To their great good fortune, these tales and talks were a part of her simple, individual plan of education.  An even greater good fortune—­in their eyes—­was her instinctive response to the seasons.  She shared to the full their clear conviction that schoolroom lessons and a radiant day of summer were a glaring misfit; and she trimmed her sails, or rather her time-table, accordingly.

“Sentimental folly and thoroughly demoralising,” was the verdict of Aunt Jane, overheard by Roy, who was not supposed to understand.  “They will grow up without an inch of moral backbone.  And you can’t say I didn’t warn you.  Lady Despard’s a crank, of course; but Nevil is a fool to allow it.  Goodness knows he was bad enough, though he was reared on the good old lines.  And you are not giving his son a chance.  The sooner the boy’s packed off to school the better.  I shall tell him so.”

And his mother had answered with her dignified unruffled sweetness—­that made her so beautifully different from ordinary people, who got red and excited and made foolish faces:  “He will not agree.  He shares my believing that children are in love with life.  It is their first love.  Pity to crush it too soon; putting their minds in tight boxes with no chink for Nature to creep in.  If they first find knowledge by their young life-love, afterwards, they will perhaps give up their life-love to gain it.”

Roy could not follow all that; but the music of the words, matched with the music of his mother’s voice, convinced him that her victory over horrid interfering Aunt Jane was complete.  And it was comforting to know that his father agreed about not putting their minds in tight boxes.  For Aunt Jane’s drastic prescription alarmed him.  Of course school would have to come some day; but his was not the temperament that hankers for it at an early age.  As to a moral backbone—­whatever sort of an affliction that might be—­if it meant growing up ugly and ‘disagreeable,’ like Aunt Jane or the Aunt Jane cousins, he fervently hoped he would never have one—­or Tara either....

But on this particular morning he feared no manner of bogey—­not even school or a moral backbone—­because the bluebells were alight under his beeches—­hundreds and hundreds of them—­and ‘really truly’ summer had come back at last!

Roy knew it the moment he sprang out of bed and stood barefoot on the warm patch of carpet near the window, stretching his slim shapely body, instinctively responsive to the sun’s caress.  No less instinctive was his profound conviction that nothing possibly could go wrong on a day like this.

In the first place it meant lessons under their favourite tree.  In the second, it was history and poetry day; and Roy’s delight in both made them hardly seem lessons at all.  He thought it very clever of his mother, having them together.  The depth of her wisdom he did not yet discern.  She allowed them within reason, to choose their own poems:  and Roy, exploring her bookcase, had lighted on Shelley’s ’Cloud’—­the musical flow of words, the more entrancing because only half understood.  He had straightway learnt the first three verses for a surprise.  He crooned them now, his head flung back a little, his gaze intent on a gossamer film that floated just above the pine tops—­’still as a brooding dove.’...