Phyllis entered the avenue, practically deserted at midday, and rested, a pathetically lonely little grey-uniformed figure on one of the benches.  On the common, some distance behind her, stretched the lines of an Army Service train, with mules and waggons, and here and there a tent.  In front of her, beyond the row of trees, was the towing-path; an old horse in charge of a boy jogged by, pulling something of which only a moving stove pipe like a periscope was visible above the bank.  Overhead the chestnuts rioted in broad leaf and pink and white blossom, showing starry bits of blue sky and admitting arrow shafts of spring sunshine.  A dirty white mongrel dog belonging to the barge came up to her, sniffed, and made friends; then, at last obeying a series of whistles from the boy, looked at her apologetically and trotted off.  Her gaze followed him wistfully, for he was a very human dear dog, and with a sympathetic understanding of all her difficulties in his deep topaz eyes.  After that she had as companions a couple of butterflies and a bumble-bee and a perky, portly robin who hopped within an inch of her feet and looked up at her sideways out of his hard little eye (so different from the dog’s) with the expression of one who would say:  “The most beauteous and delectable worm I have ever encountered.  If I were a bit bigger, say the size of the roc of the Arabian Nights, what a dainty morsel you would make!  In the meantime can’t you shed something of yourself for my entertainment like others, though grosser, of your species?” She laughed at the cold impudence of the creature, just as she had smiled at the butterflies and the bumble-bee.  She surrendered herself to the light happiness of the moment.  It was good to escape for an hour from the rigid lines of beds and the pale suffering faces and the eternal faint odour of disinfectants, into all this greenery and the fellowship of birds and beasts unconscious of war.  She remembered that once, in the pocket of her cloak, there had been a biscuit or two.  Very slowly and carefully, her mind fixed on the robin, she fished for crumbs and very carefully and gently she fed the impudent, stomach-centred fellow.  She had attracted him to the end of the seat, when, whizz and clatter, came a motor cycle down the avenue, and off in a terrible scare flew the robin; the idyll of tree and beast and birds suffered instant disruption and Randall Holmes, in his canvas suit, stood before her.

He said: 

“Good morning, Phyllis.”

She said, with cold politeness:  “Good morning.”  But she asked the spring morning in dumb piteousness, “Oh, why has he come?  Why has he come to spoil it all?”

He sat down by her side.  “This is the luckiest chance I’ve ever had—­finding you here,” he said.  “You’ve had all my letters, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered, “and I’ve torn them all up.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want them,” she flashed on him:  “I’ve destroyed them without reading them.”