JASMINE had protested against the visit to Silchester; and this protest was in the opinion of the Hector Grants conclusive evidence of a thwarted intention to corrupt poor old Uncle Matthew. Her resentment of the humiliating unconcern for her own dignity that was being displayed in thus sending her round from one group of relatives to another was brushed aside as no more than the expression of a natural chagrin at finding that her schemes had miscarried. They did not, of course, accuse her in so many words of being crafty; but Jasmine understood well enough at what they were hinting, and the consciousness that she had allowed Selina to discuss her prospects in the old gentleman's will, coupled with the memory of her own dreams of what she should do if he did leave his money to her, gave Jasmine a sufficiently acute sense of guilt to cut short any further opposition to the Silchester visit.

"I simply cannot understand your prejudice against the Deanery," Aunt May avowed. "There must be something else which you are trying to conceal." One of Aunt May's foibles was to regard as potential jackdaws everybody not situated so advantageously as herself. "It can't merely be that you don't want to greet your Aunt Ellen. There must be some other reason. I'm sorry your friend Mr. Vibart should have made such an unfortunate impression on poor old Uncle Matthew. But that is not our fault, is it?"

"I never said that anything was your fault, Aunt May," Jasmine responded. "I know perfectly well that everything is my fault, and that's why I don't want to upset any more of my relations by this behaviour of mine that they seem to find so dreadful."

"Nobody has found your behaviour dreadful," Aunt May gently contradicted. "Try not to exaggerate. I don't think I have ever called you anything worse than inconsiderate."

"Well, but you hate having me on your hands," Jasmine burst out. "You hate it. Why don't you let me go back to Sirene?"

"I've already explained to you," continued Aunt May more gently than ever, "I've already explained to you that your uncle could not accept such a responsibility. What would people say if a man in his position allowed his niece aged nineteen to set up an establishment on her own in a place like Italy?"

"People wouldn't say anything at all," Jasmine argued. "People are not so violently interested in me as all that."

"No, dear, that may be. But they are interested in your uncle, and we have to think of him, have we not? Besides, I should have supposed that you would have been glad to meet your poor father's only sister. She is the kindest of women, and Uncle Arnold is the kindest of men. I cannot say how painful it is for me to feel that I have not succeeded in rousing the least little bit of affection. I was ready to make all kinds of excuses for you last year when you first arrived. I realized that excuses had to be made then. But now you have been nearly a year in England, and it is surely not unreasonable to expect you to begin to show a little self-control. I'm afraid your visit to Uncle Matthew has done you no good. I was strongly opposed to it from the beginning and told Aunt Cuckoo as much quite plainly. But Aunt Cuckoo gets Ideas into her head. This turning Roman Catholic, this adopting a baby, this packing you off to poor old Uncle Matthew. Ideas! However, it is not our business to discuss Aunt Cuckoo.... You say you don't believe your relations in Silchester want you. I contend they have shown quite clearly that they do. And I should also like to point out that, if you decline to go, you will grievously wound your Aunt Ellen, who is not...."

"Very well, I'll go, I'll go! I'll do anything you want if you'll only stop lecturing me!" Jasmine could almost have flung herself on her knees before Aunt May if by doing so she could have stopped this conversation. There had been a sweet-shop on the way to the School of Swedish Culture, with an apparatus that went on winding endlessly round and round a skein of fondant that apparently always remained of the same size and consistency. Jasmine used to avert her head at last as she went by, so depressing became the sight of that sweet and sticky mess being wound round and round and round ... her aunt's little talks reminded her of it.

Aunt May confided in Cousin Edith after this outburst that she had wondered for a minute or two if Jasmine was really human. Cousin Edith tried to look as though she still wondered if Jasmine was really human, and all she got for her desire to be agreeable was to be asked if she had a stiff neck.

It was quarter day by now, and Jasmine was advised to spend her allowance on suitable summer frocks; she was also advised not to buy too many, because next quarter day she would be requiring suitable autumn frocks, and she was to bear in mind that clothes for autumn and winter were more expensive. Jasmine longed to refuse her allowance, but her vanity was too strong for her pride; unable to contemplate appearing before her six boy cousins in the dowdy remains of last year's wardrobe, she accepted the money, and despising herself for being so weak, she bought a flowered muslin frock and a white linen coat and skirt, the latter of which was condemned as an extravagance by Aunt May, who had no belief in the English climate. Jasmine might have spared herself the humiliation of accepting Uncle Hector's allowance, because a day or two later Aunt Cuckoo, in a rapture over some alleged conversational triumph of Baboose, sent her a present of five pounds, over which Cousin Edith sizzled but a little less appetizingly than if it had been a present from Aunt May herself.

