be in the library at his own father’s in Park Lane, from which he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries.  The third wall he approached with more excitement.  Here, surely, Timothy’s own taste would be found.  It was.  The books were dummies.  The fourth wall was all heavily curtained window.  And turned toward it was a large chair with a mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still.  In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too.  Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them.  He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in latitude 44.

‘Mausoleum!’ he thought.  ‘George was right!’ And he went out and up the stairs.  On the half-landing he stopped before the case of stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood.  They looked not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass.  If the case were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would crumble, he suspected.  It wouldn’t be worth putting that into the sale!  And suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann—­dear old Aunt Ann—­holding him by the hand in front of that case and saying:  “Look, Soamey!  Aren’t they bright and pretty, dear little humming-birds!” Soames remembered his own answer:  “They don’t hum, Auntie.”  He must have been six, in a black velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he remembered that suit well!  Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave old aquiline smile—­a fine old lady, Aunt Ann!  He moved on up to the drawing-room door.  There on each side of it were the groups of miniatures.  Those he would certainly buy in!  The miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy.  They had all been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and lasting too, painted as they were on ivory.  Many a time had he heard the tale of that young lady:  “Very talented, my dear; she had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a consumption and died:  so like Keats—­we often spoke of it.”