All the time she was supervising Elizabeth’s bed-making, fire-making, papering of drawers and turning-out of wardrobe, Patricia’s imagination played about Beatrice Cochrane. What on earth was she going to say to her; how explain? What would Beatrice do? Would she go to Francis at once? “Of course she will,” said Patricia. “I should. I wouldn’t wait a moment.” Neither then, nor for many days, did Patricia stop to consider the miraculousness of Beatrice’s war-time journey. The romance of the girl’s coming sufficed its hour. Yet the journey’s self was a romance: a romance of one girl’s persistence. There had been so many difficulties—her parents, the U. S. passport office, British Admiralty regulations; but Beatrice, smile in her eyes and fear at her heart, surmounted them one by one. The call came! and she must answer the call. Nothing else mattered. . . . Beatrice was thinking of these things as the taxi circled away from Henley Station; took the Harpsden road. So much lay behind her; so much she had yet to face. Of the past, nothing remained except the big trunk clumsily roped beside the driver, the suit-case at her feet. This England amazed her. She had expected to find at least some semblance to her own country; but, except for the language, everything seemed foreign—foreign and rather hostile. Also, nobody cared. Personalities didn’t exist. She was Beatrice Cochrane: she told herself this several times, as though she might forget it—and for all England cared she might have been Sally Smith. England had welcomed her gruffly in the pitch darkness of a choppy sea; pitch darkness out of which men from low decks had shouted to men on high. England had decanted her as an “alien”; fussed over her passport; shoved her into a train; told her to pull down the blinds in case of air-raids—and left her to her own devices. . . . The rest of her journey seemed to Beatrice’s fantasy a threading of her way through millions of soldiers. She had never seen so many soldiers. And nobody cared! Even the soldier at her side—the thin careworn man who looked so like Francis—didn’t seem particularly interested. After his first spasm of surprise, he had subsided into Englishness. Apparently, he took it for granted that she was going to stay with him, to marry his cousin. Obviously, he neither knew nor wanted to know what his wife had written to her, or why. “Jolly, isn’t it?” said Peter. “The country, I mean.” “Yes. Very—jolly.” She didn’t really think it “jolly”; she thought it rather disappointing. And they were going too fast to see much more than hedges and fields switching by. The fields looked very small; the roadside cottages they passed, very modern. “Is Sunflowers far from Henley?” she asked. “About another five miles.”