"Well, I declare," she exhaled. "If you aren't a lucky girl!"

And as the lucky possessor of five pounds all her own, Jasmine set out next day to meet another set of rich relatives.

The journey to Silchester in glowing blue midsummer weather through the fat pasture lands of Berkshire and Hampshire gave Jasmine such a new and such a pleasurable aspect of England that she began to wonder if she had been suffering all this year from a jaundiced point of view, if indeed Aunt May's assumption of martyrdom had any justification from her own behaviour. This landscape through which the train was passing with such an effect of deliberate and conscious enjoyment, with such an air of luxuriousness really, soothed her mind, warmed her heart, put her soul to bed and tucked it comfortably and safely in for some time to come. She determined to meet her new uncle and aunt in the same spirit as the train's; they were to be the natural products of such a landscape, and whether they placidly accepted her arrival like those rotund sheep or whether they threw their legs in the air and swished their tails like those lean and spotted cows pretending to be frightened of the train, she would survey them as amiably and as philosophically. Jasmine was smiling at herself for using such a long word when they ran into a tunnel, one of those long smelly tunnels in which the train seems to bang itself from side to side in despair of ever getting out. Yes, thought Jasmine, even if Uncle Arnold and Aunt Ellen were as stiff as this window, as unreceptive and unsympathetic as this strap and as ungenerous as the blue electric bulb in the roof of the compartment, she would still be philosophical, oh yes, and very very amiable, she vowed as the train escaped from the tunnel, and the air odorous with sun and grass deliciously fanned her. As for Harry Vibart, it was absurd to go on thinking of him. She might as well fall in love with a jack-in-the-box. Fall in love? She detected a faster heart-beat, a suggestion of creeping gooseflesh. Fall in love? Jasmine would have liked to lecture her own self now; she felt as censorious of her involuntary self as Aunt May. But it was no fun to lecture one's involuntary self unless it were done viva voce, and if she did that the woman on the other side of the carriage, who ever since Waterloo had been fecklessly trying to separate the green gooseberries in her string bag from the cracknel biscuits and French beans, might be alarmed. But how could she have ... of course it wasn't really his fault about the stick; in fact, he probably considered himself badly treated in the matter. But he must not come down to Silchester and create another scene there. Besides, what right or reason had she to let him come down there? He had never given her the slightest justification for supposing that he was anything more than mildly interested in her. To be sure, he had insisted that he had written to her half a dozen times. But had he? The proper course of action for herself, the dignified and in the circumstances the easiest attitude for her to adopt, was one of kindly discouragement. Yes, she would write to him from the Deanery and tell him plainly that she hoped he would not think of coming down to visit her there. She had just reached this decision when the train steamed into Silchester station.

Jasmine was waiting on the platform in the expectation of being presently accosted by any one of the several dowdy women round her when both her arms were roughly grabbed and she found herself apparently in the custody of two boy scouts.

"I say, are you Cousin Jasmine?" asked the smaller of the two in a squeaky voice.

Simple and obvious though the question seemed, it had an extraordinary effect on the other boy, who instantly let go of her arm in order to engage in what to Jasmine's alarmed vision looked to be a life-and-death struggle with his companion, which did not end until the smaller boy had cried in his squeaky voice 'Pax, Edred,' several times. Edred, however, was for prolonging the agonies of the requested armistice by twisting his brother's arm—for the ferocity with which they had fought was surely a sign that they were as intimately related—and making numerous conditions before he agreed to grant a cessation of hostilities.

"Will you swear not to chisel again if I let go your arm?"

"Yes, I swear."

"Will you swear not to be a rotten little chiseller, and when I say 'bags I asking' next time not go and ask yourself straight off?"

"Yes, I swear. Oh, shut up, Edred. You're hurting my arm most frightfully. You are a dirty cad!"

"What did you call me?" Edred fiercely enquired with a repetition of the torture.

"I said you were a frightfully decent chap. Ouch! You devil! The decentest chap in all the world."

"Well, kneel down and lick my boot," Edred commanded loftily, "and you can have pax."

"No, I say, don't be an ass," protested the younger. "Ouch! Shut up! You'll break my wrist if you don't look out, you foul brute!"

