ntal sympathy as we went through the straggling
village street and across the trim green on our way back to London.
It seemed that afternoon the most tranquil and idyllic collection of
creeper-sheltered homes you can imagine; thatch still lingered on a
whitewashed cottage or two, pyracanthus, wall-flowers, and daffodils
abounded, and an unsystematic orchard or so was white with blossom
above and gay with bulbs below. I noted a row of straw beehives,
beehive-shaped, beehives of the type long since condemned as inefficient
by all progressive minds, and in the doctor's acre of grass a flock of
two whole sheep was grazing,--no doubt he'd taken them on account. Two
men and one old woman made gestures of abject vassalage, and my uncle
replied with a lordly gesture of his great motoring glove....

"England's full of Bits like this," said my uncle, leaning over the
front seat and looking back with great satisfaction. The black glare of
his goggles rested for a time on the receding turrets of Lady Grove just
peeping over the trees.

"I shall have a flagstaff, I think," he considered. "Then one could show
when one is in residence. The villagers will like to know."...

I reflected. "They will" I said. "They're used to liking to know."...

My aunt had been unusually silent. Suddenly she spoke. "He says Snap,"
she remarked; "he buys that place. And a nice old job of Housekeeping he
gives me! He sails through the village swelling like an old turkey. And
who'll have to scoot the butler? Me! Who's got to forget all she ever
knew and start again? Me! Who's got to trek from Chiselhurst and be a
great lady? Me! ... You old Bother! Just when I was settling down and
beginning to feel at home."

My uncle turned his goggles to her. "Ah! THIS time it is home, Susan....
We got there."

VII

It seems to me now but a step from the buying of Lady Grove to the
beginning of Crest Hill, from the days when the former was a stupendous
achievement to the days when it was too small and dark and inconvenient
altogether for a great financier's use. For me that was a period of
increasing detachment from our business and the great world of London; I
saw it more and more in broken glimpses, and sometimes I was working in
my little pavilion above Lady Grove for a fortnight together; even when
I came up it was often solely for a meeting of the aeronautical society
or for one of the learned societies or to consult literature or employ
searchers or some s