st into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lying
on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the
primordial curse in Lady Osprey's mind.

"Upon his belly shall he go," she said with quiet distinctness, "all the
days of his life."

After which we talked no more of aeronautics.

Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly
the same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous aggression, that
I had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother's room. She was
amazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the
wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same--her voice; things one
would have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans in
the same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.

She stood up abruptly.

"What is there beyond the terrace?" she said, and found me promptly
beside her.

I invented a view for her.

At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon the
parapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous stones. "Now
tell me," she said, "all about yourself. Tell me about yourself; I know
such duffers of men! They all do the same things. How did you get--here?
All my men WERE here. They couldn't have got here if they hadn't been
here always. They wouldn't have thought it right. You've climbed."

"If it's climbing," I said.

She went off at a tangent. "It's--I don't know if you'll
understand--interesting to meet you again. I've remembered you. I don't
know why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay figure--when I've
told myself stories. But you've always been rather stiff and difficult
in my stories--in ready-made clothes--a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, or
something like that. You're not like that a bit. And yet you ARE!"

She looked at me. "Was it much of a fight? They make out it is."

"I don't know why."

"I was shot up here by an accident," I said. "There was no fight at all.
Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great figure in that. I
and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up. No merit in that! But
you've been here all the time. Tell me what you have done first."

"One thing we didn't do." She meditated for a moment.

"What?" said I.

"Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover. So it went to the
Phillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my step-mother--we let, too.
And live in a little house."

She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and