All I had known of her had been so shy and gentle that it was a good deal of a surprise to me to learn years later that, as a girl, she had been considered rather dashing. She had been called “The gay Miss Fannie Evrard” and her marriage with my father had begun with an elopement. Her father was Sir Charles Evrard, brother-in-law to the Earl of Lovegrove; my father’s folk were ship-chandlers in Ransby, outfitting vessels for the Baltic trade. The inequality of the match, as far as social position was concerned, made life in Ransby impossible. My father was only a reporter on the local paper at the time of his escapade; the Evrards lived at Woadley Hall and were reckoned among the big people in the county. It must have been to this house that my mother took me on that dusty summer’s day. After his marriage my father settled down in London, gaining his living as a free-lance journalist. I believe he was very poor at the start. He did not re-visit Ransby until years later. Pride prevented. My mother returned as often as finances would allow, in the vain hope of a reconciliation with her family. On these occasions she would stay at the ship-chandler’s, and was an object of curiosity and commiseration among the neighbors. Most of the facts which lie outside my own recollection were communicated to me by my grandmother. She never got over her amazement at her son’s audacity. It was without parallel in her experience until I attempted to repeat his performance with an entirely individual variation. She never tired of rehearsing the details; it was noticeable that she always referred to my mother as “Miss Fannie.” “Often and often,” she would say, “have I seen Miss Fannie come a-prancin’ down the High Street with her groom a-followin’. She was always mounted on a gray horse, with a touch of red about her. Sometimes it was a red feather in her hat and sometimes a scarlet cloak. When Sir Charles rode beside her you could see the pride in his eye. She was his only child.” After my small sister failed to arrive someone must have told me that my mother had gone to find her. I would sit for hours at the window, watching for her homecoming. CHAPTER II--THE MAGIC CARPET I was born in South London on a crowded street lying off the Old Kent Road. It was here that my mother died. When I was about six, a false-dawn came in my father’s prospects, on the promise of which he moved northward to the suburb of Stoke Newington.