“Never mind, Pat. It’s been a topping drive,” said Francis consolingly.

It was nearly four o’clock; and his cousin’s wife had just emerged from her last disappointment—a drainless waterless abomination of mouldy stone-work, with acres of unkempt gardens, ten miles from anywhere among the bleak hills beyond Ipsden.

“Where now?” he went on.

“Home, I suppose,” said Patricia, drawing her map out of its case. “We’d better make for Henley, I think.”

She felt tired, out of patience. The house-agents were idiots: three of the places they recommended turned out to be glaring brick villas on the outskirts of Reading; at the fourth—a converted farmhouse near Bix—a long-haired foreigner had informed her, after gibbering for three quarters of an hour, that “vot he vanted vas to sell de place, not to let it”; the fifth, as far as they could ascertain from the inn at Nettlebed which gave them lunch, did not exist at all: to crown disaster she had wasted time, temper and petrol on this mid-Victorian mare’s-nest.

“It’s done me all the good in the world,” went on Francis. “For two pins I’d let my flat—the Lord knows if I’ll ever be able to manage those stairs again—and come to live in the country myself.”

“Apparently, you’d have to camp out in it,” said Patricia....

They climbed, sputteringly, up a rough road; dropped to an uninhabited valley; climbed again; left the bare lands behind. Now, their way led through burgeoning woods of beech and larch-trees past a quiet village-green, into woods again.

Patricia drove slowly. The scent and the silence of the woods summoned her, bidding her stay. She wanted to stop the car, to wander away all alone over that flower-strewn moss, down those long brown avenues, under that pale-green canopy of spring-time.

All day long “country” before her eyes had been calling to “country” in her veins. A long clear call, dominant, heart-compelling. The country! She knew so little of it; the simplest names of its trees and its flowers were mysteries to her. Yet the trees and the flowers spoke to Patricia that afternoon; spoke to her of happiness. “Here, here, here and here only,” they seemed to say, “will you find that for which you are seeking....”

And then, sudden as a dream, she saw the house of her dreaming. They were still among the woods; and the house—she knew—stood beyond the woods, at the brow of the hill. Yet Patricia saw it, clear and perfect in the eye of her mind—a long low red-roofed home, with square windows opening out from walls of mellow brick-work, criss-crossed with weather-beaten oak, onto terraced garden. Below the garden pastures sloped to dark-green tree-clumps; and beyond the tree-clumps, shining silver in the gaps between, wound the river....

The road forked. Instinctively Patricia swung the car left-handed. Trees closed in above them; macadam under their wheels narrowed to a turf-edged track.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Francis.

“Certain,” she answered; and drove on, between the serried tree-trunks,—beech and larch and alder, slim pillars of brown, gray-green and silver about their path.

“Look,” said Patricia, “the woods end.”

She spoke very quietly, pointing to the door of blue which widened as they climbed to it, letting them out from the trees. The car dropped a hundred yards between the warm coral-and-ivory of hawthorn hedgerows; seemed to stop of its own accord at a quaint red-walled brown-gabled house whose lower windows were almost level with the Crossley’s wheels.

“This isn’t the place,” thought Patricia. Yet somehow the peaked and ivied gable with its one leaded window looked familiar—familiar as the road they had climbed through the woods. Just under the window, half-hidden by the ivy, was an old sign-board: “T. Tebbits. Builder & Contractor,” read Patricia. But Francis, sharper-eyed, had seen the other sign which peered over the garden-hedge—a plain square of oak, newly painted with the words:—

“I say, Pat,” he said, pointing to it, “why not try here? ...”

There came out of the house a hatless man with weather-beaten face, clean-shaven except for the fringe of hair under his chin, bushy of eyebrows, dressed collarless in a rusty black cardigan jacket and corduroy-trousers. He had hard blue eyes, hairy ears, thin lips; might have been any age from fifty-five to eighty.

“Might you be wanting anything?” he asked.

“Are you Mr. Tebbits?” Patricia smiled down at him.

“That’s my name, missis.”

“We came about the houses,” went on Patricia, indicating the notice-board.