And then, in despair at the severity of the armistice conditions, he wrenched himself free and returned with fury to the attack. The fresh struggle continued until an old gentleman was knocked backward over a luggage truck, after which Edred told his brother to shut up fighting, because people were beginning to stare at them.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Cousin Jasmine," he said genially, "but I had to give young Ethelred a lamming for being such a beastly little cheat. He's too jolly fond of it."

"Speak for yourself," Ethelred retorted. "You know mother said I'd got to come with you this time." And then he turned in explanation to Jasmine. "The last time Edred bagged going to see Canon Donkin off from the station he stood on the step outside the carriage door all the way along the platform until the train was going too fast for him to jump off, the consequence of which was he got carried on to Basingstoke. Father was sick as muck about it."

"It was rather a wheeze," said Edred simply but proudly. "I very nearly fell off. I would have, if old Donkin hadn't got hold of my collar. And I had an ice at Basingstoke," he added tauntingly to his brother.

"Well, so could I have had an ice too if I'd done the same, greedy guts," replied the brother.

"No, you couldn't."

"Yes, I could."

And the fight would have begun all over again if Jasmine had not entreated them to find her luggage. As this process involved making a nuisance of themselves in every direction they accepted the job with alacrity. When the trunk was found, Edred suggested as rather a wheeze that Ethelred should have it put on his back like a porter, and Ethelred, in high approval of such a course, accepted the position with zest. He was swaying about on the platform to the exquisite enjoyment of his brother when an old lady, who was evidently a stranger to Silchester, asked Jasmine if she was not ashamed to let a little boy like that carry such a heavy trunk. At that moment Ethelred was carried forward by the impetus of the trunk, which slid over his shoulders, and cannoned into the stream of people passing through the ticket barrier. The odd thing was that none of the station officials seemed to interfere with the behaviour of her cousins until the ticket collector, from having had most of his tickets knocked out of his hand, lost his temper momentarily and aimed a blow at Ethelred with his clip.

"How are we going to the Deanery?" Jasmine enquired when at last to her relief she found herself on the edge of the kerb outside the station.

"Edwy's going to drive us in the governess-cart," they informed her. Jasmine had not the slightest idea what a governess-cart was; but it sounded a fairly safe kind of vehicle.

"Edwy's rather bucked at driving you," said Edred. "He's going to pretend it's a Roman chariot. You'll be awfully bucked too," he added confidently to his cousin. "It's rather hard cheese we've got your luggage, because it will make a squash. I say, why shouldn't we leave it here?"

"Oh no, please," Jasmine protested.

"Right-o," said Edred. "But it would be quite safe here on the kerb. You see, Ethel and I wanted to drive, and if you left your luggage here we could come back and fetch it."

Jasmine, however, was firm in her objection to this plan, and at that moment a fat boy of about fifteen, whose voice was at its breaking stage, was seen standing up in a governess-cart shouting what Jasmine recognized as the correct language of a Roman charioteer from The Last Days of Pompeii. She asked the other two which cousin this was.

"I say, don't you know?" Edred exclaimed in incredulous surprise. "That's old Edwy, only we call him Why, and we call me Because, and we call Ethelred Ethel."

"No we don't, so shut up," contradicted Ethelred.

"Well, he looks like a girl, doesn't he, Cousin Jasmine?"

Jasmine was spared the embarrassment of a reply by Edwy's pulling up with the governess-cart.

"Did you win?" both the younger brothers asked eagerly.

Edwy nodded absently; his whip had coiled itself round a lamp-post. Greetings between herself and this third cousin over, Jasmine was invited to get in and recommended to sit well forward and not get tangled up with the reins. Her box was placed opposite her, and the younger boys mounted.

"Good Gum," Edwy exclaimed with contempt. "We can't race anything with this load, can we?"

Jasmine, perceiving the narrow High Street of Silchester winding before her, was thankful for the news.

"I tell you what we could do," Edred suggested. "We could pretend that it was three chariots, and that we were all three driving one against the other."

Edwy considered this offer for a moment, then "Right-o" he agreed calmly, and off they went. It might have been less dangerous if Edwy had raced another cart as originally intended, because with the convention they were then following both his younger brothers had to have a hand on the reins. They also had to have a turn with the whip. The extraordinary thing to Jasmine was that this reeling progress down the High Street did not seem to attract a single glance. She commented on the public indifference, and the boys explained that the natives were used to them.

"Monday and Tuesday were much worse than we are," said Edred.

"Monday and Tuesday?"

"Edmund and Edgar. The pater was only a Canon Residentiary in those days. He's been Dean for six years now. He's the youngest Dean that ever lived. Or the youngest Dean alive; I forget which. Then he was Regius Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford."

