you up for the night. Will you please send a telegram to him”; and the Colonel’s address followed.

P. M.

Paul sent off his telegram at once and followed it in the afternoon. Outside Pulboro’ station a small grey car was waiting and a girl of his own age, with brown eyes and a fresh pretty face and a small bright blue hat sitting tightly on her curls, was at the wheel.

“I am Phyllis Vanderfelt,” she explained. “My father asked me to drive in and fetch you. He has had to be away to-day and won’t get home much before dinner time, I’m afraid.”

She turned the car and drove westwards under the railway arch talking rather quickly as people who are uneasy and dread an awkward silence will do. They passed through a little town of narrow winding streets and high walls clustered under a great church with a leaping spire, like a piece of old France, and swung out onto a high wide road which dipped and rose, with the great ridge of the South Downs sweeping from Chanctonbury Ring to Hampshire on their left, forests and bush-strewn slopes of emerald and cliffs of chalk silver-white in the sun, and from end to end of the high rolling barrier the swift shadows of the clouds flitting like great birds.

They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence. Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness upon his face.

“To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”

Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a church stood upon a little hill.

“It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?

“Do you know our Downs?”

Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.

“I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising something.”

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