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Laburnum Vale. He was looking for No. 72, but he was not destined to find it. The row of little villas, whose small front gardens had once maintained a green wall which broke for one enchanted month into gold, were now reduced to a mere twenty shabby houses. Shops had crept in upon them at the one end, and at the other, where Nos. 50 to 100 had once stood, great modern blocks of flats reared themselves imposingly. The surviving laburnums were few, straggly, and grey in the cold light of the January afternoon.
    Miles wandered to the end of the flats and turned back again. Miss Macintyre had receded in the most depressing manner. She was pre-war. Laburnum Vale was defunct. There wasn’t any Agnes Smith.
    He dropped into a tobacconist’s and asked questions. A pleasant worried-looking little man said he didn’t know, he was sure. There was a Mrs Smith just round the corner. She was quite young—newly married couple in a hair-dressing business. It wouldn’t be them? He’d only been here a matter of five years himself, but Mr Haynes at the ironmonger’s stores he was a very old resident.
    Miles sought out Mr Haynes and found him elderly, whiskery, and bland. He rubbed his hands and bowed until Miles could see how neatly his oiled grey hair encircled the shining bald patch on the top of his head.
    â€œA lot of changes here—oh yes, sir, a lot of changes. Improvements they call them, but I’m not so sure. Laburnum Vale, and a Mrs Smith that used to live at 72? Before the war? Oh dear, oh dear, sir, that’s a long time ago. I’d my two boys with me in the business then. We can’t put the clock back—can we? Excuse me, sir.”
    He rubbed his hands and went away into the back of the shop. Miles heard him calling, “Mother!” and presently he came back with a brisk, plump wife.
    â€œMrs Smith? Why, Father, of course you remember her! Now what’s the good of saying you don’t? No. 72 you said? Yes, that’s her right enough—used to let apartments. Why, Father, don’t you remember Bert taking a fancy to a girl she had—a forward piece of goods that I wouldn’t have inside my door? Real put out he was because he wanted to bring her into tea and I said no, and meant it too.” She turned back to Miles with a sparkle in her eyes. Bert was dead somewhere in Flanders, Mrs Smith’s Ada, that forward piece, had been gone nearly twenty years from Laburnum Vale; but the old anger came up in Mrs Haynes as she thought of “the likes of her setting her cap at our Bert.”
    â€œWell, sir,” she said, “that’s Mrs Smith right enough, but she’s been gone from here, oh, getting along for eighteen, nineteen years, I should say.”
    Curiously enough, she had only the vaguest recollection of what must surely have provided the neighbourhood with a good deal of food for gossip—the death of Mrs Smith’s lonely lodger a week after the birth of her child. She couldn’t remember the name, or what had happened to the baby. What month would it be? Oh, July 1914? Well, that accounted for it, because she was away right on into August with her sister in Devonshire, and only came home then because Bert had enlisted—“And if I’d been there, I’d have kept him home and he’d have been here yet.”
    â€œNow, now, Mother—” said Mr Haynes.
    They sent him on to two other people who remembered Mrs Smith, but neither of them knew where she had gone. One of the two, a little faded dressmaker, remembered Mrs Macintyre—“Very nice-looking but very sad, poor thing, and used to cry more than was good for her, I’m afraid. She died when the baby was born.”
    â€œYes,” said Miles. “Now, Miss Collins, I want you to tell me anything you can remember. Mrs Macintyre died on 30th July 1914. Do you know what happened to the baby?”
    Miss Collins’ small beady eyes became