"The youngest Dean that ever lived in Silchester, you ass," interposed Edwy with a gruff squeak.

"Oh well, it's all the same, and ass yourself!"

Jasmine, who feared the effect of another fight in the cart, changed the subject with an enquiry about Oxford.

"I can't remember being there," said Ethelred proudly. And his elder brothers appeared quite jealous of what was evidently a family distinction.

"Last lap!" Edwy shouted. "Don't go on jabbering about Oxford."

They were driving along a quiet road of decorous Georgian houses, at the end of which was a castellated gateway.

"Here's the Close," Edred cried as they passed under the arch into a green and grey world. "Blue leads! Blue leads!"

"Shut up, you fool, I'm Blue!" yelled the youngest.

While the rival charioteers punched each other behind their brother's back, Purple in the personification of Edwy pulled up at the Deanery and claimed to be the victor. The serenity of the Close after that break-neck drive from the station was complete. The voices of the charioteers arguing about their race blended with the chatter of the jackdaws speckling the great west front of the Cathedral in a pleasant enough discordancy of sound that only accentuated the surrounding peacefulness. Upon the steps that led up to the west door the figures of tourists or worshippers appeared against the legended background no larger than birds. At no point did the world intrude, for the houses of the dignitaries round their quadrangle of grass had nothing to do with the world, and if a town of Silchester existed, it was hidden as completely by the massed elm trees that rose up behind the low houses of the Dean and Chapter as the ancient Roman city was hidden in the grass that now waved above its buried pavements and long lost porticoes.

"It really is glorious here, isn't it?" Jasmine exclaimed.

"Yes, it's rather decent," Edred allowed. "We've got a swannery at the back of our garden, and that's rather decent too. They get awfully waxy sometimes. The swans, I mean," he supplemented. And in such surroundings, Jasmine felt, even swans had no business to lose their tempers.

The Deanery itself was externally the gravest and most impressive of the many grave and impressive houses round the Close. Beheld thus it presented such an imperturbable perfection of appearance that before he knocked upon its door or rang its bright brass bell, the most self-satisfied visitor would always accord it the respect of a momentary pause. But when the door was opened—and it was opened by a butler with all the outward and visible signs of what a decanal butler ought to be—that air of prosperous comfort, of dignity and solid charm, vanished. It was not that the entrance-hall was ill-equipped. Everything was there that one could have expected to find in a Dean's hall; but everything had an indescribably battered look, the irreverent mark that an invading army passing through Silchester might have left upon the Deanery, had some of the soldiers been billeted there. It was haunted by a sense of everything's having served some other purpose from that for which it was originally intended, and the farther one penetrated into the house the more evident were the ravages of whatever ruinous influence had been at work. Even Jasmine with her slight experience of English houses was taken aback by the contradiction between the exterior and the interior of the Deanery. She was used to entering Italian palaces and finding interiors as bare and comfortless as a barrack; but in them the discomfort and bareness had always been due to the inadequate means of their owners. It was certainly not poverty that caused the contradiction at the Deanery. The solution of the puzzle burst upon her when with a simultaneous onrush her cousins, each shouting at the top of his voice 'Bags I telling the mater Jasmine is here,' stormed the staircase like troops. The butler, listening to their yells dying away along the landing above, paused for a moment from the gracious pomp of his ministrations and observed to Jasmine: "Very high-spirited young gentlemen."

"But is the pony quite safe?" she asked, looking back to where the governess-cart with her trunk still inside was waiting driverless outside the door.

"Yes, miss, she's not a very high-spirited animal, and she's usually very quiet after the young gentlemen have driven her."

Again the yells resounded, this time with increasing volume as the three boys drew nearer, leaping, sliding, rolling, and cannoning down the staircase abreast. Jasmine received a thump from Edred, who was the first to reach her, a thump that was evidently the sign of victory, because the other two immediately resigned her to his escort for the necessary presentation to her aunt, while they went out to attend to the pony.

