Patricia drove slowly. The scent and the silence of the woods summoned her, bidding her stay. She wanted to stop the car, to wander away all alone over that flower-strewn moss, down those long brown avenues, under that pale-green canopy of spring-time. All day long “country” before her eyes had been calling to “country” in her veins. A long clear call, dominant, heart-compelling. The country! She knew so little of it; the simplest names of its trees and its flowers were mysteries to her. Yet the trees and the flowers spoke to Patricia that afternoon; spoke to her of happiness. “Here, here, here and here only,” they seemed to say, “will you find that for which you are seeking. . . .” And then, sudden as a dream, she saw the house of her dreaming. They were still among the woods; and the house—she knew—stood beyond the woods, at the brow of the hill. Yet Patricia saw it, clear and perfect in the eye of her mind—a long low red-roofed home, with square windows opening out from walls of mellow brick-work, criss-crossed with weather-beaten oak, onto terraced garden. Below the garden pastures sloped to dark-green tree-clumps; and beyond the tree-clumps, shining silver in the gaps between, wound the river. . . . The road forked. Instinctively Patricia swung the car left-handed. Trees closed in above them; macadam under their wheels narrowed to a turf-edged track. “Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Francis. “Certain,” she answered; and drove on, between the serried tree-trunks,—beech and larch and alder, slim pillars of brown, gray-green and silver about their path. “Look,” said Patricia, “the woods end.” She spoke very quietly, pointing to the door of blue which widened as they climbed to it, letting them out from the trees. The car dropped a hundred yards between the warm coral-and-ivory of hawthorn hedgerows; seemed to stop of its own accord at a quaint red-walled brown-gabled house whose lower windows were almost level with the Crossley’s wheels. “This isn’t the place,” thought Patricia. Yet somehow the peaked and ivied gable with its one leaded window looked familiar—familiar as the road they had climbed through the woods. Just under the window, half-hidden by the ivy, was an old sign-board: “T. Tebbits. Builder & Contractor,” read Patricia. But Francis, sharper-eyed, had seen the other sign which peered over the garden-hedge—a plain square of oak, newly painted with the words:— “TWO GOOD HOUSES TO LET.” “I say, Pat,” he said, pointing to it, “why not try here? . . .” There came out of the house a hatless man with weather-beaten face, clean-shaven except for the fringe of hair under his chin, bushy of eyebrows, dressed collarless in a rusty black cardigan jacket and corduroy-trousers. He had hard blue eyes, hairy ears, thin lips; might have been any age from fifty-five to eighty. “Might you be wanting anything?” he asked. “Are you Mr. Tebbits?” Patricia smiled down at him. “That’s my name, missis.”