ird that made a noise
in the shrubbery like that of two pebbles knocked sharply together; until
the young people on the tennis court could no longer see to play, and the
tall Californian poppies at the back of the herbaceous border that was
her special pride shone like moon-flowers in the dusk.

"When I think of all that ... that summer," she said with a sigh, "I'm so
thankful ... so thankful." And then Arthur came back with his sweater
over his arm, swinging his racket, and she went straight up to him and
kissed him with the sort of modesty that you would have expected in a
young girl rather than a middle-aged widow.

"You dear thing, Mater," he said, kissing her forehead in return.

This is the land of digression into which memories of Overton lead one.
My only excuse is that part of the story, and indeed its emotional climax
belongs to Overton, to that smoothly ordered country house with its huge
sentinel elms and its peculiar atmosphere of leisure and peace. No doubt
Mrs. Payne was aware of this when she kissed her son. From the lawn
where we were sitting she could see the yew-parlour and the cypress hedge
in the shadow of which she had stood on the tremendous evening about
which she had been telling me. We walked back to the terrace, and on the
way she gave me a shy smile, half triumph, half apology. She never
mentioned the episode again and though the story fermented in my brain,
maturing, as I hoped, like a choice vintage, and has emerged from time to
time when my mind has been free from other work, I have kept my promise
and have neither repeated it nor written it till this day.

Now, at last, I find myself absolved. Arthur Payne, I believe, is
happily married to the fresh young person with whom he was playing
tennis. Soon after their marriage they emigrated to the backs of Canada,
or was it New Zealand: somewhere at any rate beyond the reach of colonial
editions. Overton is now in the possession of a Midland soap-boiler.
Mrs. Payne, having fulfilled her main function in life and fearing
English winters, has retired to a small villa at Mustapha Superieur, near
Algiers, where, though she live for ever she is not likely to read this
book. And Gabrielle, the beautiful Gabrielle, is dead.

The news came as a shock to me. For the moment I, who had never even set
eyes on her, suffered the pain of an almost personal bereavement; I was
moved, as poets are moved by the vanishing of something beautiful from