‘Move it in here then for the night,’ said the Padre. ‘You can get it through the backyard and into the outhouse.’

Georgie felt himself bound to object to this: the table belonged to Grebe, and it looked as if Grebe, alas, belonged to him.

‘I think it had better come to Mallards Cottage,’ said he firmly. ‘It’s only just round the corner, and it can stand in my yard.’

The Padre was quite willing that it should go back to Grebe, but why should Georgie claim this object with all the painful interest attached to it? After all, he had found it.

‘And so I don’t quite see why you should have it,’ he said a little stiffly.

Georgie took him aside.

‘It’s dreadful to talk about it so soon,’ he said, ‘but that is what I should like done with it. You see Lucia left me Grebe and all its contents. I still cling – can’t help it – to the hope that neither it nor they may ever be mine, but in the interval which may elapse –’

‘No! Really!’ said the Padre with a sudden thrill of Tillingite interest which it was no use trying to suppress. ‘I congrat – Well, well. Of course the kitchen table is yours. Very proper.’

The trolley started again and by dint of wheedlings and cunning coaxings the sad substantial relic was induced to enter the backyard of Mallards Cottage. Here for the present it would have to remain, but pickled as it was with long immersion in sea water, the open air could not possibly hurt it, and if it rained, so much the better, for it would wash the salt out.

Georgie, very tired and haggard with these harrowing arrangements, had a little rest on his sofa, when he had seen the table safely bestowed. His cook gave him a succulent and most nutritious dinner by way of showing her sympathy, and Foljambe waited on him with peculiar attention, constantly holding a pocket-handkerchief to the end of her nose, by way of expressing her own grief. Afterwards he moved to his sitting room and took up his needlework, that ‘sad narcotic exercise’, and looked his loss in the face.