hem. "They wear their
native costume."

"We are your neighbors in Surrey," she said, going off abruptly from
that. "We are quite near to your father."

She paused with that characteristic effect of deliberation in her
closed lips. Then she added: "I can see the trees behind your father's
house from the window of my room."

"Yes," I said. "You take all our southward skyline."

She turned her face to me with the manner of a great lady adding a new
acquaintance to her collection. But her eyes met mine very steadily and
intimately. "Mr. Stratton," she said--it was the first time in her life
she had called me that--"when we come back to Surrey I want you to come
and see me and tell me of all the things you are going to do. Will you?"

Sec. 3

That meeting, that revival, must have been late in November or early in
December. Already by that time I had met your mother. I write to you,
little son, not to you as you are now, but to the man you are someday to
be. I write to understand myself, and, so far as I can understand, to
make you understand. So that I want you to go back with me for a time
into the days before your birth, to think not of that dear spirit of
love who broods over you three children, that wise, sure mother who
rules your life, but of a young and slender girl, Rachel More, younger
then than you will be when at last this story comes into your hands. For
unless you think of her as being a girl, if you let your present
knowledge of her fill out this part in our story, you will fail to
understand the proportions of these two in my life. So I shall write of
her here as Rachel More, as if she were someone as completely
dissociated from yourself as Lady Mary; as if she were someone in the
story of my life who had as little to do with yours.

I had met her in September. The house my father lived in is about twelve
miles away from your mother's home at Ridinghanger, and I was taken over
by Percy Restall in his motor-car. Restall had just become a convert to
this new mode of locomotion, and he was very active with a huge,
malignant-looking French car that opened behind, and had a kind of poke
bonnet and all sorts of features that have since disappeared from the
automobile world. He took everyone that he could lay hands upon for
rides,--he called it extending their range, and he called upon everyone
else to show off the car; he was responsible for more introduction and
social admixture in that part of Surrey tha