2

The voices, the young loud clear voices of Gerda and of Kay, shrilled
down from the garden, and Esau yapped in answer. They were calling her.
They had probably been to wake her and had found her gone.

Neville smiled (when she smiled a dimple came in one pale brown cheek)
and swung herself down from the beech. Kay and Gerda were of enormous
importance; the most important things in life, except Rodney; but not
everything, because nothing is ever everything in this so complex world.

When she came out of the wood into the garden, now all golden with
morning, they flung themselves upon her and called her a sneak for not
having wakened them to bathe.

"You'll be late for breakfast," they chanted. "Late on your forty-third
birthday."

They each had an arm round her; they propelled her towards the house.
They were lithe, supple creatures of twenty and twenty-one. Between them
walked Neville, with her small, pointed, elfish face, that was sensitive
to every breath of thought and emotion like smooth water wind-stirred.
With her great violet eyes brooding in it under thin black brows, and
her wet hair hanging in loose strands, she looked like an ageless
wood-dryad between two slim young saplings. Kay was a little like her in
the face, only his violet eyes were short-sighted and he wore glasses.
Gerda was smaller, fragile and straight as a wand, with a white little
face and wavy hair of pure gold, bobbed round her thin white neck. And
with far-set blue eyes and a delicate cleft chin and thin straight lips.
For all she looked so frail, she could dance all night and return in the