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and Searle leaning on the little side gate into the Trimmings garden and laughing together like a pair of children. She came up behind them along the field path from the church, and was dismayed by some quality of loveliness, of youth, that belonged to their gaiety. A quality that was not apparent in any communion between Liz and Walter.
    'What I like best is the yard or two of Renaissance before the bit of Border peel,' Liz was saying. They were evidently at their favourite game of making fun of the Bradford magnate's folly.
    'How did he forget a moat, do you think?' Searle asked.
    'Perhaps he started life digging ditches and didn't want to be reminded of them.'
    'It's my guess he didn't want to spend money on digging a hole just to put water in it. They're Yankees, aren't they, up there?'
    Liz 'allowed' that north-country blood had probably much in common with New England. Then Searle saw Emma and greeted her, and they walked up to the house with her, not self-conscious in her presence or stopping their game, but drawing her into it and sharing their delight with her.
    She looked at Liz's sallow little countenance and tried to remember when she had last seen it so alive; so full of the joy of life. After a little she remembered. It was on a Christmas afternoon long ago, and Liz had experienced in the short space of an hour her first snow and her first Christmas tree.
    So far she had hated only Leslie Searle's beauty. Now she began to hate Leslie Searle.

4
    IT was Emma's hope that Searle would go quietly away before any further evidences of desirableness were revealed to the family; but in that too she was bound to be frustrated. Searle had avowedly come to England for a holiday, he had no relations or intimate friends to visit, he had a camera and every intention of using it, and there seemed no reason why he should not stay at Trimmings and use it. His expressed intention, once he had seen the largely unspoiled loveliness of Orfordshire, was to find a good hotel in Crome and make that a centre for photographic foraging among the cottages and country houses of the neighbourhood. But that, as Lavinia swiftly pointed out, was absurd. He could stay at Trimmings, among his friends, and forage just as far afield and with as good results as he could at Crome. Why should he come back each night to a hotel room and the company of casual acquaintances in a hotel lounge, when he could return to a home and the comfort of his own room in the tower?
    Searle would no doubt have accepted the invitation in any case, but the final makeweight was the suggestion that he and Walter might do a book together. No one could remember afterwards who first made the suggestion, but it was one that anyone might have made. It was from journalism that Walter had graduated to the eminence of radio commentator, and an alliance between one of Britain's best-known personalities and one of America's most admired photographers would produce a book that might, with luck, have equal interest for Weston-super-Mare and Lynchburg, Va. In partnership they could clean up.
    So there was no question of Searle's departing on Monday morning, nor on Tuesday, nor on any specific day in a foreseeable future. He was at Trimmings to stay, it seemed. And no one but Emma found any fault with that arrangement. Lavinia offered him the use of her Rolls two-seater to take him round the country—it did nothing but lie in the garage, she said, when she was working—but Searle preferred to hire a small cheap car from Bill Maddox, who kept the garage at the entrance to the village. 'If I'm going nosing up lanes that are not much better than the bed of a stream, some of them, I want a car I don't have to hold my breath about,' he said. But Liz felt that this was merely a way of declining Lavinia's offer gracefully, and liked him for it.
    Bill Maddox reported well of him to the village—'no airs at all and can't be fooled neither; upped with the bonnet and went over her as if he was