If Platt and Parsons and Mr. Polly live to be a hundred, they will
none of them forget that girl as she stood with a pink flush upon her,
faintly smiling and yet earnest, parting the branches of the hedgerows
and reaching down apple in hand. Which of them was it, had caught her
spirit to attend to them?...

And once they went along the coast, following it as closely as
possible, and so came at last to Foxbourne, that easternmost suburb of
Brayling and Hampsted-on-the-Sea.

Foxbourne seemed a very jolly little place to Mr. Polly that
afternoon. It has a clean sandy beach instead of the mud and pebbles
and coaly _defilements_ of Port Burdock, a row of six bathing
machines, and a shelter on the parade in which the Three Ps sat after
a satisfying but rather expensive lunch that had included celery. Rows
of verandahed villas proffered apartments, they had feasted in an
hotel with a porch painted white and gay with geraniums above, and the
High Street with the old church at the head had been full of an
agreeable afternoon stillness.

"Nice little place for business," said Platt sagely from behind his
big pipe.

It stuck in Mr. Polly's memory.


V

Mr. Polly was not so picturesque a youth as Parsons. He lacked
richness in his voice, and went about in those days with his hands in