He replied to Stanley: 

“Dear Stanley: 

“Delighted; if I may bring my two youngsters.  We’ll arrive to-morrow at four-fifty.

“Yours affectionately,

“Felix.”

Travelling with Nedda was always jolly; one could watch her eyes noting, inquiring, and when occasion served, have one’s little finger hooked in and squeezed.  Travelling with Alan was convenient, the young man having a way with railways which Felix himself had long despaired of acquiring.  Neither of the children had ever been at Becket, and though Alan was seldom curious, and Nedda too curious about everything to be specially so about this, yet Felix experienced in their company the sensations of a new adventure.

Arrived at Transham, that little town upon a hill which the Morton Plough Works had created, they were soon in Stanley’s car, whirling into the sleepy peace of a Worcestershire afternoon.  Would this young bird nestling up against him echo Flora’s verdict:  ’I feel all body there!’ or would she take to its fatted luxury as a duck to water?  And he said:  “By the way, your aunt’s ‘Bigwigs’ set in on a Saturday.  Are you for staying and seeing the lions feed, or do we cut back?”

From Alan he got the answer he expected: 

“If there’s golf or something, I suppose we can make out all right.”  From Nedda:  “What sort of Bigwigs are they, Dad?”

“A sort you’ve never seen, my dear.”

“Then I should like to stay.  Only, about dresses?”

“What war paint have you?”

“Only two white evenings.  And Mums gave me her Mechlin.”

“’Twill serve.”

To Felix, Nedda in white ‘evenings’ was starry and all that man could desire.

“Only, Dad, do tell me about them, beforehand.”

“My dear, I will.  And God be with you.  This is where Becket begins.”

The car had swerved into a long drive between trees not yet full-grown, but decorously trying to look more than their twenty years.  To the right, about a group of older elms, rooks were in commotion, for Stanley’s three keepers’ wives had just baked their annual rook pies, and the birds were not yet happy again.  Those elms had stood there when the old Moretons walked past them through corn-fields to church of a Sunday.  Away on the left above the lake, the little walled mound had come in view.  Something in Felix always stirred at sight of it, and, squeezing Nedda’s arm, he said: 

“See that silly wall?  Behind there Granny’s ancients lived.  Gone now—­new house—­new lake—­new trees—­new everything.”

But he saw from his little daughter’s calm eyes that the sentiment in him was not in her.

“I like the lake,” she said.  “There’s Granny—­oh, and a peacock!”