But though his emotions were cold, his imagination worked freely. The few feet of Dorsetshire clay, the half-inch of brittle West Country elm-wood, that separated him from the upturned skull of his begetter, were like so much transparent glass. He looked down into William Solent’s empty eye-sockets, and the empty eye-sockets looked back at him. Steadily, patiently, indifferently they looked back; and between the head without a nose looking up and the head with so prominent a nose looking down there passed a sardonic wordless dialogue. “So be it,” the son said to himself. “I won’t forget. Whether there are plantains or whether there aren’t plantains, the universe shan’t fool me.” “Fool me; fool me,” echoed the fleshless skull from below.

“There!” sighed Selena Gault, rising to her natural perpendicular position. “There! There won’t be any more of them for a fortnight. Shall we go back now, boy?”

When they were once more in the road, Miss Gault became a little more talkative.