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Lance drove home with the sun behind him.

In leaving Castle Craven he seemed to be coming down from a height, and was reminded of Italy and one of those Tuscan towns with a shrine or a campanile soaring against the sunset. His pilgrimage had been to the feet of the unexpected. He had discovered a sage.

His own grandfather! A little old man with the head of a Roman emperor, an imperial philosopher, a kind of little Marcus Aurelius, with his flowers and his books and his pigeons. The Venerable! The polisher of boots and the bearer of burdens! For in Lance was that rare virtue, a passion to reverence men and things. He carried a flame. At that time he had the audacity and the élan of the idealist. Also, he had the essential cleanness of a flame. To the sex-obsessed and the unpleasantly clever he might appear something of a fool, lyrical and tiresome, a fellow who never looked higher than a garter.

He was back at Windover by a quarter past seven. He rushed up to his room to change. It was a warm, still, September evening, and in leaning out of his window to look at the world, he observed his father sitting in a deck-chair on the terrace. His father was reading a paper, the Financial Times.

Lance drew back. He had felt himself above his father and able to look down at him with sudden impartiality.

“Poor old pater!”

Yet he was conscious of antagonism, contempt, compassion.

At dinner they asked him where he had been, and accepted his vague answer—“Oh, just knocking around, seeing things.” Neither Sir Probyn nor his wife had sufficient imagination to penetrate beyond their son’s silence. Besides—it was usual. He would disappear for the whole day and have nothing to tell them when he returned.

The poetic age! Sir Probyn’s swivel eye gazed rather dubiously at the versifier. Poetry, useless stuff. The pursuit of it was quite gentlemanly, but not very productive. Sir Probyn supposed that it came of Eton and Trinity, though you did expect a young man of this tennis-playing, sports-model, slack-trousered generation to be a little more practical. Still, Lance was a good oar. He might be a scribbler, but he rowed in the 3rd Trinity Mary boat and at Henley. That was a solid performance. You had to allow a lad his head of steam.

But it never occurred to Probyn and his wife that their son had discovered his grandfather, or that in discovering him Lance might wish to keep the Venerable in a niche apart from the lares and penates of his parents.