Thus was there one reason the less for boys who were growing up, ceasing to tear the knees of their trousers and so on, to frequent Abercorran House. I lingered on, but the death of one there had set me painfully free. After a time I used to go chiefly to honour an old custom, which proved an inadequate motive. Then year after year, of course, it was easier to put off revisiting, and one day when I went, only Ann was left. She had her kitchen and her own room; the rest of the house had no visible inhabitants. Yet Ann would not have it that it was sad. “It does a house good,” she said, “to have all those Morgans in it. Now they have gone back again to Abercorran in the county of Caermarthen, and I am sure they are all happy but the mistress, and she was incurable; that was all; and there was an end of it at last.” Ann herself was staying on as caretaker till Abercorran House was let or sold. CHAPTER II THE MORGANS OF ABERCORRAN HOUSE In spite of old Ann and her kitchen fire I did not stay long in the house that day. The removal which had left it deserted and silent had made it also a little sordid: the family’s ways, for example, had not agreed with the wall-paper, and they had been no enemies to spiders. So I went out into the yard. There were no dogs; all had gone with the Morgans to Abercorran. The only life was a single homeless blue pigeon flying about in search of the home which had been sold. Ann said that almost every one of the birds had returned in this way, and she called the traveller into the kitchen to wait until its purchaser came in search of it. She told me who he was, and much more about the sale, which I forgot or never heard, because the sun shone very warmly into the yard just then, and I could not help seeing them all again, Jack and Roland, Lewis and Harry, and Jessie, and Philip, too, as he was at sixteen, and the dogs,--Ladas the greyhound, Bully the bull-terrier, Granfer the dachshund, Spot the fox-terrier, and pigeons here and there among them, and some perched on roof and chimneys, some flying so high that they were no bigger than larks--and Mr Morgan at the top of the steps looking at it all and seeing that it was good. Often had I come upon them in this pattern, not knowing at first whether to join this group or that, the busy or the idle.