The days had slipped by there very pleasantly, for Radmore liked his
taciturn host, and Mrs. Crofton was very pretty--an agreeable playfellow
for a rich and lonely man. So it was that when it came to the point he
had not cared to look up any of the people associated with his early
youth.

But now he was going to see them--almost had he forced himself upon them.
And the thought of going home to Old Place shook and stirred him to the
heart.

To-day he felt quite queerly at a loose end. This perhaps, partly because
the lately widowed Mrs. Crofton, with whom he had spent a good deal of
his time since his arrival in London three weeks ago, had left town. She
had not gone far, only to the Surrey village where he himself was going
on Friday.

When pretty Mrs. Crofton had told Radmore that she had taken a house at
Beechfield, he had been very much surprised and taken aback. It had
seemed to him an amazing coincidence that the one place in the wide world
which to him was home should have been chosen by her. But at once she had
reminded him, in her pretty little positive way, that it was he himself
who, soon after they had become first acquainted in Egypt, had drawn such
an attractive picture of the Surrey village. That, in fact, was why, in
July--it was now late September--when she, Enid Crofton, had had to think
of making a new home, Beechfield had seemed to her the ideal place. If
only she could hear of a house to let there! And by rare good chance
there had been such a house--The Trellis House! A friend had lent her
a motor, and she had gone down to look at it one August afternoon, and
there and then had decided to take it. It was so exactly what she