At the beginning of October, Hugh went up to Cambridge, for the assembling of freshmen, and I had still some ten days which I spent at Addington. Arthur was already back at Eton, my father and mother and Maggie soon went off on some visit, and thus it happened that Nellie and I for a few days were alone there. We had breakfast very late, with a sense of complete uncontrol, we rode and we played lawn-tennis and talked in the desultory argumentative manner that we both thoroughly enjoyed. In particular we played at “old games,” and Beth used to join us. That year the big cedar in the garden was covered with little immature cones, full of a yellow powder like sulphur, and we collected this in glass-topped pill-boxes, part of the ancient apparatus of the moth-collections, shaking the sulphur-laden cones into them, and filling each full to the brim. There was no design as to what we were to do with these: there was just some reversion in our minds to childish “treasures,” like the spa and the dead hornet in the aquarium. It was enough to fill these little pill-boxes with the cedar-pollen, and screw the lids on, and know that half a dozen boxes were charged to the brim. We were quite aimless, we saw nobody but Beth, and were wonderfully content. I did a little reading in Overbeck’s _Schriftquellen_, and Nellie translated the German part of it to me, to save time. There was nothing more to remember of those days except that delicious sense of leisure and love and liberty: we did nothing except what we wanted to do, and what we seemed to want was to be ridiculous children again. Eventually, after some four or five days, came the afternoon when I had to go back to Cambridge; my father and mother were coming back to Addington that day or the next. Nellie and I parted, greatly regretting that these silly days were done, and made plans for Christmas.
A week or so afterwards, I got a letter from my mother, saying that Nellie had a diphtheritic sore throat. Anxious news came after that for a few days, but on a certain Sunday I had tidings that she was going on well. Early on Monday morning I got a telegram telling me to come home at once, for she was very much worse. I went round to Trinity to see Hugh, and found he had received a similar telegram. There was a train to London half an hour later, and as I was packing a bag the post came in with reassuring news. But that had been written the day before: the telegram was of later date.