One promising afternoon Joanna and Georgie packed a picnic-basket, and with rugs and a kettle they all climbed the hill behind the house. Sholto pushed his mother up the steepest places with such vigour that she laughed like a schoolgirl with her clear bell-like laugh. Then when they had sat down and spread out their belongings, Linnet took her shoes off, and Joanna pulled out the toes of her thick cashmere stockings in the way Juley loved because it eased her poor feet. Next Georgie massaged the tell-tale ankles, remonstrating with them, but more gently than usual, while the others ran here and there, calling to each other in echoing voices and collecting wood and dry bits of heather for the fire. Joanna was always happy tending a fire, and the boiling of the kettle was her special charge. After tea they even forebore to object when Juley read out to them from Asia’s Millions how the Gospel was spreading among mandarins.

Yet another interval of reunion was to remain as a happy memory.

It had been raining since dawn, but towards evening the sky cleared, and Linnet suggested that they should all go fishing in the bay. It was a job to get started, but once down the steep lane from the house Juley was easy to manage. With encouraging cries the four hauled the rowing-boat down the stony beach; and Juley, very heavy and awkward, was helped aboard from the little jetty. When they had anchored over the fishing-ground, quarrelled amicably over the lines, and baited their hooks, the mother gazed at the lingering sunset and felt that Heaven was very near to earth. Memories of the early days of her motherhood brought happy tears, and she turned her swimming eyes from the radiant west to her full-grown sons and daughters beside her. Georgie was exclaiming excitedly as she wound in the jerking line. She was sure it was either three whiting at once, or an enormous dog-fish which Sholto would have trouble in killing. And when a very small but vigorous lythe appeared over the side they all shouted with laughter at her. Joanna caught three flounders running, through forgetting to pull her hooks a yard up from the bottom; but Juley said she liked flounders better than whiting, and was going to have these cooked for supper that very night. Linnet had no luck at all, and kept shifting his tackle from one side to the other, till at last he got settled in the bows with his Norfolk-coated back to his mother, and she noticed how like his father he was growing about the shoulders, one hitched a little higher than the other. Sholto astern, held his line between his knees. Both his hands were busy with a Jew’s harp. It was, he said, the appropriate instrument for the son of a Mother in Israel!