aining. "I shan't mind so much, dadda,"
you remarked to me, "if I may yelp." So for a day, by special
concession, you yelped, and then the sting of those fresh wounds
departed.

Within a fortnight, so quickly does an aseptic wound heal up again, you
were running about in the sun, and I had come back, as one comes back to
a thing forgotten, to the first beginnings of this chapter on my desk.
But for a time I could not go on working at it because of the fear I had
felt, and it is only now in June, in this house in France to which we
have come for the summer, with you more flagrantly healthy than I have
ever known you before, that my heart creeps out of its hole again, and I
can go on with my story.

CHAPTER THE SECOND

BOYHOOD

Sec. 1

I was a Harbury boy as my father and grandfather were before me and as
you are presently to be. I went to Harbury at the age of fourteen. Until
then I was educated at home, first by a governess and then by my
father's curate, Mr. Siddons, who went from us to St. Philip's in
Hampstead, and, succeeding marvellously there, is now Bishop of
Exminster. My father became rector of Burnmore when I was nine; my
mother had been dead four years, and my second cousin, Jane Stratton,
was already his housekeeper. My father held the living until his
resignation when I was nearly thirty. So that all the most
impressionable years of my life centre upon the Burnmore rectory and the
easy spaciousness of Burnmore Park. My boyhood and adolescence
alternated between the ivied red-brick and ancient traditions of Harbury
(and afterwards Christ-church) and that still untroubled countryside.

I was never a town dweller until I married and we took our present house
in Holland Park. I went into London at last as one goes into an arena.
It cramps me and wearies me and at times nearly overwhelms me, but
there it is that the life of men centres and my work lies. But every
summer we do as we have done this year and go to some house in the
country, near to forests or moorland or suchlike open and uncultivated
country, where one may have the refreshment of freedom among natural and
unhurried things. This year we are in a walled garden upon the Seine,
about four miles above Chateau Galliard, and with the forest reaching up
to the paddock beyond the orchard close....

You will understand better when I have told you my story why I saw
Burnmore for the last time when I was one-and-twenty and why my memories
of