Travelling north, they travelled backwards from early summer, through late and middle spring, and came to their own hill-top at last, to find the roads still grey and wrinkled with winter mud, and only the beeches green, for Brackenhurst was always three weeks behind the rest of Kent. Laura settled down with touching good faith to enjoy her spring all over again and more completely than before, because Oliver was left behind in Italy and could not interrupt. She actually believed, you see, that life will give you the same good gift twice over. Oh, of course, she did not expect to see so much of Justin now that she was at home.... Importantly she acknowledged her duties, her social and parochial duties, to Gran’papa and Aunt Adela and Brackenhurst.... And Justin would be going to business.... She was vague about his income and responsibilities, but she took it for granted that his days would be fully employed.

They were, but not as she expected. Aunt Adela was quite horrified when Laura’s notions were accidentally conveyed to her.

“Oh no, my dear, why shouldn’t he? Oh, of course old Mr. Cloud used to go up two or three times a week. His hobby—there was no real necessity. Besides, it’s been a company for years now. Mrs. Gedge told me so. Mrs. Gedge has shares. And Mrs. Cloud has money of her own as well. What should Justin Cloud go to business for?”

What indeed? Laura was only too pleased to find that Justin would have time on his hands. Firmly she suppressed the conviction of her industrious forebears, the inherited conviction that a man who did not begin work at nine in the morning and return worn out at half-past six, was somehow cheating the universe. And, since there was no need for Justin to work, set herself to help him to play.

But there again they differed.

They had talked about Architecture in the Italian play-ground, about Botticelli, and Carpaccio, and Dante, and Excavations, and Francis of Assisi, and Giotto, and so on steadily through the alphabet to Virgil and Zenobius. And vaguely, without actually canvassing the matter, she expected to go on thinking and talking to Justin about these entirely satisfactory and absorbing subjects for the rest of their natural lives. But she had reckoned without Justin, without old habits, and a flying visit to Bellew, and an enlarged but by no means completed collection crying out for attention. Art?—when nests were tucked away in the Brackenhurst hedges and nests swinging high in the Brackenhurst woods and birds rising from every tussock of green heather on flat-topped Brackenhurst Hill to mislead the enemy? Art? Art was in Italy, or if she must cross Europe with them at Laura’s invitation, Justin, like a sensible Briton, insisted on finding her lodgings in town. And there they had left her, the foreigner, the bored great lady, to yawn away her days in Chelsea attics and overheated galleries. Of course they promised to come and look her up constantly: and Laura meant, and Justin thought he meant, to keep that promise. But the train service from Brackenhurst was a slow one: and the weather was perfect.

Besides—didn’t Laura understand?—he enjoyed pottering round the fields with a collecting-box.

But after Botticelli—birds’ eggs?

I know. I know. It’s distressing. Naturally, you want an explanation: and if the case were a woman’s, I could satisfy you. I’m sure I could; for, if you can but happen upon it, there is always sound policy behind a woman’s wildest extravagance—drinks of pearl or Bartholomew Eves. But Nero fiddles because he enjoys fiddling and wants to see the pretty fire. And if we accept that elementality as, if not justifying, at least explaining our mere man, how much more must it suffice us in considerating that amiable reductio ad absurdum of a man that we call a collector. I am to explain to you a collector? I am to explain why a respectable elderly lawyer runs about Epping Forest with a butterfly net on Sunday afternoons? why your favourite jeune premier haunts a down-at-heel farmhouse for the twin china spaniels’ sake upon its parlour mantelpiece? why a square inch of orange paper changed hands the other day for near a thousand pounds? and why H. J. Cloud, Esq., after refreshing dalliance with the wonders of a wonderful world, returns, unconscious of incongruity, to his home, to his habit, to his hobby, to his beloved and incomparable birds’ eggs? How can I explain? What am I to say? Collectors are made that way. We must accept them as we accept love, or triplets, or earthquakes, as eccentricities of Nature, unaccountable but interesting.

Besides, I collect pewter myself.

So taking Justin for granted——But that, you see, is what Laura could not do.

Here was Justin, with his years, his brains, his position—why—why—he had been to Oxford! He would have been a B.A. if he hadn’t had influenza! He had been round the world! He knew interesting people! He had once been to dinner with Mr. Wells! A man like Justin could do anything he chose—go into Parliament—write a book (she was convinced that he could write a book if he would only take the trouble, for there was a something about his letters ...) and here he was, settling down to—to collecting birds’ eggs! Birds’ eggs!!

She put it to him once in desperation—“Why birds’ eggs?”

But then, as Justin said to her—“Why not?”

They never got farther than that.

But it was patent that Laura, slightly annoying to Justin though her attitude might be, must stick to her principles and remain aloof. And for a wavering, half-hearted week or two she did remain aloof, attending strictly to her own affairs, settling down to quiet life in Brackenhurst, to dusting the drawing-room and paying calls with Aunt Adela and bearing with a Gran’papa grown no younger and no less tetchy in two years. Out of the tail of her eye, however, she could observe Justin, missing her but little, it seemed, as, his camera hung from his shoulder, he passed her in Brackenhurst by-ways with a nod and a smile. That she could have borne longer, but when she next took tea at the Priory she found that Annabel Moulde, who had also left school and put up her hair and who wore a frock and a manner that made Laura feel childish, was also taking tea at the Priory, and that Justin (who had never liked Annabel) was nevertheless confiding to her, over chocolate Éclairs, items of oological interest that he ought to have been telling Laura. (Surely he ought to have been telling them to Laura?)

She said less about cruelty to parent birds, and the comparative value of a dead shell and a live songster as she stood beside Justin ten minutes later at his open cabinet and admired a fortnight’s spoils. Justin (I do not know why) had asked her to come and look at them, and Annabel (I do not know how) had been left in the drawing-room to talk to Mrs. Cloud. Annabel was calling on Mrs. Cloud, wasn’t she?

And Laura went out with Justin the next morning by invitation, and was sound on the axiom that birds could not count. On the following afternoon she was the proud discoverer of a willow-wren’s nest that Justin had overlooked, and their Saturday whole-day expedition to the Warren Woods beyond Beech Hill was such a success that it became a weekly institution.

Behold her then, one warm Friday night of June, retiring to bed at ten o’clock after a day of virtue and housewifery. Aunt Adela was away for the week-end: and after turning out the dining-room with Maud Ann; impressing her idea of chervil salad (acquired from sundry student festivals in forsaken Rue Honorine) upon Aunt Adela’s severely British cook; entertaining the Vicarage, that always mistook at-home days, with tea and small-talk; and playing double-dummy, grimly, with Gran’papa all the long light beckoning evening, she felt that she was at last and indeed a grown-up lady; but that as long as she had her Saturdays with Justin she could bear it. Behold her further, producing from the bottom of her hat-box a most private store of candles (Aunt Adela did not approve of young people reading in bed) washing out her newest blouse and ironing it then and there with the spirit iron that Mrs. Cloud had given her in Italy: and thereafter, tucked up in bed, absorbed in a chronique scandaleuse, with plates, of the thrush family (order Passeres), not to mention their cousins the warblers and the white-throats, and their collaterals the tits and the finches and the pipits and the shrikes, and so leave her, at last, in the dazed middle of a sentence, to sleep and the shifting pageant of her dreams.