“All except the orchard, I seemed to know perfectly,” she finished.
And her father, looking up from his note-book, said, “No. You couldn’t be expected to know about that. As far as I can recollect, there wasn’t one.”
Francis, instinctively setting a story, glanced first at the lined face of the little consultant, then into the astonished eyes of his daughter.
“Explain please, pater,” commanded Patricia. “What was it? One of those cases of pre-natal vision you’ve always wanted to confirm.”
“No such luck!” Her father closed the note-book, returned it to his pocket. “Very interesting though. You had seen the place before. When you were two years old, your mother and I drove you there—probably through the very road up which you and Francis motored. She wanted me to buy a country practice. Sunflowers—I’d forgotten the name till Francis mentioned Arlsfield—was a doctor’s house in those days. You ask old Tebbits and see if I’m not right.”
“Curious thing the human brain,” he went on, “always taking snap-shots—just like a camera. Stores its pictures away too, and keeps them for when they’re wanted. We’re working on this ‘picture’ theory now—for our shell-shock cases. If anything weakens the brain—a shock for instance, or overwork—the pictures get mixed up: confused, we call it. No one seems to know how soon the brain starts taking its snapshots: some say the process starts prior to birth. I don’t believe that. . . . Then there are imaginative pictures. You know the impression of reality a good book makes on you, or a well-told story. . . .” He expanded the theory, ending: “It was because I didn’t want you to make imaginative pictures that I took my notes before I told you the truth.”
“Well I’m glad there was no mystery,” smiled Pat. “I don’t want any ghosts at Sunflowers.”
But Francis Gordon, whose writer’s brain could summon and set aside both real and imaginative pictures at will, sat very silent, visioning in pale gold against the dark panelling of his new home the head of a girl in America—a girl whose last letter had concluded:
“Somehow or other I don’t think I shall ever get married.”