ly assembled at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, where she
lived. Nan always gave her a more expensive present than she could
afford, in a spasm of remorse for the irritation her mother roused in
her.

"Oh, poor mother," Neville exclaimed, suddenly remembering that Mrs.
Hilary would in a week be sixty-three, and that this must be worse by
twenty years than to be forty-three.

The hurrying stream of life was loud in her ears. How quickly it was
sweeping them all along--the young bodies of Gerda and of Kay leaping on
the tennis court, the clear, analysing minds of Nan and Rodney and
herself musing in the sun, the feverish heart of her mother, loving,
hating, feeding restlessly on itself by the seaside, the age-calmed soul
of her grandmother, who was eighty-four and drove out in a donkey
chair by the same sea.

The lazy talking of Rodney and Nan, the cryings and strikings of Gerda
and Kay, the noontide chirrupings of birds, the cluckings of distant hens
pretending that they had laid eggs, all merged into the rushing of the
inexorable river, along and along and along. Time, like an ever-rolling
stream, bearing all its sons away. Clatter, chatter, clatter, does it
matter, matter, matter? They fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the
opening day.... No, it probably didn't matter at all what one did, how
much one got into one's life, since there was to be, anyhow, so soon an
end.

The garden became strange and far and flat, like tapestry, or a dream....

The lunch gong boomed. Nan, who had fallen asleep with the suddenness of
a lower animal, her cheek pillowed on her hand, woke and stretched. Gerda
and Kay, not to be distracted from their purpose, finished the set.

"Thank God," said Nan, "that I am not lunching with Rosalind."

CHAPTER II

MRS. HILARY'S BIRTHDAY

1

They all turned up at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, in time for lunch on
Mrs. Hilary's birthday. It was her special wish that all those of her
children who could should do this each year. Jim, whom she preferred,
couldn't come this time; he was a surgeon; it is an uncertain profession.
The others all came; Neville and Pamela and Gilbert and Nan and with
Gilbert his wife Rosalind, who had no right there because she was only an
in-law, but if Rosalind thought it would amuse her to do anything you
could not prevent her. She and Mrs. Hilary disliked one another a good
deal, though Rosalind would say to the others, "Your darling mother!
She's priceless, and I