Say that I’m guilty of what I’m here for, but you can add, if you like, that I’m not personally a vile character… That is, if you agree that I’m not.”

“Wouldn’t that be very hard for her to understand at her age?”

“At any age, Emily. Sometimes even I find it hard to grasp. But I’d rather have her puzzled about me than indignant on my behalf.”

But Emily, distressed as she was, nevertheless declined to accept that alternative herself. To be puzzled was the one thing she abhorred, and to avoid it she could almost always discover a romantic formula. That accounted for her mood when, towards twilight as she returned home after the interview, she saw Livia wandering in the road below the clough; it was why she failed to scold her, or to listen to her prattle about ghosts; and it was why, next morning, after long consultations with Sarah and Miss Fortescue, she told Livia the only possible romantic lie about her father except that he was innocent; and that was, that he was dead. He had been killed, she said, in South Africa, and the war for which he had given his life had ended in victory. Emily found it possible to say all this convincingly, with genuine tears, and without going into awkward details. Doubtless in a few years (she reckoned) the truth would have to come out, but when it did it might even seem relatively GOOD news to a child of maturer intelligence; while for the time being it surely could not upset Livia too much to think that a father whom she did not remember had died a hero. Pride more than grief seemed the likely emotion.

Livia felt neither, however, so much as a queer kind of relief. She wept easily when her mother wept, for much the same reason that she made imitative noises when the dog barked or the cat mewed; but she had stared out of the drawing-room window with such protracted hopes of her father’s return that it was almost pleasanter not to have to expect him any more. Instead, she promptly added a new legend to that of the three little girls whose ghosts were supposed to haunt the neighbourhood. She persisted in telling people (the people at Stoneclough, for she never met anyone else) that she often saw her father’s ghost in the clough, smoking and walking slowly and looking at the trees. She was so circumstantial in describing all this that Miss Fortescue grew nervous about driving to Browdley after dark, though there were several flaws in Livia’s story when Miss Fortescue analysed it. For instance, how could Livia, who did not remember her father, even pretend to recognize his ghost? And then, too, the detail about the smoking. Not only had John Channing been a non-smoker, but Miss Fortescue was also sure that ghosts could not smoke. Livia, however, replied stoutly: “My daddy’s ghost DOES.”

Which presented a problem that Emily, Miss Fortescue, Sarah, Dr. Whiteside (the family physician), and a few others were wholly unable to evaluate, much less to solve. Could it be that the child, in addition to BELIEVING a lie (which was only right and proper, in the circumstances), was also capable of TELLING one? Miss Fortescue thought not, again adducing the ‘smoking’ detail. If Livia had uttered a falsehood with deliberate intent to deceive, surely she would not have invented such an incongruity; therefore, did it not prove that she was speaking what at least she regarded as the truth?

In fact, it was neither a lie nor the truth, but some halfway vision in a child’s-eye view of the world, a vision that could start as easily from a lie deliberately told, and as easily end by sincerely believing it. Those three children, for instance; Livia had undoubtedly lied in claiming to have seen them, but later her fancy convinced her that she DID see them, more than once; and this made her forget that she had lied in the first place. Nor was it ever a conscious lie that she saw her father, for by that time the clough was a place where she could see anything and anybody. The high trees arching over the stream as it tumbled from the moorland, the ruins of the old cottages where grass grew through the cracks of the hearthstones, the winding path leading down from the Stoneclough garden to the road—these were the limits of a world that did not exist elsewhere save in Grimm and Hans Andersen and the Tanglewood Tales—a world as young as the children who lived in it and the belief that alone made it real.

And in the other world, meanwhile, she continued to learn Mathematics, Spelling, Geography, History and ‘Scripture’ from Miss Fortescue, who was everlastingly thrilled by the secret that could not yet be told and by her own forbearance in not telling it; she also understood children just enough to feel quite certain that she understood Livia completely, which she never did. Old Sarah, who professed no subtleties, came much closer when she remarked, leaning over the child’s first attempts at arithmetic— “Queer stuff they put into your head, Livia—no wonder you see ghosts after it.” And it was Sarah who saw nothing queer at all in Livia’s question, when Miss Fortescue had informed her that Ben Nevis was the highest mountain in the United Kingdom: “Please, Miss Fortescue, what’s the LOWEST?”

* * * * *

Another war did begin, as Emily had envisaged (but it was between Russia and Japan, and so not one in which an English household had to take sides); meanwhile Livia passed her sixth birthday; meanwhile also the cotton trade boomed and then slumped. This would have mattered more at Stoneclough had not Emily possessed a little money of her own; indeed, it was a subject of bitter comment throughout Browdley, where hundreds had been ruined as a result of the Channing crash, that the family responsible for it seemed to be flourishing just as formerly. But this was not quite accurate. Browdley did not realize how much had been abandoned—the town house in London, the holidays at Marienbad, the platoon of servants; and while to Browdley life at Stoneclough was itself a luxury, to Emily it was an economy enforced by the fact that the house was of a size and style that made it practically unsaleable, and thus cheaper to stay in than to give up. So they stayed —she and Livia and Miss Fortescue and Watson the gardener-coachman- handyman (a truly skeleton staff for such an establishment); and the blacker the looks of Browdley people, as trade worsened and times became harder, the more advantageous it seemed that Stoneclough was so remote although so close —a moorland fastness that no one from the town need approach save in the mood and on the occasions of holidays. All of which, in its own way, conditioned Livia’s childhood. Sundays in summer-time were the days when she must, above all things, remain within the half-mile of garden fence; week-days in winter-time permitted her the greatest amount of freedom. It was easy, by this means, to keep her ignorant of everything except Miss Fortescue’s teachings and a general impression that all nature was kind and all humanity to be avoided.

And Emily, who liked to put things off anyway, kept putting off the time for correcting all this. “Next year perhaps,” she would say, whenever Dr. Whiteside mentioned the matter.