We five had all been playmates together. There were Lord Maxton, who was killed at Paardeberg while I was in Ladysmith, he was my senior by nearly a year, Philip, who is now Earl Ladislaw and who was about eighteen months younger than I, Mary, my contemporary within eight days, and Guy, whom we regarded as a baby and who was called, on account of some early efforts, "Brugglesmith." He did his best to his juniority as time passed on by an enormous length of limb. I had more imagination than Maxton and was a good deal better read, so that Mary and I dominated most of the games of Indians and and exploration in which we passed our long days together. When the were at Burnmore, and they usually spent three or four months in the year there, I had a kind of invitation to be with them. Sometimes there would also be two cousins to our party, and sometimes there would be a raid of the Fawney children with a detestable governess who was perpetually vociferating reproaches, but these latter were absent-minded, lax young persons, and we did not greatly love them.  
It is curious how little I remember of Mary's childhood. All that has happened between us since lies between that and my present self like some impenetrable mist. I know we liked each other, that I was taller than she was and thought her legs thin, and that once when I knelt by accident on a dead stick she had brought into an Indian camp we had made near the end of the west shrubbery, she flew at me in a sudden fury, my face, scratched me and had to be suppressed, and was suppressed with extreme difficulty by the united manhood of us three elder boys. Then it was I first the blazing blueness of her eyes. She was light and very , so that none of us cared to climb against her, and she was as difficult to hold as an . But all these traits and characteristics vanished when she was transformed.
 
For what seems now a long space of time I had not seen her or any of the family except Philip; it was certainly a year or more, probably two; Maxton was at a crammer's and I think the others must have been in Canada with Lord Ladislaw. Then came some sort of between him and his wife, and she returned with Mary and Guy to Burnmore and stayed there all through the summer.
 
I was in a state of transition between the great and the infinitely little. I had just ceased to be that noble and being, that almost statesmanlike personage, a sixth form boy at Harbury, and I was going to be an undergraduate. Philip and I came down together by the same train from Harbury, I shared the Burnmore dog-cart and luggage cart, and he dropped me at the rectory. I was a long-limbed youngster of seventeen, as tall as I am now, and fair, so fair that I was still boyish-faced while most of my contemporaries and Philip (who favored his father) were at least smudgy with moustaches. With the head-master's and the grave elder-brotherliness of old Henson, and the cheers of a little crowd of juniors still echoing in my head, I very naturally came home in a mood of gravity, and I can still remember pacing up and down the oblong lawn behind the rockery and the fig-tree wall with my father, talking of my outlook with all the tremendous savoir faire that was natural to my age, and noting with a secret gratification that our shoulders were now on a level. No doubt we were discussing Oxford and all that I was to do at Oxford; I don't remember a word of our speech though I recall the exact of its color and the feeling of our measured equal paces in the sunshine....
 
I must have gone up to Burnmore House the following afternoon. I went up alone and I was sent out through the little door at the end of the big gallery into the garden. In those days Lady Ladislaw had made an Indian pavilion under the tall trees at the east end of the house, and here I found her with her cousin Helena Christian entertaining a mixture of people, a carriageful from Hampton End, the two elder Fawneys and a man in brown who had I think ridden over from Chestoxter Castle. Lady Ladislaw welcomed me with ample graciousness—as though I was a personage. "The children" she said were still at tennis, and as she I saw Guy, grown nearly beyond recognition and then a shining being in white, very straight and , with a big soft hat and overshadowed eyes that smiled, come out from the hurried of the sunflakes under the shadows of the great , into the glow of summer light before the pavilion.
 
"Steve arrived!" she cried, and waved a welcoming racquet.
 
I do not remember what I said to her or what else she said or what anyone said. But I believe I could paint every detail of her effect. I know that when she came out of the brightness into the shadow of the pavilion it was like a regal , and I know that she was wonderfully self-possessed and helpful with he............