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that spring. ‘It is rather like the saloon of a ship, with the windows all round and the low ceiling,’ she said. ‘And with such a quantity of rain outside one might fancy oneself on the waves!’

‘I should call this the cosiest of suburban rooms and anything more dismal than the saloon of a ship I can’t conceive of!’ laughed Hester, taking out her cigarette, while Robin, feeling her not at all in the game, whispered to his grandmother: ‘Perhaps there’s a whale round the corner that’s been washed on deck.’

‘Let’s go see!’ she said. Hester no more understood a child’s mind than she understood the drawing-room, which was neither cosy nor suburban. She was glad she did not; glad that Robin whispered. She took him by the hand and led him off and as they turned the corner and went down the steps it seemed to her that she and Robin escaped into fairyland leaving Hester behind them. Tranquil, pale, the rain-swept hedgerow elms outside making it the quieter, the lower room received them as though with a gentle finger laid on its lips, and in their bowl on the lacquer table the goldfish glanced and glittered, living so determinedly their mysterious, circumscribed life. Robin stopped short on seeing them. ‘It’s not a whale:—it’s