Since it was I who discovered Philip Esdaile's painting-cottage for him I think I may claim that I know the Santon country fairly well. It is a vast and skyey upland east of the Wolds, and its edge drops in four hundred feet of glorious white cliff sheer to the sea. Everything there is on the amplest and most bountiful scale, from the enormous stretches of wheat and barley to the giant barns and huge horses and the very poultry of its farmyards. The only tiny thing about it is its church, and this stands in the middle of a daisied field, not by any means one of the largest, but that can hardly be less than a hundred acres. There is a shop-post-office, a short street mostly laithes as big as airship hangars, an opaque horse-pond, and a single telegraph wire the posts of which can be seen for miles diminishing away over the Wolds. The few trees are mostly thorn, all blown one way by the wind and as stiff and compact as wire mattresses.

And Joan herself fitted into all this Caldecott spaciousness as if she had been bred and born there. Half a mile away across the young corn you saw her white sweater at the cliff's edge, and it seemed part of the whiteness of the screaming seabirds, of the whiteness of the awful glimpses of chalk where the turf suddenly ended in air, of the crawling whiteness of the waves far below. And on the shore—but any young girl is a Nausicaa on any shore. Esdaile has drawn and painted her a score of times—young neck, fair thick yellow hair, the none-too-small white feet with the sand disappearing from them as she waded into the anemonied pools. Sometimes it was no more than a cryptic pencil-line, that, as you looked at it, suddenly became her uplifted arm and flank, or the balance of back and hips as she moved across the unsteady white stones. Sometimes the jotting was more abbreviated still, just a dab or two of color that placed her against fawn-colored sand or ribbon-grassed water. But always it was Joan romping as it were her last between the little Alan and Jimmy she mothered and those other dream-stuff children that did not call her mother yet.

I feel fairly certain that it was not in the very least on Philip Esdaile's account that she had given instructions at the Chelsea post-office for the readdressing of letters. Neither was it, as she had falsely said, "to save Mr. Rooke the trouble." Both Philip's stupid letters and Monty's convenience were very minor matters. The really important thing was her own letters. Some little delay her change of address was bound to entail; but if, after "1," "2," and "3" there must be a short pause, "4," "5" and the rest would arrive all in one blissful bag. And, pending her receipt of them, there was no reason why she should cease to write letters.

So, accompanied by the letter-case with the new lock on it, down to the shore she took the children on the first two mornings (which is something of a journey, by the way), and back in the afternoon she came to high tea at half-past four. On the first day she did not even trouble to walk on to the little post-office-shop. But on the second day she did, returning empty-handed to boiled fowl and white sauce, tall piles of Santon bread and Santon butter and Santon jam, pints of hot tea from the luster pot under the haystack cosy, and the children's clamor:—

"I saw a jellyfish as big as a cart-wheel!"

"'N Jimmy found seven starfishes!"

"I found eight starfishes!"

"'N I waded out till the water came right up to here!"

"'N I saw a polar bear——"

"Oh, Jimmy, what a story! You've just made that up this minute!"

This last in bell-voiced reproof from Joan. At twenty she still corrected and disputed with them as a rather larger equal.