, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The
fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate
their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the
truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece
of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it
was something to eat.

He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like
a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.

"Under the spreading ilex tree..."

He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn't.

"The smith, a brawny man is he, With arms like rubber bands."

Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more
regularly.

He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him,
reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the
summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne's bare arms and seal-sleek
bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.

"And little Luce with the white legs, And bouncing Barbary..."

Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able
to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was
truly his own, or was it simply an education?

He walked slowly round the water's edge. In an embayed recess among
the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a
pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless
mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.

"Hullo!" he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say
something.

Mary looked up. "Hullo!" she answered in a melancholy, uninterested
tone.

In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to
Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the
pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.

At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard
of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen
windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding
out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times
and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty
years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They
will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the
moment, however, Mary's mind was not moved by these considerations.

On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was writt