This is the land of digression into which memories of Overton lead one. My only excuse is that part of the story, and indeed its emotional climax belongs to Overton, to that smoothly ordered country house with its huge sentinel elms and its peculiar atmosphere of leisure and peace. No doubt Mrs. Payne was aware of this when she kissed her son. From the lawn where we were sitting she could see the yew-parlour and the cypress hedge in the shadow of which she had stood on the tremendous evening about which she had been telling me. We walked back to the terrace, and on the way she gave me a shy smile, half triumph, half apology. She never mentioned the episode again and though the story fermented in my brain, maturing, as I hoped, like a choice vintage, and has emerged from time to time when my mind has been free from other work, I have kept my promise and have neither repeated it nor written it till this day. Now, at last, I find myself absolved. Arthur Payne, I believe, is happily married to the fresh young person with whom he was playing tennis. Soon after their marriage they emigrated to the backs of Canada, or was it New Zealand: somewhere at any rate beyond the reach of colonial editions. Overton is now in the possession of a Midland soap-boiler. Mrs. Payne, having fulfilled her main function in life and fearing English winters, has retired to a small villa at Mustapha Superieur, near Algiers, where, though she live for ever she is not likely to read this book. And Gabrielle, the beautiful Gabrielle, is dead. The news came as a shock to me. For the moment I, who had never even set eyes on her, suffered the pain of an almost personal bereavement; I was moved, as poets are moved by the vanishing of something beautiful from the earth. Was she then so beautiful? I don't know. But I like to persuade myself that she was a fiery, elemental creature of a rare and pathetic brilliance ... for the sake of her story, no doubt. But, for the moment, when old Colonel Hoylake, who always began his _Times_ by quotations from the obituary column--he had survived the age when births or marriages are interesting--suddenly brought out the word Hewish: Gabrielle Hewish, I was startled out of the state of pleasant lethargy into which a day's fishing on the Dulas and the Matthews' beer had plunged me, and became suddenly wide awake. I had the feeling that some bright thing had fallen: a kingfisher, a dragonfly. "Hewish," he murmured again. "Gabrielle Hewish ... Well, well." "You know the family?" "Yes, I knew her father, poor feller," he said.