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.