Everything was soon arranged, for Mr. Trotman was a man of few words.  Radmore gave his own name and the address of Old Place, and then, just before leaving the house, he put down a L5 note on the table.

The sturdy, grizzled old man took up the note and held it out to his new client.  “I’d rather not take this, sir, if you don’t mind,” he said a little gruffly.  “We’ll send you in a proper bill in due course.  You needn’t be afraid.  The cat shall have every care, and of course, if things should go wrong—­you know what I mean—­I’ll at once give you a telephone call.  But, as far as I can tell, you’re right, and it was just fear for her young made her behave so.”  He turned to his wife.  “Now then, mother, you just get back to bed!  I’ll see to these gentlemen, and to poor pussy.”

They shook hands with Mrs. Trotman, and then the famous vet took them down the trellised path and stood in the doorway till they got into the car.

“I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Trotman,” Radmore called out heartily.  “I’d like to come over here one day, and go over your place.”

As they raced up towards the Downs, Radmore suddenly turned to Timmy:  “The more time goes on, the more it’s borne in on me that there’s nothing like the old people of the old country.”  And as the boy, surprised, said nothing for once, he went on, “I hope that the stock won’t ever give out.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Well, take those two people, that man and woman.  We get them out of their warm, comfortable bed in the middle of the night, they knowing nothing about us, except that we bring a cat which may be mad; and yet they take it all in the day’s work; they’re civil, kindly, obliging—­and the man won’t take money he hasn’t earned!  I call that splendid, Timmy.  You might almost go the world over before you’d find a couple like that—­anywhere but in England.”

* * * * *

They drove on and on, and then all at once, Radmore, glancing down to his left, saw that Timmy had fallen asleep.  Now Timmy, asleep, looked like an angelic cherub, and so very different from his usual alert, inquisitive, little awake self.  And there welled up in Radmore’s heart the strangest feeling of tenderness—­not only for Timmy but for the whole of the Tosswill family—­not only for the Tosswill family, but for the whole of this sturdy, quiet, apparently unemotional world of England to which he had come back.

The human mind and brain work in mysterious ways.  Radmore will never know, to the day of his death, the effect that this curious night drive had on the whole of his future life.  He was not a man to quote poetry, even to himself, but to-night there came into his mind some words he had heard muttered by a corporal in Gallipoli: 

  “What do they know of England
   Who only England know?”

When he had left his homeland, now nearly ten years ago, he had been in a bitter mood.  It had seemed to him that his own country was rejecting him with scorn.  But now his heart swelled proudly at the thought of the old country—­of all that she had endured since then.  He had thought England altered and very much for the worse, when he was in London on his two brief “leaves” during the War, but now he knew how unchanged his country was—­in the things that really matter....