Aunt Ellen's room had escaped the pillaged appearance which upstairs at the Deanery was even more conspicuous than below; it was crowded with religious pictures in religious Oxford frames, religious Gothic furniture, and religious books. Apart from the fruit of her own religious tastes, Aunt Ellen had directly inherited from the Bishop of Clapham his religious equipment (accoutrements would be too highly coloured a word for the relics of that broad-minded prelate); and perhaps because she was fond of her episcopal father she had hesitated to sacrifice his memory, together with her husband and the rest of the household, upon the common altar of those six household gods, her sons. At any rate, when she carefully explained to her niece that the room was a sanctuary not so much for her own use as for old time's sake, Jasmine accepted its survival as due to some sentimental reason. But if Aunt Ellen's room had escaped, Aunt Ellen herself had certainly not. The weather-beaten gauntness of Uncle Eneas and Uncle Hector was in Aunt Ellen much exaggerated, although an aquiline nose preserved her from being what she otherwise certainly would have been, a grotesque of English womanhood, or rather, what English people would like to consider a grotesque of English womanhood; Jasmine, however, with many years' experience of English tourists landing at Sirene after a rough voyage across the Bay of Naples, considered Aunt Ellen to be typically English. She had acquired that masculine look which falls to so many women who have produced a number of sons. When Jasmine knew her better she found that her religious views and emotions resembled the religious views and emotions that are so widely spread among men of action, such as sea captains and Indian colonels. Her ignorance of anything except the gentlemanly religion of the professional classes was unlimited; her prejudice was unbounded. Jasmine soon discovered that the main reason why she had not been invited to the Deanery before was her aunt's fear of introducing a papist into the household. It was this, apparently, that weighed much more with her than the accounts she had received from Lady Grant of their niece's behaviour. True, she informed Jasmine that she had been anxious to correct the looseness of her moral tone. But how could she compete with priest-craft? She actually asked her niece this! Her religious apprehensions were only overcome by the menace of waking up one morning to find Jasmine the sole heiress of Uncle Matthew's fortune, which, as she wrote to her sister-in-law, without presuming to impugn the disposition of God, would be entirely unjust. It was not that she dreaded a direct competition with her own boys, because, proud though she was of them and of herself for having produced them, she never deceived herself into supposing that a personal encounter between them and their uncle would be anything but fatal, not merely to their chances of ultimate wealth, but also to her own. On her own chances she did build. She could not believe that her uncle (painfully without belief in a future state as he was) would ignore the rights of a niece married to the Dean of Silchester. After all, a Dean was something more than a religious figure; he was a worldly figure. Aunt Ellen was sharply aware of the might of a Dean, because that might was mainly exercised by her, the Dean himself by now taking not the least interest in anything except the history of England before the Conquest. Jasmine had derived an entirely false impression of her aunt from her letters, which, filled as they were with religious sentimentality, suggested that Aunt Ellen was softer than the rest of the family, that perhaps she was even like her own beloved father. She found, however, that except where her sons were concerned Aunt Ellen was hard, fierce, martial, and domineering. All her affection she had kept for her sons, all her duty for God. Jasmine was not so much discouraged as she might have been by her aunt's personality, because she found at any rate her three youngest cousins a great improvement on Lettice and Pamela, and if the three eldest ones turned out to be only half as amusing, she felt that she should not dislike her visit to the Deanery. Besides, she had the satisfaction of knowing that this was quite definitely only a visit, and that there was no proposal pending to attach her permanently to the household as a poor relation.

Jasmine did not discover all this about her aunt at their first meeting; the conversation then was crammed with the commonplace of family news; and how Aunt Ellen would have resented the notion that any news about the Grants could be described as commonplace! She might have gone on talking until tea-time if Edred's continuous kicking of the leg of her father's favourite table had not suggested a diversion in the form of Jasmine's long-delayed introduction to the Dean. She had hesitated to interfere directly with her son's harmless if rather irritating little pleasure; but the varnish was beginning to show signs of Edred's boots, and she announced that, although Uncle Arnold was working, he would no doubt in the circumstances forgive them for disturbing him.

Jasmine smiled pleasantly at the implied compliment, not realizing that the circumstances were the table's, not hers.

"I say, need I go?" asked Edred. He dreaded these visits to the study, because they sometimes ended in his being detained to copy out notes for his father.

"No, dear, you need not go."

Edred dashed off with a whoop of delight, turning round in the doorway to shout to Jasmine that he would be in the garden with Why and Ethel should she wish presently to be shown the swans.

"Poor boy," sighed Aunt Ellen when he was gone, and upon Jasmine's asking what was the matter with him, she told her that he had just failed for Osborne.

"It's such a blow to him," she murmured in a plaintive voice that was ridiculously out of keeping with her rockbound appearance. "If he had passed, he had made up his mind to become an admiral, and now I suppose we must send him back to school in September. Poor little boy, he's quite heartbroken. I've had to be very gentle with him lately."

Jasmine supposed it might be tactless to observe that Edred showed no signs of heartbreak, and instead of commenting she enquired sympathetically what Ethelred was going to do.

