Geoff was Mrs Lancaster’s little boy. The family consisted of Mr Winburn, his widowed daughter, and Geoffrey.

Rain had begun to beat against the window—pitter-patter, pitter-patter.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Winburn. ‘Is it not like little footsteps?’

‘It is more like rain,’ said Mrs Lancaster, with a smile.

‘But that, that is a footstep,’ cried her father, bending forward to listen.

Mrs Lancaster laughed outright.

‘That’s Geoff coming downstairs.’

Mr Winburn was obliged to laugh too. They were having tea in the hall, and he had been sitting with his back to the staircase. He now turned his chair round to face it.

Little Geoffrey was coming down, rather slowly and sedately, with a child’s awe of a strange place. The stairs were of polished oak, uncarpeted. He came across and stood by his mother. Mr Winburn gave a slight start. As the child was crossing the floor, he distinctly heard another pair of footsteps on the stairs, as of someone following Geoffrey. Dragging footsteps, curiously painful they were. Then he shrugged his shoulders incredulously. ‘The rain, no doubt,’ he thought.

‘I’m looking at the spongecakes,’ remarked Geoff with the admirably detached air of one who points out an interesting fact.

His mother hastened to comply with the hint.

‘Well, Sonny, how do you like your new home?’ she asked.

‘Lots,’ replied Geoffrey with his mouth generously filled. ‘Pounds and pounds and pounds.’ After this last assertion, which was evidently expressive of the deepest contentment, he relapsed into silence, only anxious to remove the spongecake from the sight of man in the least time possible.

Having bolted the last mouthful, he burst forth into speech.

‘Oh! Mummy, there’s attics here, Jane says; and can I go at once and eggzplore them? And there might be a secret door, Jane says there isn’t, but I think there must be, and, anyhow, I know there’ll be pipes, water pipes (with a face full of ecstasy) and can I play with them, and, oh! can I go and see the Boi-i-ler?’ He spun out the last word with such evident rapture that his grandfather felt ashamed to reflect that this peerless delight of childhood only conjured up to his imagination the picture of hot water that wasn’t hot, and heavy and numerous plumber’s bills.

‘We’ll see about the attics tomorrow, darling,’ said Mrs Lancaster. ‘Suppose you fetch your bricks and build a nice house, or an engine.’

‘Don’t want to build an ’ouse.’

‘House.’

‘House, or h’engine h’either.’

‘Build a boiler,’ suggested his grandfather.

Geoffrey brightened.

‘With pipes?’

‘Yes, lots of pipes.’

Geoffrey ran away happily to fetch his bricks.

The rain was still falling. Mr Winburn listened. Yes, it must have been the rain he had heard; but it did sound like footsteps.

He had a queer dream that night.

He dreamt that he was walking through a town, a great city it seemed to him. But it was a children’s city; there were no grown-up people there, nothing but children, crowds of them. In his dream they all rushed to the stranger crying: ‘Have you brought him?’ It seemed that he understood what they meant and shook his head sadly. When they saw this, the children turned away and began to cry, sobbing bitterly.