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John Pybus had five shelves of books, but the first things that Lance happened to notice in that austere little room were the photos of his father and his uncle on the mantelpiece. They had been taken many years ago, but even from the doorway Lance had recognised the flabby pallor of Conrad’s full-moon face, and his father’s oblique glances. But he paid no heed to them. He was all for continuing to be the unknown young man until he and his grandfather should have come closer to each other. Meanwhile, he crossed towards John Pybus’s bookshelves, but paused by the window, one of those broad, low windows that one finds in old cottages. It gave to Lance the sheaved splendour of dahlias and tall asters, with the grey walls of the castle and the gracious curves of the ash trees rising to a blue and white sky. The outlook from his grandfather’s window had beauty and tranquillity. It offered you glimpses of distant hills, and of the castle field, with its banks and hollows very green in the sheeted sunlight. It had the spaciousness and the dignity of a fine picture.

“That’s a good thing to live with, sir.”

“Yes, you go out to it,” said old Pybus, “and it comes in to you. The older you grow—the more beauty gets you.”

“Always?”

“Depends on your eyesight, doesn’t it?”

“Insight, sir?”

“That’s what I mean.”

They smiled at each other, and Lance went on to look at his grandfather’s books. He felt that he would be knowing his grandfather in reading the titles of his books. They were of all ages and of all kinds, many of them books that Lance had never heard of, queer old volumes in leather coats, histories, herbals, gazetteers. There were the old and the new, Chaucer and Swinburne, and one or two little volumes of war poetry. Lance glanced at the modern, Shaw and Oliver Lodge, and Masefield, and Joseph Conrad, and a few of the younger school. The Venerable’s taste was both catholic and varied. Imagine an hotel “boots” reading D. H. Lawrence! Moreover, in a place by themselves Lance saw books on contemporary science, sociology, psychology. The Venerable read Freud and MacDougal.

Lance picked out Hardy’s “Tess.”

“Ah, I remember that being published,” said his grandfather, “and the fuss over poor ‘Jude.’ I saw Thomas Hardy once.”

“Did you?”

“I used to sell books. Yes, and I had quite a lot of first editions. Got some of them still. Up—there. Stevenson’s ‘Treasure Island,’ and Conrad’s ‘Nigger of the Narcissus.’”

“I say—have you! May I look?”

“Certainly.”

“Have you ever written a book?”

“I—sir?”

“Yes.”

“No. Had a try once. Who hasn’t?”

“I scribble rather seriously.”

“You do. Published anything?”

“No, not yet.”

“Tried to?”

“No. I’m not satisfied—yet.”

“What’s the matter with the work?”

“It doesn’t strike me as real. I just seem to miss things—at present.”

“Plenty of time yet,” said the Venerable with a smile. “Generally, youth is in such a devil of a hurry.”

For twenty minutes they discussed books, and handled them, and confessed to their intimate, individual passions and prejudices. The Venerable could not and would not read Meredith. The man was too clever, boringly clever. An artificial person. They argued about Butler’s “The Way of all Flesh,” and went on to discuss Aldous Huxley. Lance was a romanticist. No, not of the Monsieur Beaucaire school. But wasn’t the life of the day full of pungent romance if you had the eyes to see it?

“Yes, things happen,” said his grandfather, “you can express them in black and white—or in colour.”

Lance was for colour. But looking out of his grandfather’s window he saw beyond the reds and golds and purples of the Venerable’s garden the shadows of the castle and the ash trees stretching far across the green of the castle field. It was half-past five, and he had sixty miles to cover, and a secret to keep both at Windover and Castle Craven.

“I shall have to be going. I’ve enjoyed this immensely.”

“Far to go?”

“It won’t take me long. I say, sir, if I happen to be this way again—may I come in and talk?”

Old Pybus looked at him queerly.

“Any time you like.”

“Thanks—ever so much.”

The Venerable walked up the yard with him and watched Lance drive off.

“See you again, sir.”

He waved a hand, and old Pybus stood looking towards the arch of the gateway. He had a strange feeling of kinship with the lad. It was as though something that he had always known, something that was his, had dropped down out of the sky.