‘I am Ivor Restormel,’ said the enemy. ‘I was born about twelve hours after your fire at Brakelond. So you cannot wonder that I carry the traces of it in my life, as it were. And so, you see, I was right: you are in some way responsible for my dread of fire. Wasn’t it a careless servant who set light to the old wooden wing of Brakelond? Well, if it had not been for that careless servant, I should not have had any dread or shrinking from fire.’ ‘Really,’ said Gundred, hardly heeding him, ‘this is wonderfully interesting. Then you are poor dear Mary Restormel’s son? I used to know your mother so well in the days before you were born. And then the place was sold, of course, to these Hoope-Arkwrights, and I never saw much of poor dear Mary again. But how very strange to meet you here--yes?’ Gundred was always faithful to her traditions and her memories. The stranger came immediately into the hallowed circle of Gundred’s own class, and no longer suffered the condemnation of the outsider. In her heart of hearts, Gundred, perhaps, would never surmount her first mysterious sense of repulsion; but anger, disdain, reproof must at once be very much modified in the case of a person who now stood revealed as no longer an unhallowed, nameless member of the Hoope-Arkwright world, but as poor dear Mary Restormel’s son, with the right divine to Gundred’s sympathetic loyalty. Her strong and dutiful _esprit de corps_ even prompted her to something resembling an apology. ‘Of course I had no notion who you were,’ she said. ‘What you tell me is a perfect explanation. How very dreadful for you, though! But I quite understand your feeling--a simple instinct. Yet, of course, until one knew who you were, it did seem a little strange--yes?’ Ivor Restormel had ceased to take much interest in the question. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘one is always meeting odd things in life. I only wish I had escaped that particular oddity. However, I do all I can to get the better of it, and in a way I have succeeded. I can face flame more than I could, though it still gives me the same supernatural creepy feeling. What I have suffered, too, in seeing women smoke is more than I can express.’ ‘Not at all a nice habit, I think,’ replied Gundred. ‘Somehow, it never seems appropriate or ladylike--no?’ ‘Oh, it is not _that_ I mind, but the possibilities are so horrible. A man wears rough tweeds and things. No spark could settle on them. But think of the innumerable frills and fluffs and films that a woman has floating all round her nowadays. A chance spark, and the dropping of a red cigarette-end, and--ah! it doesn’t bear thinking of.’