“May I?” Mary said to her nurse with a frightened gasp.

“Well, now, don’t you go far,” said the nurse, with a fierce look at Hortense.

“You like where you are?” asked Hortense, smiling more than ever.  “You ’ave a good place?” Slowly the nurse yielded.  The novelette was laid aside.

Impossible to say what occurred under the tree.  Now and again a rustle of wind would send the colours from the trees to short branches loaded with leaves of red gold, shivering through the air; a chequered, blazing canopy covered the ground.

Mary Kitson had, it appeared, very little to say.  She sat some way from Sarah, clutching Adrian and Emily tightly to her breast, and always her large, startled eyes were on Sarah’s face.  She did not move to drive the leaves from her dress; her heart beat very fast, her cheeks were very red.

Sarah talked a little, but not very much.  She asked questions about Mary’s home and her parents, and Mary answered these interrogations in monosyllabic gasps.  It appeared that Mary had a kitten, and that this kitten was a central fact of Mary’s existence.  The kitten was called Alice.

“Alice is a silly name for a kitten.  I shouldn’t call a kitten Alice,” said Sarah, and Mary started as though in some strange, sinister fashion she were instantly aware that Alice’s life and safety were threatened.

From that morning began a strange acquaintance that certainly could not be called a friendship.  There could be no question at all that Mary was terrified of Sarah; there could also be no question that Mary was Sarah’s obedient slave.  The cynical Hortense, prepared as she was for anything strange and unexpected in Sarah’s actions, was, nevertheless, puzzled now.

One afternoon, wet and dismal, the two of them sitting in a little box of a room in the little box of a house, Sarah huddled in a chair, her eyes staring in front of her, Hortense sewing, her white, bony fingers moving sharply like knives, the maid asked a question: 

“What do you see—­Sar-ah—­in that infant?”

“What infant?” asked Sarah, without moving her eyes.

“That Mary with whom now you always are.”

“We play games together,” said Sarah.

“You do not.  You may be playing a game—­she does nothing.  She is terrified—­out of her life.”

“She is very silly.  It’s funny how silly she is.  I like her to be frightened.”

Mary’s nurse told Mary’s mother that, in her opinion, Sarah was not a nice child.  But Sarah had been invited to tea at the confused, simple abode of the Kitson family, and had behaved perfectly.

“I think you must be wrong, nurse,” said Mrs. Kitson.  “She seems a very nice little girl.  Mary needs companions.  It’s good for her to be taken out of herself.”

Had Mrs. Kitson been of a less confused mind, however, had she had more time for the proper observation of her daughter, she would have noticed her daughter’s pale cheeks, her daughter’s fits of crying, her daughter’s silences.  Even as the bird is fascinated by the snake, so was Mary Kitson fascinated by Sarah Trefusis.