“I have taken a house in the Mendip Hills,” said Father one night in London at the end of dinner. “Not far from Dolebury Camp,” he added, as though that explained everything.

“To live in?” exclaimed Aunt Effie, pardonably surprised, for she had had absolutely no warning.

Father said, though it was really beneath him, that he had no intention of dying in it.

“Well, really, Alan, you might have told me! That is, I’d like to have known!” Aunt Effie remonstrated.

Father looked at her patiently over his spectacles and pointed out with great reasonableness that she knew now.

“Has it got a garden?” she demanded at once.

Father said Yes, he believed things grew.

“And has it got bathrooms?” persisted Aunt Effie in the order of their importance.

Father set down his after-dinner coffee cup with a small irritable clink.

“My dear Effie,” he said, for she was after all his own sister, “there is no reason for you to suppose that I would take a lease on Dolebury Camp itself for a home. The house has three bathrooms, and is otherwise adequately furnished. It is called Nuns Farthing. And don’t ask me why,” he continued hastily as both their mouths came open, “because I don’t know. Wells is the nearest town of any size. I shall be able to use the museum there.”

He rose then, and left them, disappearing behind the closed door of his den.

“Men!” said Aunt Effie hopelessly, to the astonished air.

Sabrina was delighted, and began at once to pack.

They arrived at Nuns Farthing by motor with their hand luggage, on a late afternoon in March, with a damp, chilly wind blowing off the Hills.

They had come down the Bath Road from London, with luncheon at Marlborough, and Sabrina had not been so far afield since she was a small child. She had gone a little giddy with a mounting rapture of escape, and freedom, and adventure, brought on by a countryside pregnant with spring and by her own secret conviction that now at last, at last, she was going to live happily forever after. One could never feel sure of that in London, somehow. But from now on she would wake up every morning in the country—in a house, instead of a flat—with a garden outside—with the Hills beyond— with spring coming on. No school. No maimed men singing in the gutters, and hopeless pavement artists with heart-breaking little dogs doing tricks for pennies. No terrifying newspaper contents-bills wherever you looked. No aeroplanes overhead and no nerve-racking traffic underfoot. Nothing but peace and stillness and all this greenness....