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find this train not at all unentertaining.’ He let his eye stray to the corridor.
    Toplady, though ignorant of Mr Eliot’s peculiar proceedings of a few minutes before, divined the need for intervention. ‘The house on the hill’, he said didactically and with unusual directness, ‘belongs to some cousins of mine.’
    They all looked out of the window. Perched with urbane aggressiveness on top of a hill – and violating thereby the nicest canons of its period – was a spreading eighteenth-century mansion, its empty and impeccable proportions emphasized against a wintry sky-line. ‘A big house,’ said Winter with malicious respect. He glimpsed Timmy grinning understandingly – as with the intimation of his knowing from experience that his tutor was feeling relieved, annoyed, and ready to plunge into sustained verbal extravagance.
    Toplady, conscious that his claim had been without motive of arrogance, proceeded to set the now retreating mansion in a sympathetic light. ‘Steynfield Hall,’ he said. ‘Even more than it would be so unhappily natural to suppose, they have been hit by death duties during the past thirty years. Recently my cousin had to disperse the library. And now he thinks – or so it is thought – that he may even have to give up his mastership of hounds. How bad – are they not? – things are.’
    The landowner in Mr Eliot nodded sincere by absent agreement. The novelist – Winter suspected – made a mental note of Toplady’s peculiar rhetoric. But it was a third Mr Eliot who spoke. ‘The Steynfield library? I remember the sale very well. There were several Caxtons. Belinda went.’ He turned to Winter. ‘My daughter is interested in early printers’ devices.’ He spoke casually, as a well-bred man plays his trump card. ‘She has already had one or two papers in the Library .’ Mr Eliot’s eye glanced with a hint of reproach towards Timmy and returned, with the same hint faintly lingering, to Winter. It would be nice, the remote implication ran, if Belinda’s brother had caught similar scholarly tastes from his tutor.
    From Timmy’s corner came a succession of faint snaps. He had produced another cake of chocolate and was breaking it into irregular chunks. ‘Books,’ he said, ‘’tis a dull and endless strife. Chocolate?’
    Mr Eliot took a piece of chocolate and father and son sat munching side by side. ‘Come, hear the woodland linnet? Yes – yes, indeed. But I don’t think Wordsworth meant to condemn books outright – or even bookishness. He speaks very appreciatively of books in the Prelude . We couldn’t really get on without books; not even without that sort of books to the making of which there is no end. Don’t you think?’ And Mr Eliot, plainly proposing the pleasures of a little literary conversation, turned again to Winter.
    At this moment the train bumped to a stop. ‘The junction,’ said Timmy. In his voice was the peculiar tone by which the outsider recognizes a family joke.
    Mr Eliot, hitherto a monument of placid content, was at this transformed into a vessel of quintessential and incomprehensible gaiety – a gaiety that stirred neither in word not in gesture but was all in a momentary translucency of the physical man, as if someone had contrived an exquisite electrical effect. At the same time he contrived to appear acutely apprehensive. ‘ You look,’ he said urgently to his son.
    Timmy looked. So did Winter. At the tail-end of the train Bussenschutt was descending, in his bearing the annoyance of a man who steps out of a first-class carriages and fails to find a porter within hail. The porters were all farther up the platform where a largish group of people, the majority apparently known to each other, was already standing amid little piles of luggage. In a yard beyond stood a row of cars; a chauffeur with an old and roomy saloon of the sort that discreetly wealthy people keep to meet trains at country stations, a disguised gardener with another of