everything. But I am not sure—”

Paul felt the clutch of fear catching his breath once more as he looked into the girl’s compassionate eyes.

“I am with your father,” he said. “My recollections are too faint. I can only remember what I see. Let us go on!”

“Very well!”

Phyllis Vanderfelt went into one of the cottages and came out again with a big key in her hand. Beyond the cottages a thick high hedge led on to an old rose-red house with an oriel window looking down the road from beneath a gable and a tiled roof golden with lichen. Wisteria draped the walls in front with purple.

“It is empty,” said Phyllis, as she put the key into the lock and opened the door. The rooms were all dismantled, the floors uncarpeted. Paul Ravenel shook his head.

“I remember nothing here.”

Phyllis led him through a window into a garden. A group of beech trees sheltered the house from the southwest wind and beyond the beech trees from a raised lawn their eyes swept over meadows and a low ridge of black firs and once more commanded the shining Downs. Paul stood for a little while in silence, whilst Phyllis watched his face. There came upon it a look of perplexity and doubt. He turned back towards the house. On its south side, a window had been thrown out; on its tiled roof a wide band of white clematis streamed down like a great scarf. On the wall beside the window a great magnolia climbed.

“Wait a moment,” cried Paul; and as he gazed his vision cleared. He saw, as the gifted see in a crystal, a scene small and distant and very bright.

There was a table raised up on some sort of stand upon the gravel paths outside this window. A man was sitting at the table and a small crowd of people, laughing and jeering a little—an unkindly crowd—was gathered about him. And furniture and ornaments were brought out. He turned to Phyllis. “There was a sale here, ever so long ago—and I was present outside the crowd, looking on. I lived here, then?”

“Yes,” said Phyllis.

“And it was our furniture which was being sold?”

“Yes.”

So far there was no surprise for Paul Ravenel, nothing which conflicted with his conception and estimate of his father. Monsieur Ravenel had sold off his 

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