The night after he had signed the agreement for Glen Cottage, Francis dined at Harley Street.

“A fine pair of idiots you two seem to have made of yourselves while I’ve been away,” commented Heron Baynet, who had just returned from a fortnight’s holiday, after listening for over an hour to the usual chatter of people obsessed with new possessions. “Within six months, you’ll both be yearning for London.”

“I wonder,” said Francis. “Certainly Arlsfield doesn’t possess a picture-palace....”

“Arlsfield,” interrupted the doctor, (as if by common consent, neither had mentioned the name of that unhappy village), “Arlsfield!”

For a moment he sat perfectly still, staring at one of the electric candle-sticks on the dinner-table: then he pulled note-book and pencil out of his pocket; turned to Patricia; and said, in the level voice of the consulting-room:—

“You mentioned a little while ago, Pat, that this house—what’s its name again?—Sunflowers—thanks—seemed familiar to you. I want you to describe to me, as accurately as you can, just in what way it seemed familiar.”

“Why do you want to know, pater?”

“Never mind about that. Tell me just how you felt both before you came to it and when you were in it....”

Astonished, Patricia began her story, doing her utmost to recall each fleeting sensation of that first afternoon.

“All except the orchard, I seemed to know perfectly,” she finished.

And her father, looking up from his note-book, said, “No. You couldn’t be expected to know about that. As far as I can recollect, there wasn’t one.”

Francis, instinctively setting a story, glanced first at the lined face of the little consultant, then into the astonished eyes of his daughter.

“Explain please, pater,” commanded Patricia. “What was it? One of those cases of pre-natal vision you’ve always wanted to confirm.”

“No such luck!” Her father closed the note-book, returned it to his pocket. “Very interesting though. You had seen the place before. When you were two years old, your mother and I drove you there—probably through the very road up which you and Francis motored. She wanted me to buy a country practice. Sunflowers—I’d forgotten the name till Francis mentioned Arlsfield—was a doctor’s house in those days. You ask old Tebbits and see if I’m not right.”

“Curious thing the human brain,” he went on, “always taking snap-shots—just like a camera. Stores its pictures away too, and keeps them for when they’re wanted. We’re working on this ‘picture’ theory now—for our shell-shock cases. If anything weakens the brain—a shock for instance, or overwork—the pictures get mixed up: confused, we call it. No one seems to know how soon the brain starts taking its snapshots: some say the process starts prior to birth. I don’t believe that.... Then there are imaginative pictures. You know the impression of reality a good book makes on you, or a well-told story....” He expanded the theory, ending: “It was because I didn’t want you to make imaginative pictures that I took my notes before I told you the truth.”

“Well I’m glad there was no mystery,” smiled Pat. “I don’t want any ghosts at Sunflowers.”

But Francis Gordon, whose writer’s brain could summon and set aside both real and imaginative pictures at will, sat very silent, visioning in pale gold against the dark panelling of his new home the head of a girl in America—a girl whose last letter had concluded:

“Somehow or other I don’t think I shall ever get married.”