"Ah, poor Ethelred's a great problem. He wants to be an engineer, and really he is very clever with his fingers; but his father is quite opposed to anything in the nature of technical education until he's had an ordinary education. I think myself it is a pity, but Uncle Arnold is quite firm on that point. Ethelred was at Mr. Arkwright's school until Easter, but the school doctor wrote and told us that he thought the air on the east coast was too bracing for him. In fact, he insisted on his leaving for the dear boy's own sake."

"And Edwy?"

"Ah, poor Edwy! His heart is weak, and we can only hope that with care he will become strong enough for the Army by the time he goes to Sandhurst."

"Is his heart very weak?" Jasmine asked.

"Oh, very weak," her aunt replied, "and he has set it—his heart, I mean—on being a soldier, and so he is working with Canon Bompas, one of the minor canons. A great enthusiast of the Boy Scout movement. A delightful man who was in the Army before he took Orders, and who, as he often says jokingly, though of course quite reverently, still belongs to the artillery. He is a bachelor, though of course," added Aunt Ellen, "not from conviction. As you perhaps know, the Church of England is opposed to celibacy of the clergy. Yes, poor Edwy! He had such a lovely voice. I wish it hadn't broken just before you arrived."

It was hard to believe that Edwy's voice, which now alternated between the high notes of a cockatoo and the low notes of a bear, had ever been beautiful, and Jasmine was inclined to ascribe its alleged beauty to maternal fondness.

"Edmund and Edgar won't be back from Marlborough until the end of the month; but Edward is coming in a fortnight. He delighted us all by winning a scholarship at Trinity. He's so happy at Cambridge, dear boy; though I think everybody is happy at Cambridge, don't you?"

Jasmine agreed, though she really had no opinion on the subject.

"Well, come along," said her aunt, "and we'll go and find your uncle. Quite a walk," she added, "for his study is at the far end of the top storey. His library is downstairs, of course, but he found that it didn't suit him for work, and though it's rather inconvenient having to carry books backwards and forwards up and downstairs, we all realize how important it is that he should be quiet, and nobody minds fetching any book he wants."

This was said with so much meaning that Jasmine immediately visualized herself carrying books up and down the Deanery stairs day in day out through the whole of the summer.

"I told you about the difficulty he had with his typewriting, and how anxious he was that Ethelred should learn, but the dear boy's mind was so bent on mechanics that he was always taking the machine to pieces. Very cleverly, I'm bound to say. But of course it occupied a good deal of his time. So now he practises the piano again instead. People tell me he's very musical."

While Aunt Ellen was talking, they were walking up and down short irregular flights of stairs and along narrow corridors, the floors of which were billowy with age, until at last they came to a corridor at the head of which was a large placard marked SILENCE.

"The boys are not allowed along here," said their mother with a sigh, as if by not being allowed along here they were being deprived of the main pleasure of their existence.

"Uncle Arnold does not like us to knock," she explained when they came to the door at the end of the corridor, on which was another label DO NOT KNOCK. She opened the door, and Jasmine was aware of a long, low, sunny room under a groined ceiling, the gabled windows of which were shaded with lucent green. The floor was littered with docketed papers and heaped high with books from which cardboard slips protruded. From the fact that the windows looked out on the Close instead of on the garden, Jasmine divined that the Cathedral Close was considerably quieter than the Deanery garden. Seated at a large table at the far end of the room was her uncle, or rather what she supposed to be her uncle, for her first impression was that somebody had left a large ostrich egg on the table.

"Jasmine," her aunt announced.

The ostrich egg remained motionless; but the scratching of a pen and the slow regular movement of a very plump white hand across a double sheet of foolscap indicated that the room contained human life. At the end of a minute the egg lifted itself from the table, and Jasmine found herself confronted by a very bright pair of eyes and offered that very plump white hand. After meeting so many tall, gaunt relatives, it was a great pleasure to meet one who was actually shorter than herself. It was not merely that the Dean was shorter than herself which attracted her. He was regarding her with an expression that, had she not been assured of his entire attention's being concentrated upon Anglo-Saxon history, she would have supposed to be friendly, even affectionate; at any rate it was an unusually pleasant expression for a relative. It was probably that first impression of the Dean's head as an ostrich egg which led her to compare him to a bird; but the longer she looked at him—and she had to look quite a long time because her uncle said nothing at all—the more she thought he resembled a bird. His eyes were like a bird's, small, bright, hard, and round; he put his head on one side like a bird; and his thin legs, encased in gaiters beneath that distinct paunch, completed the resemblance.

