If you really change your mind and want to go----" But by this time Ingred was round the corner of the house; so, shaking a philosophic head at the ways of girls in general, her brother gathered a gooseberry or two en route, and followed her in the direction of the stable-yard.
The Saxons were spending their summer holidays at a farm near the seaside, and for the first time in four long years the whole family was reunited.

Mr.Saxon, Egbert, and Athelstane had only just been demobilized, and had hardly yet settled down to civilian life.

They had joined the rest of the party at Lynstones before returning to their native town of Grovebury.

The six weeks by the sea seemed a kind of oasis between the anxious period of the war that was past and gone, and the new epoch that stretched ahead in the future.

To Ingred they were halcyon days.