The plane lay on its back, shining in the desert glare. Two long skid marks led up to it, deepening towards the spot where it had finally dug its nose into the sandy ground and somersaulted. Its trim military lines showed little damage except for a crumpled wing-tip. In its protecting shadow Hilary lay propped against the bundle of an unused parachute. He wore an ordinary civilian khaki shirt and shorts. His left side from above the waist downward was caked in his own blood round the bandage on a two days old bullet wound, and his breathing had become difficult. He reached for his khaki coat on the ground beside him, and began to go through its pockets methodically.

A silver cigarette-case and lighter, which he laid across his signature as a paper-weight; a bunch of keys, a pocket-knife and a bottle-opener, a nail-file, a handful of coins, a compass, a small leather-bound engagement-book, a tin box of peppermints, a pipe and tobacco pouch—he came at last to his wallet and its few papers. Two thin letters with English air-mail stamps he laid to one side. A three-cornered butterfly-envelope made of a ruled notebook page came next, labeled Roadside near Kohat— Junonia, and enfolding a male of that species destined for his small and very exclusive collection at home; a youthful habit he had never outgrown was the acquisition on every job of some such exquisite trophy, each one a separate jewel of memory. A picture cut out of the Tatler was next—a fair girl in her presentation gown and feathers. With only a brief glance he placed it on the letters, his eyes caught and held by the snapshot which was beneath it, and which showed a curving drive shaded by old trees, leading to a stone house with pointed gables and rows of casement windows. The edge of a well-kept lawn was visible, and flowers bloomed. And yet the house stood somehow barren and bleak, with a bare hillside rising behind it.

He had not been there for two years. On the top floor in a long, L-shaped room was all his boyhood. Not a very luxurious room, furnished with odds and ends left over from downstairs. But the casement windows opened above the garden to the south, the armchairs were comfortable, his desk was Chippendale, and the mantelpiece, displaced from the drawing-room a hundred years ago by a vulgar piece of Victorian marble, was Jacobean oak. Not a very luxurious boyhood either, if it came to that, shadowed by the Great War, and dominated by the ruthless, abiding knowledge of what was expected of him when he grew up.