"Not finished yet, my dear?" his wife asked in the way in which one asks an invalid if he should like to sit up for an hour or two while the sun was shining.

"No, my dear, not quite," the Dean replied; and his voice had a trill at the back of it like a bird's. "About six more volumes."

Mrs. Lightbody sighed. "The way he works! But don't forget, my dear, that the Archdeacon is coming to dinner."

In some odd way Jasmine divined that the Dean thought 'Damn.' She felt like somebody in a fairy tale who is granted the gift of understanding the speech of animals and the tongues of birds. What he actually said was: "Delightful! Don't open the '58 port. Foljambe has no palate."

He had put his head more than ever on one side by now, so that with one eye he was able to read over what he had just been writing, looking at the foolscap as a thrush contemplates a snail before he attacks it.

"I'm afraid that we—I mean that I've disturbed your work," Jasmine murmured.

"Yes," agreed the Dean, and so rapidly did he sit down that his niece was scarcely conscious of the movement until she saw the ostrich egg lying on the table again.

"Now I must take Jasmine to her room," proceeded Aunt Ellen, and she managed to convey in her tone that it was the Dean who had interrupted her and not she the Dean. He did not reply vocally; but as his hand travelled along the paper, a short white forefinger raised itself for a moment in acknowledgement of her remark, and then quickly drooped down to the penholder again.

Jasmine did not suppose that she had made any impression on her uncle, and she felt rather sad about this, because she was sure that if he would only give her an opportunity of being her natural self he would find her sympathetic. She was surprised, therefore, when he and Archdeacon Foljambe arrived in the drawing-room that evening after dinner, to perceive her uncle making straight for herself, exactly like a water wagtail with his funny little strut and funny little way of putting his hands behind his coat and flirting his tail.

"Can you type?" he asked.

And the twinkle in his eyes seemed to endow his question with a suggestion of daring naughtiness, so that when Jasmine told him that she did type, she felt that she was admitting the presence of a lighter side to her nature.

"Come up to my study to-morrow morning about half-past nine. I'll have a chair cleared for you by then."

And thus it was that Jasmine found herself booked to help Uncle Arnold every morning of the week. Yet in helping him she was not in the least aware of being made use of; on the contrary the work had a delicious flavour of impropriety. The machine itself was a good one, so good that it had survived Ethelred's attempted dissection of it; and Uncle Arnold, who when a difficult Anglo-Saxon problem required solution used to tap upon the table with his fingers, did not seem to mind the noise the typewriter made any more than a nuthatch on one branch might object to the pecking of a yaffle at another. Jasmine, remembering that her aunt had alluded in her first letter to the Dean's dislike of constantly changing typists, asked him one day on their way down to lunch why he had had so much trouble with his secretaries.

"One used a particularly vicious kind of scent. Another was continually scratching at her garter. One used to breathe over my head when she came across to give me what she had been doing. Another thought she knew how to punctuate. And one who had studied history at Lady Margaret's quoted Freeman against me! My clerical position forbade me to swear at them. My brain in consequence became surcharged with blood. So I used to work them to death, and when one of them who refused to be worked to death and refused to give notice ... Jasmine! this must never go beyond you and me...."

"No, Uncle Arnold," she promised eagerly. "But do tell me how you got rid of her."

"I used to put drawing pins on her chair. Not a word to a soul! My wife would suspect me of being a papist like yourself if she found out, and the Bishop, who now thinks I'm mad, would then be sure of it. Never let a bishop be sure of anything. He thrives on ambiguity."

Apart from her work with the Dean, Jasmine enjoyed herself immensely in garden games with the three youngest boys. The Deanery garden was a wonderful place, and to Jasmine it afforded a complete explanation of the affection that English people had for England. She had been so unhappy all this past year that she had come to think of Italy as having the monopoly of earth's beauty. But this garden was as beautiful as anything in Italy, this garden with wide green lawns, bird-haunted when she looked out of her window in the lucid air of the morning, bird-haunted when at dusk she would gaze at them from the candle-lit dining-room. The shrubberies here were glossy and thick, not at all like the shrubbery at Rouncivell Lodge. A high wall bright with snapdragon bounded the garden on the side of the Cathedral, and beyond it loomed the south transept and a grove of mighty elms. There was a lake in which floated half a dozen swans that puffed themselves out with esteem of their own white grace, while in the water they regarded those mirrored images of themselves, the high-sailing clouds of summer, or perhaps more proudly their own splendid ghosts. There was an enclosed garden where fat vegetables were girdled with familiar flowers, blue and yellow and red, an aromatic garden loud with bees. Finally there was an ancient tower, the resort of owls and bats, which the Dean sometimes spoke of restoring. But he never did; and the mouldering traceries, the lattices long empty of glass, and the worm-eaten corbels of oak grey with age went on decaying all that fine July. It would have been a pity to restore the tower, Jasmine thought, and replace with sharp modern edges that dim and immaterial building in its glade of larches. The dead lower branches of the trees wove a mist for the paths, on the pallid grass of which grew clusters of orange and vermilion toadstools; it would be a pity to intrude on such a place with the tramp of restoring workmen.

