"Serena, what on earth will Father make of Jack. Jack is so dreadfully well-informed. I hardly dare open my mouth in his presence. Jack says he is looking forward to meeting his grandfather, and realising what he calls his feudal point of view." "Jack only means by that expounding to his grandfather his own point of view. I don't think your Father will take to him, but he will love Catherine; she is so like your Mother, and _she_ never wants to realise any point of view." * * * * * Jack arrived first with his servant and a large hamper of fish. The air lorry followed with the tents and the fishing tackle and the mastiffs. "But where is Catherine," asked Michael, as Jack came in pulling off his leather helmet and goggles. Jack grinned and said with a spice of malice: "Catherine fell into the sea." "She didn't!" said Serena. "That's the second time. How tiresome. She always has a cold on her chest if she gets wet." "Where did you leave her?" asked Michael. "In mid-Atlantic. We kept to the highway. It was her own fault. I warned her not to loop the loop with that old barge of hers, but she would try and do it. She was fastened in all right. I saw to that, but her stuff was loose, and you should have seen all her fish and kettles and the electric cooker shooting out one after another into the deep. It was in trying to grab something that she lost control, and fell, barge and all after her crockery into the sea. I circled round--that is why I am a quarter-of-an-hour late--till I sighted one of the patrol toddling up, old Granny Queen Elizabeth it was. Catherine wirelessed to me that she was all right, and would start again as soon as she was dry and had had a cigarette, so I came on." Catherine arrived an hour later, full of apologies about the lost crockery, and the electric cooker, and was at once put into a hot bath by her mother and sent to bed. * * * * * After the arrival of his grandchildren John spent more and more of his time in the clearing in the wood. He shrank instinctively from the sense of movement and life in the house, and his sole prop, Serena, seemed unable to be so constantly with him as before. He was never tired of gazing at the gracious lines of the landscape. Perhaps he loved that particular place because he had sat there with his wife on their last afternoon together, perhaps also because, in a world where all seemed changed, that alone, save for the cloud on the horizon, was unchanged. He was at home there.