It was the Duchess of X.’s Hospital at a certain plage on the coast.  I had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons.  As we neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand, fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass.  Here clumps of broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave of the sky.  The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an etching.

I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the Duchess in the Matron’s room.  She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse.  It was here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara.  She was nursing a doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the Duchess why she did not wear her “cowonet.”

“This is Barbara—­our little Egyptian,” said the matron.

Barbara repudiated the description hotly.

“She was born in Egypt,” explained the matron.

“Ah,” I said, “that wasn’t your fault, Barbara, was it?  But it was Egypt’s good fortune.”

Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and proceeded to explain with great seriousness:  “You see, Mummy was travelling, and she comed to Egypt.  She didn’t know I was going to happen,” she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of thoughtlessness.

“And your birthday, Barbara?”

Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March—­only six days apart.  This put us at once on a footing of intimacy—­we must have been born under the same star.  Barbara proceeded to inform me that she rather liked birthdays—­except the one which happened in Egypt.  I had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, assigning to her all my own birthdays as an estate pour autre vie, with all profits a prendre and presents arising therefrom, for I am thirty-eight and have no further use for them.

“I am afraid there are more than six years between us, Barbara,” I said pensively.

Barbara regarded me closely with large round eyes.

“About ten, I fink.  I’m seven, you know.”

“How nice of you to say that, Barbara.  Then I’m only seventeen.”

Barbara regarded me still more closely.

“A little more, p’waps—­ten monfs.”

“Thank you, Barbara.  I’ll remind you of that some day.”  After all, ten years is no obstacle to the course of true love.  “But what is the matter with the doll?” Despite a rosy flush the doll has a field-dressing round her auburn locks, and one leg is immensely stout owing to a tourniquet.