All at once she heard Timmy’s clear treble voice:—­“Hullo!  There’s Betty.”

Radmore turned and said something Betty did not hear, and the child went off like an arrow from the bow.  Then Radmore, turning, came towards her quickly.  She had no clue to the strange look of pain and indecision on his face, and her heart began to beat, strangely.

When close to her:—­“Betty,” he said in a low voice, “I want to tell you that I didn’t know about George till last night.  How could you think I did?”

“I suppose one does think unjust things when one’s in great trouble,” she answered.

He felt hurt and angry and showed it.  “I should have thought you would all have known me well enough to know that I should have written at once—­at once.  Why, the whole world’s altered now that I know that George is no longer in it!  Perhaps that sounds foolish and exaggerated, as I never wrote to him.  But I think you’ll know what I mean, Betty?  It was all right, as long as I knew he was somewhere, happy.”

She said almost inaudibly:—­“I think that he is happy somewhere.  You know—­but no, you don’t know—­that George was a born soldier.  Those months after he joined up, and until he was killed, were, I do believe, by far the happiest of his life.  He always said they were.”

As he made no answer she went on:—­“I’ll show you some of his letters if you like, and father will show you the letters that were sent to us—­afterwards.”

By now they had left the garden proper, and were walking down an avenue which was known as the Long Walk.  It was here that they two, with George always as a welcome third, used to play “tip and run” and “hide and seek” with the then little children.

“Tell me something about the others,” he said abruptly.  “I’m moving in a world unrealised.”

She smiled up into his face.  Somehow that confession touched her, and brought them nearer to one another.

“Jack frightens me a bit, you know—­he’s so unlike George.  And then the girls?  Is it true what Timmy says—­that Rosamund wants to be an actress?”

There was a slight tone of censorious surprise in his voice, and Betty reddened.

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t be an actress if she wants to be!  Father’s making her wait till she’s twenty-one.”

“Let me see,” he said hesitatingly, “Dolly’s older than Jack, isn’t she?”

“Oh, no.  Dolly will only be twenty next Thursday.”

There came over her an overwhelming impulse to tell him something—­the sort of thing she could only have told George.

“You know that pretty old church at Oakford?”

He nodded.

“Well, Mr. Runsby is dead.  They’ve got a bachelor clergyman now, and Janet and I think that he’s becoming very fond of Dolly!  He’s away just now, or you would have already seen him.  He’s very often over here.”

“I should have thought—­” He hesitated in his turn, but already he was falling again into the way of saying exactly what he thought right out to Betty—­“that with you and Rosamund in the house, no one would look at Dolly!”