She was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the voice of Mlle. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through the open French window—a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work with the crop of questions he always thought of too late. ‘A beginning, at any rate!’ he said to himself, thinking of all the things he was going to write for them. ‘Only I wish we were all in camp out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you mayn’t cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted....’ The thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled; laughing and sighing as he went. ‘My wig!’ he thought aloud, ‘but it’s really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things _I_ could never have dreamed of—alone!’ ‘Paul, dear, what _are_ you thinking about, here all by yourself—and without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud like this they will think—! Well, I hardly know quite what they _will_ think!’ ‘Something Blake said—to be honest,’ he laughed, turning to his sister who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow upon her face. ‘_Maurice_ Blake!’ she exclaimed. ‘Joan’s cousin with the big farm on the Downs? But you don’t know him!’ ‘Not that Blake,’ he laughed again; ‘and Joan, if you mean Joan Nicholson, Dick’s niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in London, I have never seen in my life.’ ‘Then it’s a book you mean—one of those books you are always poring over in the library,’ she murmured half reproachfully. ‘One of Dick’s books, yes,’ he replied gently, linking his arm through hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. ‘One of my “treasures,”’ he added slyly, ‘that you once shamelessly imagined to be in petticoats.’ She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet their differences never took on the slightest ‘edge.’ A genuine affection smoothed all their little talks. ‘You do read such funny old books, Paul,’ she observed, as though somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern. ‘Don’t you ever try books of the day—novels, for instance?’ She had one under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.