Nan nodded. "If I could have ten pounds.... I'd let you have it in a
fortnight."

"That's easy," said Rodney, in his kind, offhand way.

"Of course," Neville said. "You old spendthrift."

"Thank you, dears. Now I can get a birthday present for mother."

For Mrs. Hilary's birthday was next week, and to celebrate it her
children habitually assembled at The Gulls, St. Mary's Bay, where she
lived. Nan always gave her a more expensive present than she could
afford, in a spasm of remorse for the irritation her mother roused in
her.

"Oh, poor mother," Neville exclaimed, suddenly remembering that Mrs.
Hilary would in a week be sixty-three, and that this must be worse by
twenty years than to be forty-three.

The hurrying stream of life was loud in her ears. How quickly it was
sweeping them all along--the young bodies of Gerda and of Kay leaping on
the tennis court, the clear, analysing minds of Nan and Rodney and
herself musing in the sun, the feverish heart of her mother, loving,
hating, feeding restlessly on itself by the seaside, the age-calmed soul
of her grandmother, who was eighty-four and drove out in a donkey
chair by the same sea.

The lazy talking of Rodney and Nan, the cryings and strikings of Gerda
and Kay, the noontide chirrupings of birds, the cluckings of distant hens