"An' how _do_ they deal with them, the poor little ducks?" enquired Pansy, who had just come in from the garden looking more than usually gay and lovely and fantastic in a pink sunbonnet and the kind of dress affected by milkmaids in a chorus. Kitty looked at her thoughtfully. "I should hardly like to tell you. You mightn't like it. Besides, it's a private department, like the secret room in jam factories where they make the pips. No, Pansy love, I can't possibly tell you.... But they _do_ deal with them, quite effectively." Pansy tossed her Cheeper up and down to a gentle music-hall ditty. "Who'll buy babies-- Babies better dead? Here's every mental category, From C3 down to Z...." It was a taking song as she crooned it on the stage, nursing an infant on each arm, and with a baby-chorus crying behind her. 4 After breakfast on Sunday morning Kitty remarked that she was going by train to Beaconsfield, where she had arranged to meet Chester for a walk through Burnham Beeches. She as a rule made no secret of her walks with Chester, only occasionally, when self-consciousness took her. After all, why should she? One went walks with all sorts of people, with any man or woman who liked walking and talking and whom one liked as a companion; it implied nothing. Kitty at times, with all it meant in this instance burning and alive in her consciousness, had to pause to tell herself how little it did imply to others, how she might mention it freely and casually, without fear. Yet might she? The intimacy of the Minister of a Department with one of his clerks _was_, no doubt, out of the ordinary, not quite like other intimacies; perhaps it did seem odd, and imply things. Perhaps Kitty might have thought so herself, in another case. She announced her plan this morning with an extra note of casualness in her voice. Pansy said, "Oh, you two. You'll be goin' baby-huntin' in the ditches, I should think, instead of pickin' primroses. I should say you jolly well ought, and you'd better take the Cheeper's pram with you." Anthony said, "Exactly what I always try _not_ to do, going out on Sundays with the people from my shop. It spoils the Sabbath rest, the Pisgah's mountain touch. You'd much better come out with Cyril and Pansy and me." "I," said Cyril, in his detached manner, "shall be going to Mass." 5 They walked up through the depraved mushroom growth round Beaconsfield station to the old town that city set on a hill, lying wide and spacious, with its four Ends stretched out like a cross. Old Beaconsfield is an enchanted city; as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it is to-day, an ancient country town, full of brick walls and old houses, and courtyards and coaching inns, and dignity and romance and great elms. But they left it behind them, and took the lane that runs to Hedgerley, with the cold April wind in their faces.