The workshop was nicer than the old apple-tree house, because there were always lots of things to do in it for Nicky.

“Nicky,” she said suddenly, “do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well—­” Nicky caught his bar as it fell from the lathe and examined it critically.

“You remember when I was afraid of ghosts, and you used to come and sit with me till I went to sleep?”

“Rather.”

“Well—­there are ghosts.  I saw one last night.  It came into the room just after I got into bed.”

“You can see them,” Nicky said.  “Ferdie’s seen heaps.  It runs in his family.  He told me.”

“He never told me.”

“Rather not.  He was afraid you’d be frightened.”

“Well, I wasn’t frightened.  Not the least little bit.”

“I shall tell him that.  He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw them too.”

“Me?  But Nicky—­it was Ferdie I saw.  He stood by the door and looked at me.  Like he does, you know.”

The next morning Frances had a letter of two lines from Veronica’s mother: 

     “Ferdie died last evening at half past eight.

     “He wants you to keep Ronny.

          “VERA.”

It was not till years later that Veronica knew that “He wanted most awfully to know whether you saw them too” meant “He wanted most awfully to know whether you really were his daughter.”

PART II

THE VORTEX

XI

Three years passed.  It was the autumn of nineteen-ten.  Anthony’s house was empty for the time being of all its children except Dorothea.

Michael was in the beginning of his last year at Cambridge.  Nicholas was in his second year.  He had taken up mathematics and theoretical mechanics.  In the long vacation, when the others went into the country, he stayed behind to work in the engineering sheds of the Morss Motor Company.  John was at Cheltenham.  Veronica was in Dresden.

Dorothea had left Newnham a year ago, having taken a first-class in Economics.

As Anthony came home early one evening in October, he found a group of six strange women in the lane, waiting outside his garden door in attitudes of conspiracy.

Four of them, older women, stood together in a close ring.  The two others, young girls, hung about near, but a little apart from the ring, as if they desired not to identify themselves with any state of mind outside their own.  By their low sibilant voices, the daring sidelong sortie of their bright eyes, their gestures, furtive and irrepressible, you gathered that there was unanimity on one point.  All six considered themselves to have been discovered.

At Anthony’s approach they moved away, with slow, casual steps, passed through the posts at the bottom of the lane and plunged down the steep path, as if under the impression that the nature of the ground covered their retreat.  They bobbed up again, one after the other, when the lane was clear.