“To your right, Sabrina—the other side of the mantelpiece—” He spoke urgently from the middle of the room behind her, motionless there, striving desperately now to reach her with some sense of his words. “Those red and gold books on the second shelf to the right of the mantelpiece—they were all given to me by a dear maiden aunt with a vice for scribbling on fly-leaves, dates and all. Find my Kipling, Sabrina—”

She wavered, hung on one foot, moved vaguely towards the mantelpiece, and halted again, looking up at it disapprovingly.

“You might have won a golf trophy,” she said, and this time it was a direct reproach, “or a tennis championship — or a steeplechase. Then they would have engraved your name on a lovely silver cup, and it would be here on the mantelpiece for me to read. I can’t think what you’ve done with your time.”

“Wasted,” he said, watching her from the middle of the room, awed and paralyzed by that first unconscious “you.” “All wasted, till today! Keep to your right, Sabrina—that’s it—you’re getting warm now—the Kipling, Sabrina, you can’t miss it—no, the shelf above that one—above it—up one, I tell you, you must hear me— red and gold—higher, my darling, higher—”

Her feet had carried her forward uncertainly. Her hand came up, hovered, and fell on Puck of Pook’s Hill.

“Got it!” cried Hilary with infinite satisfaction, from the middle of the room.

She lifted the book off the shelf and opened it, turning the leaves lovingly.

“Did you read this when you were little, I wonder?” she murmured. “I did, more than once. It would be fun to read it again—together.”

“My name’s in the front of it, Sabrina, in Aunt Dorothy’s handwriting. I know it’s damn’ silly what she wrote, but you’ve got my name in your hands—”

The well-worn pages flipped back slowly under her thumb—

“‘And see you, after rain, the trace

Of mound and ditch and wall?

O that was a Legion’s camping-place,

When Caesar sailed from Gaul,’”

she read aloud, in a glow of rediscovery. “But of course! That’s what living in London does to you! I never realized before—it’s all round this house—Maesbury Camp, where Father goes—Dolebury, too—mound and ditch and wall—traces—”

“Go on,” he said compellingly, from where he stood, hungry for the sound of the dear, remembered words. “You’re in the midst of it here, didn’t you know? Please go on, Sabrina—”

“‘And see you marks that show and fade,

Like shadows on the Downs?

O they are the lines the Flint Men made

To guard their wondrous towns.

“‘Trackway and Camp and City lost,

Salt marsh where now is corn;

Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease—

And so was England born!’”