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Two, who had served at Omdurman, but because the Misses Clegg had moved into the Avenue as long ago as 1911, when the “Rec” end of the Crescent was still unbuilt.
    The Cleggs came from a tiny parish in North Devon, where their father, the Rev. Hugh Clegg, D.D., had been vicar for over forty years. When he died, they had good reasons for moving far away from the area in which they had been born and brought up, and Edith chose the Avenue because it was the most rurally situated terrace house offered her by the London house-agents.
    At first she had been very homesick for the open skies of Exmoor, and the thin, misty rain that fell so persistently throughout eight months of the year, but as time went on she found herself preferring the casual neighbourliness of the suburb, and the undoubted convenience of the shops, to the stifling intimacy of the Devon village, and the wretched isolation of the grim old parsonage in which they had lived so long.
    Moreover, the Avenue seemed to suit Becky, whose “spells” had become far less frequent in the last few years, and werenow limited to less than one a month, not counting those brought on by the spring air-raids of 1917.
    All along the Avenue Becky was known as “the dippy sister.” This was chiefly on account of her occasional appearances, in the garden of Number Four, in a flannel nightdress, with her thick chestnut hair hanging down her back, but Becky's immodesty in this respect had nothing to do with her “spells”; they were occasioned by genuine anxiety for her cat, Lickapaw.
    Lickapaw was a huge, sullen-faced Tom, who repaid his mistress's frantic devotion by disappearing for long periods, in search of fresh wives. He sometimes stayed away a week, but he always came home in the end, to nurse his damaged whiskers and renew his spent vitality, on heaped-up platefuls of fresh fish and saucer after saucer of milk, spooned from the top of the can.
    Under Becky's ministrations Lickapaw quickly recovered from the effects of his sporadic debauchery, putting on flesh again, and sleeping, for days at a stretch, in the best armchair. Sometimes he slept for more than a week, occupying the chair all day, and the foot of Becky's bed at night, and on these nights she sometimes stayed awake until the small hours, delighting in his weight on her feet, and hardly daring to move for fear of disturbing his recuperative slumbers.
    Ultimately, however, he always went off into the nursery garden again, and then, night after night, Becky would “fish” for him, standing on a box placed against the fence that divided the Avenue gardens from the nursery, and dangling a piece of hake, or a kipper, from the end of a long string.
    These moonlit matinées were a source of great delight to the Carver boys, and to other children living lower down the Avenue. They would stay out late, risking good hidings on their return, solely for the pleasure of seeing Miss Clegg, looking a little like Lady Macbeth, jerk her kipper over the six-foot fence and call: “Lickapaw! Lickapaw! Come away from those nasty strays!”
    Edith, Becky's sister, jeopardised the popularity her natural warmth and generosity had earned among the children, by seeking to cut these entertainments short, and by tugginggently at Becky's nightdress, until she reluctantly stepped down from the box, and went disconsolately to bed.
    Poor Edith spent most of her life tugging her sister's garments, in one way or another, but she would not have had it otherwise, for her loving care of Becky, besides being a sisterly obligation, was part of a lifelong penance, imposed by the conviction that it was she, in large measure, who was responsible for Becky's periodical lapses.
    On nights like these, and those during Becky's “spells”, Edith's memory reconstructed every detail of that soft June night nearly twenty years ago, when Becky, a radiant young girl madly in love, had been compelled to confide in her sister because she needed money to