"My eyebrows," said Mr Innes.
But his wife, quicker-witted, laughed. "Of course," she said. "Mary! Are you from Leys, then? Do you know Mary?" Her face lit and her voice sang as she said it. Do you know Mary? Was it because she was going to see her daughter that she was happy today?
Lucy explained who she was, and introduced Desterro, who was pleased to find that this charming couple knew all about her. "There is very little we don't know about Leys," Mrs Innes said, "even if we have never seen the place."
"Not seen it? Won't you come over and have your coffee with us, by the way?"
"It was too far for us to inspect it before Mary went there. So we decided that we would wait until her training was finished and then come to the Demonstration." Lucy deduced that if fares had not been a problem, Mary Innes's mother would not have had to wait these years before seeing Leys; she would have come if only so that she could picture her daughter in her setting.
"But you are going there now, surely?"
"No. Oddly enough, we are not. We are on our way to Larborough, where my husband-he's a doctor-has to attend a meeting. We could go to Leys, of course, but it is the week of the Final Examinations, and it would only distract Mary to have her parents descending suddenly on her for no reason. It is a little difficult to pass by when we are so near, but we have waited so long that we can wait another ten days or so. What we couldn't resist was turning off the main West road as far as Bidlington. We didn't expect to run into any College people at this hour of the morning, especially in Examination week, and we did want to see the place that Mary had talked so much about."
"We knew that we shouldn't have time on Demonstration Day," Dr Innes said. "There will be so much to see then. A surprisingly varied training, isn't it?"
Lucy agreed, and described her first impression of the staff-room with its varying worlds.
"Yes. We were a little puzzled when Mary chose that for her career-she had never shown any great interest in games, and I had thoughts that she might take a medical training-but she said she wanted a career with a great many facets; and she seems to have found it!"