“Be you from the agents?” asked Mr. Tebbits suspiciously.

“No. We were just passing, and we thought....”

“Well, that’s a good thing.” The old man smiled grimly. “Because I won’t have no more agents. They be all robbers, it seems to me. Now what sort of a house was you looking for, missis? I asks because it’s no good a wasting your time if you wants the sort of house I hasn’t got. There be two of ’em, one’s a bit cottage-like and t’other’s bigger. But they bain’t neither of ’em what you’d call big.”

“Are they a long way away?” interrupted Patricia.

“Well, missis, one is middling far and t’other’s quite close. Sunflowers—that’s the name of the bigger one and a silly name it be, to my way of thinking, because there bain’t never a sunflower near it—her’s just up the road. T’other....”

“Could we go and see it, do you think?” Patricia interrupted again.

“Aye. If you’ll bide a minute, I’ll just go and get my cap.” He disappeared into the house; re-appeared.

“Now if you’ll drive on slowly, missis, I’ll follow you. ’Tis the first house you comes to on the left hand side of the road. ’Bout a hundred and fifty yards down, two hundred mebbe.”

Mr. Tebbits declined a lift, and they motored on without him; rounded a bend in the hedge-rows; and saw in front of them, half hidden by greenery, low red roofs that curled up to high red chimney-stacks and down to square windows, set in walls of mellow brick-work criss-crossed with the gray of weather-beaten oak.

Patricia’s heart gave a great leap: for this was the very home she had imagined as they came through the woods!

They drew up at a wooden gate, painted dull green, supported by low pillars of old brick-work between the hawthorn hedges; saw, peering through it, a small gravel-drive, a huge walnut tree just in leaf, and a long low house, door in centre, double-floored under projecting eaves.

“Francis,” cried Patricia, “this is it.”

He looked at her; saw a woman transformed. Her cheeks glowed; her lips were half-parted; her slumbrous eyes danced and kindled.

“My dear Pat ...” he began.

“Don’t tell me I haven’t seen it yet, Francis. Don’t tell me it won’t do; that the drains will be all wrong; that it’s a hundred miles from anywhere. Because I don’t care. This is going to be my home—mine and Peter’s....”

Mr. Tebbits found them by the gate.

“You been wounded, mister?” he asked, looking at the sticks Francis carried.

“Yes,” admitted Francis.

“Ah. At the war, I expect. This be a mighty bad war. I’ve got five sons there myself. All in the Ox and Bucks they be. Two’s Corporals. Charlie, he couldn’t go; nor Harry neither.” He turned to Patricia. “This be Sunflowers, missis. Likely you’d care to go in.”

He swung open the gate; held it while Francis hobbled through. “The paddick goes with the house,” explained Tebbits, “but if you wasn’t thinking ’bout keeping stock, I’d be just as glad to have it for my cows.”

Patricia looked dumbly over the knee-deep green to the sun-lit tree-fringe beyond. The house, her house, stood in a semi-circle of woodland; the green trees folded it lovingly. What did she care about keeping stock?

Mr. Tebbits drew a vast key from his trouser-pocket; opened the front-door.

“This be what we calls the hall,” he began, “the kitchens be along the passage....”

Mr. Tebbits talked, as the British peasant talks, interminably repetitive, all the time they were inspecting “Sunflowers.” But Patricia hardly heard him. Already in her mind she had taken the place; was settling herself and her family into it.

This hall now, with its deep fireplace, its windows either side the door, (which would need heavy brown-velvet curtains), must be the drawing-room. The dining-room, leading out of the drawing-room, would be small, still.... And the tiny “study” must be Peter’s. “Kitchen-range good,” thought Patricia. “Hope it doesn’t burn too much coal....”

She passed up the balustered stair-case, Tebbits clumping at her heels; found square bed-rooms, opening onto greenery, a good modern bath-room—(“wonder of wonders,” thought Patricia)—and, best of all, at the end of the corridor, running full-length of the north side, a long apartment which would be ideal for the children....

