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Mummy?’ said Robin. He leaned against his grandmother’s knee and looked about him. ‘I like it. You can’t tell what’s on the other side, down the steps.’

‘I think I can,’ said Hester. Her reasonableness was only just not a snub and for a moment Robin was checked by it; but he took up after a moment: ‘Not if you didn’t know already. If you didn’t know already, there might be robbers down there; or tigers;—or just a kitten asleep on a cushion.’ His fancy as it took substance widened his gaze.

‘Well, I shouldn’t care for robbers in my drawing-room, or tigers either and you’d be the first to be frightened by them if they were there,’ Hester re-joined, turning her head to measure her child with a scientific eye as though hidden meanings might lurk in these images.

‘But they wouldn’t really be there,’ Robin re-joined, quite as reasonably as his mother, and without her dryness. ‘That’s what’s so nice; Grannie might have changed everything and one wouldn’t know.—I do like this room, Grannie,’ he repeated. ‘It’s like that queer room on the ship you took me to.’

Monica’s one remaining brother was an Indian judge and Robin had gone with her to see him off