“Why, Betty!” he exclaimed in a voice he tried to make quite ordinary, “I didn’t see you.  Have you been there the whole time?”—­the whole time being but half a minute at the longest.

And then he strode across the room, and, taking her two hands in his strong grasp, brought her forward, rather masterfully, to the window through which he had just come.

“You’re just the same,” he said, but there was a doubtful note in his voice, and then as she remained silent, though she smiled a little tremulously, he went on:—­

“Nine years have made an awful difference to me—­nine years and the war!  But Beechfield, from what I’ve been able to see of it, seems exactly the same—­not a twig, not a leaf, not a stone out of place!”

“We didn’t expect you for another hour at least,” said Betty, in her quiet, well-modulated voice.

She was wondering whether he remembered, as she now remembered with a kind of sickening vividness, the last time they had been together in this room—­for it was here, in the dining-room of Old Place, that they had spent their last miserable, heart-broken moment together, a moment when all the angry bitterness had been merged in wild, piteous tenderness, and heart-break...

“I had a bit of luck,” he answered cheerfully, “as I went out of the house where I had managed to get on to a telephone, there came a car down the road, and I asked the man who was driving it if he would give me a lift.  My luck held, for he was actually breaking his journey for half an hour here, at Beechfield!”

He was talking rather quickly now, as if at last aware of something painful, awkward, in the atmosphere.

“Others all out?” he asked.  “Perhaps you’ll show me my room, godson?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see Nanna?” asked Timmy officiously.  “She’s so looking forward to seeing you.  She wants to thank you for the big Shetland shawl she supposes you sent her last Christmas, and she has an idea that the little real silver teapot she got on her birthday came from you too.  It has on it ‘A Present for a Good Girl.’”

* * * * *

As Radmore followed Timmy up the once familiar staircase, he felt extraordinarily moved.

How strange the thought that while not only his own life, but the lives of all the people with whom he had been so intimately associated, had changed—­this old house had remained absolutely unaltered!  Nothing had been added—­as far as he could see—­and nothing taken away, and yet the human atmosphere was quite other than what it had been ten years ago.

Just now, in the moment of meeting, he had avoided asking Betty about George.  Betty’s twin had been away at the time of Radmore’s break with Old Place—­away in a sense which in our civilised days can only be brought about by one thing, an infectious illness.  At the time the agonising debate was going on at Beechfield, he had been in a fever hospital close on a month, and they were none of them to see him for three more weeks.  It had been at once a pain and a relief that he should not be there—­yet what good could a boy of nineteen have done?