Her face cleared.
"Oh, what a heavenly thing!" She made straight for a large drawing of the Val d'Arno in spring, and the gap in the mountains that leads to Lucca, taken from some high point above Fiesole.

She knelt down before it in an ecstasy of pleasure.
"Mummy and I were there two years before the war.

I do believe you came too ?" She looked up, smiling, at the face above her.
It was the first time she had ever appealed to her childish recollections of him in any other than a provocative or half-resentful tone.

He could remember a good many tussles with her in her frail mother's interest, when she was a long-legged, insubordinate child of twelve.

And when Helena first arrived at Beechmark, it had hurt him to realize how bitterly she remembered such things, how grossly she had exaggerated them.