came some sort of estrangement between
him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and
stayed there all through the summer.

I was in a state of transition between the infinitely great and the
infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and potent being,
that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I
was going to be an Oxford undergraduate. Philip and I came down together
by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and
luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed
youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I
was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who
favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the
head-master's valediction and the grave elder-brotherliness of old
Henson, and the shrill cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing
in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of exalted gravity, and
I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the
rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with
all the tremendous _savoir faire_ that was natural to my age, and noting
with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No
doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I
don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact tint of
its color and the distinctive feeling of our measured equal paces in the
sunshine....

I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up
alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big
gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian
pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I
found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of
people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man
in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady
Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness--as though I was a
personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she
spoke I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining
being in white, very straight and graceful, with a big soft hat and
overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried endearments of
the sunflakes under the shadows of the great chestnuts, into the glow of
summer light before the pavilion.

"Steve arrived!" sh