By now, they had reached the paddock-gate, stood gazing down on Sunflowers. The mellow house behind the leafless walnut-tree looked a veritable English home of peace; smoke spired lazily from its tall chimneys; its square windows glinted welcome. They heard the children’s voices shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” saw Peter striding, gun over shoulder, to the front door.
“He’s been to see Francis again,” said Patricia.
“Agoraphobia,” thought Heron Baynet, “the Fear of Open Spaces. I wonder what particular kind of horror he sees every time he goes down across that little bit of meadow-land.”
But Patricia’s mind had suddenly remembered Francis; Francis, alone, night after night, in that quaint up-and-down cottage, firelight glowing sombrely on panelled walls, Prout and his “female” pottering in the red-tiled kitchen.
“Pater,” she said suddenly, “supposing you’re wrong in your diagnosis?”
“I’m never wrong about these things,” he answered, purposely boastful.
“Then tell me what’s the matter with Francis. Even I can see he’s not normal.”
“Normal!”—Heron Baynet pulled a cigarette-case from his over-coat pocket, extracted and lit a Gianaclis—“of course he’s normal. That’s his trouble. A normal man trying to live an abnormal life.”
“It isn’t abnormal to live in the country.”
“No, it isn’t abnormal to live in the country, but”—for the second time that afternoon, Heron Baynet laughed and his daughter blushed—“but it is abnormal, especially for a man of Francis Gordon’s temperament, to live there like a monk.”