While her daughter crouched shivering by the fire, the old woman herself had made no further concession to the weather than by having thrust her feet into a deer-skin hassock. She sat steely and erect on a straight-backed chair before her desk in the deep window-bow that was her favourite post, and this though the mountain prospect that she loved was quite gone in mist. Mist, chill, heavy and sopping on this day of summer, had left nothing for the disconsolate eye to rest upon save a drenched garden terrace, some shrubs weighted with the rain, and a broken regiment of tiger-lilies. “My dear Mother,” returned Irene in a tone of martyrdom which her mother guessed was due less to maternal anxiety than to her grievance at having had to leave London in the middle of the season, “you surely don’t imagine that I like our summer arrangements. But you see for yourself that Carola has had one cold upon another since we came here. And after bronchitis so lately …”

“ … Look!” – went on the persistent undertone of the lesson. “This is a seed of the ash – a single seed in a sheath which is really a wing. It is called a samara. See the twist that helps it to fly! And this is a sycamore fruit with two wings.”

“Can it really fly, Miss Frew?” asked Carola, the elder child, suddenly taking some interest, “like a bird?”

“It can whirl along on the wind for miles and miles.”

“The child doesn’t go out enough,” announced Carola’s grandmother.

“ … Suppose it fell on a stone, Miss Frew?”

“Then if it lived long enough, it would have to wait for another wind to blow it to a place where it could sprout and take root …”

“Would you have her go out on a day like this?”

“Most certainly I should. To hear you one would hardly think you were a Scotswoman at all.” A fine, metallic thread of contempt was one of the strands in the withered old voice.

“ … Suppose the wind blew it on to another stone, and another stone – lots more stones, Miss Frew? Or into the sea? …”

“I don’t hold,” – Aunt Georgina still spoke – “with your doctor’s fiddle-faddle about bronchitis and sea-air and nonsense. However, I see your mind is made up, and after all they are only my grand-children, not my children!”

“ … For one seed that sprouts, millions and millions only rot every year.”

“Do billions and billions rot,” asked Phyllis, the younger child, speaking for the first time.

“I suppose so.”

“And trillions and trillions. Miss Frew? …”