lunch, did not exist at all: to crown disaster she had wasted time, temper and petrol on this mid-Victorian mare’s-nest. “It’s done me all the good in the world,” went on Francis. “For two pins I’d let my flat—the Lord knows if I’ll ever be able to manage those stairs again—and come to live in the country myself.” “Apparently, you’d have to camp out in it,” said Patricia. . . . They climbed, sputteringly, up a rough road; dropped to an uninhabited valley; climbed again; left the bare lands behind. Now, their way led through burgeoning woods of beech and larch-trees past a quiet village-green, into woods again.