Jasmine's zest in the middle ages, her absorption in pre-Norman days, her surrender to the essential England were at first faintly troubled by having to attend mass at a little Catholic mission chapel built of corrugated iron. But from being pestered by Aunt Ellen to compare the facilities for worship in Silchester Cathedral with those in the church of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, she began to wonder if the externals of history could effect as much as she had supposed. If the Cathedral was spacious, the mind of Aunt Ellen was not; if the church of the Immaculate Conception was tawdry ... but why make comparisons? She had never noticed in Sirene how ugly sham flowers looked upon the altar; when she made this discovery in Silchester, she was instantly ashamed of herself; and when she looked again, it seemed as if the gilt daisies in their tarnished vases were alive, as if they were nosegays gathered in Italy. If the church of the Immaculate Conception, Bog Lane, was hideous, what about the English church at Sirene? That was a poky enough affair. But again, why make comparisons? There were rich relatives and poor relations in churches just as much as in everything else.

Jasmine was fighting loyally against her inclination to criticize, when one blazing day at the end of July the Dean proposed a visit to the remains of Roman Silchester, at which his three sons expressed horror and dismay.

"Why, what's the matter with Old Silchester?" she asked.

"Oh, it's a most stinking bore! A most frightful fag!" groaned Edred.

"Father makes us sweat ourselves to death digging in the sun," croaked Edwy.

"And last time when I chivied a Holly Blue, or it may have been only a Chalk Hill Blue, he cursed me like anything," lamented Ethelred.

The boys groaned again in unison.

"There's nothing to see."

"There's nothing to do."

"It's absolutely foul."

"Father jaws all the time about history, which I hate," said Edred. "I say, can't you put him off taking us?"

But Jasmine declared that they were horribly unappreciative, and declined to intervene.

"Well, anyway," said Ethelred hopefully, "Lord George Sanger's Circus is coming the second week in August."

The thought of that sustained the boys to face a long summer's day among the ruins of the ancient city.

In the end the day was delightful. The Dean preferred his niece as a listener to his sons, and as Mrs. Lightbody had been unable to come, he was not driven by her irritating crusade on behalf of the boys' amusement to insisting upon their attention. The result was that they vanished soon after lunch to hunt butterflies, while the Dean expounded his theory of Old Silchester. Jasmine sat back enjoying the perfume of hot grass, the murmurous air, the gentle fluting of a faint wind, while the Dean proved conclusively that the Saxon invasion utterly swept away every trace of Roman civilization in Britain. The Dean's shadow while he wandered backward and forward among the scanty remains grew longer, and beneath his exposition the Roman Empire, so far as its effect on England was concerned, went down like the sun. Jasmine had been asleep, and she woke up suddenly in the fresh airs of sunset. Half a mile away the boys were coming back over the expanse of grey-green grass to display their captures.

"And how pathetic it is," the Dean was saying, "to think of this outpost of a mighty empire succumbing so easily to those invaders from over the German ocean. The last time they excavated here at all systematically, they turned over some of the rubbish heaps of the camp. Curiously enough they actually found the skins of the nutty portion of the pine-cone from Pinus Pinea, which is eaten to this day in southern Italy."

"Pinocchi!" cried Jasmine, leaping to her feet in excitement.

"Yes, pinocchi," the Dean confirmed. "The soldiers must have had packets of them sent from Rome by their sweethearts and wives and mothers. And that is one more proof that they remained strangers, whereas the Saxons bred themselves into the soul of the country."

While they jogged back in the waggonette through the twilight, Jasmine dreamed of those dead Roman soldiers, and herself longed for freshly roasted pinocchi. The boys jabbered about butterflies. The Dean went to sleep.

"I'm enjoying myself here comparatively," said Jasmine to herself that night. "But only comparatively. I still love Italy best."

But she was enjoying herself, and she hoped that she should not have to leave Silchester yet awhile.