Of course, she had fallen in love with the place; meant to have it at all costs. Yet even Francis, who had as yet very little sense of home, admitted to himself, as he waited in the bare hall, the excellence of Sunflowers. It was a strange combination of solid pre-Georgian brickwork without; of old wood and modern plaster within.

Mr. Tebbits’ grandfather had converted it originally, from the shell of a three-hundred-year-old tithe barn; running his floor-boards over beams of oak; letting in the heavy fan-lighted front door, the deep window-sashes; throwing out the red-tiled square-beamed kitchen. Mr. Tebbits’ father had unroofed the kitchen, carefully, preserving his father’s tilework, added the long room above. Then the grandson of the original builder, dissatisfied with the narrow entrance corridor, had broken it down, joined it to the parlour. Till finally his son Charlie—(“he be a bit new-fangled be Charlie”)—had seized the opportunity presented when the new Company ran its mains over the hill, to modernize the water-supply, to construct a bath-room. (“An’ a good job they boys made of it, missis. These pipes, they be pipes.”)

It was while replastering and “making all good with Parian” that the idea of a “garrige” had come to Charlie Tebbits: and a “garrige” he and his brothers forthwith constructed, using (as their great-grandfather had used his tithe-barn) the shell of an old ramshackle stable, now concrete-floored and water-tight. But the “modern” stabling constructed by their father, the “boys” had not touched, except for the throwing of two stalls into a loose-box—just “case any one might be wanting it.”

Altogether, an amazing find. And amazing the fore-knowledge of this detail and that which overcame Patricia as she passed from room to room. But most amazing of all the certainty with which she flung open the Eastward window half-way up the staircase; looked out onto the gravel terrace, and the slopes of green pasturage dotted with dark tree-clumps through which, molten in the drooping sun, flashed far glimpses of the river Thames.

“That be Arlsfield village, missis,” explained Tebbits, pointing a two-mile-distant cluster of buildings above which the smoke spired lazily. “You can’t see the Hall from here. Them big chestnuts do hide it. Too close to the Hall, they be: and often I’ve told the old Colonel so myself. But he’s that set on his trees....”

“What’s the name of the Hall?” interrupted Pat.

“Arlsfield Hall, mum.”

And, for the second time, the name sounded familiar. Indeed in all that smiling prospect—jade fields of young wheat, emerald of pasture, trees and village and far-away river—only one feature puzzled Patricia. The oily magnolia-leaves at window-sill, she seemed to know; and the ochre gravel below, and every detail of the sloping country beyond them. But the slip of orchard, foaming in wave on wave of wave-green grass and snow-white blossom between her terrace and the country-side, her strange inward memories could not recall.

“Planted they trees ’bout twenty-five years ago. Good trees they be, too. Blenheims mostly,” said Tebbits....

It was long after five when Patricia finished her inspection. “Likely, you’d care for a dish of tea, missis,” invited the old man: and to tea in Mr. Tebbits’ kitchen the three went.

Miss Tebbits—she was sixty and the old man’s daughter all over, from thin lips to the hair in her ears,—served them their “dish of tea” in china which had no right to exist outside a museum; brought home-made cake, home-made bread, a great dish of saffron butter: and while the daughter served, her father talked.

“He didn’t believe in leases,” he told Patricia. “If so be she wanted the house, all she had to do was to say so. He’d always got his sixty pounds a year for it: ’cept when people didn’t keep stock. Then he took fifty-five. ’Twas a bit dear like, but his son Charlie wouldn’t have him take less....” And here the old man explained how Charlie had moved the building business to Arlsfield, leaving him and Harry with the farm. “I be a bit old for the building, missis. Turned eighty-five. But Charlie, he’ll do all the papering and the painting for you. We don’t let any one ’cept ourselves touch our houses....”

Tea over, he stood cap-in-hand to bid them good-bye.

“We’ll be down again tomorrow, Mr. Tebbits,” smiled Patricia, engine throbbing under her finger on the throttle-lever.

“Very good, missis. I’ll have Charlie come up here to meet you. Likely, if you take the house, there’ll be one or two things to talk over.”