“I hope I shan’t be a dreadful nuisance to you, but I need rest and quiet and Miss Stebbings told me to come. And,” he smiled, “What she says generally goes.” “I see that you know her, sir,” said Mrs. Pettiland pleasantly. The luggage taken in, the cab dismissed she led him up to his room—a large bed-sitting room, looking over a wild garden and a wide expanse of rolling downs, with the faint white ribbon of high road circling in and out and round about them. His meals, she informed him, he could take in the parlour downstairs, without extra charge. “But I insist on paying my way,” he said. “Unless my staying here is profitable to you, I can’t remain. For the present at least, I can well afford it.” So a modest arrangement was made and Triona settled down in his new home. For some days he enjoyed the peace of Pendish. He had brought with him books, ordered from the hospital; books which would take him long to read; some of the interminable modern French novels; a complete Fielding and Smollett; _Paradise Lost_ and _The Faerie Queene_, neither of which he had as yet had time to go through. He spent hours in the sunny garden riotous with ingenous roses and delphinium and Canterbury bells and burning red-hot pokers as they call them in the West. Often he limped along the green lanes that wound between the fields up and down the downs. Becoming aware that he knew nothing of bird-life, he procured through the Fanstead bookshop popular works on British Birds, and sitting under a tree in a corner of a meadow would strive to identify them by their song and plumage and queer individual habits. He talked to the villagers. He talked to Mrs. Pettiland, who told him the tragic story of Myra and the man in the County Asylum. Of Myra’s doings all the year round, he found she knew little. She was with her lady whom she had served most of her life and had gone back with her to Medlow. Of the lady herself Myra never spoke. Mrs. Pettiland did not know whether the lady was married or not. That was Myra Stebbings’s way. She gave no information and no one dared ask her questions. “She never even told me, in her letter, who you were, sir,” she added. “I am just under her protection,” he smiled. “She took me up when I had no one to defend me.” “She’s a curious woman,” sighed Mrs. Pettiland. “With strange tastes in protégés.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Pettiland, I don’t quite know myself what I am. But doubtless sooner or later I’ll do something to astonish you.”