Mrs. Rylands had been back in Casa Terragena two days before the succession of little notes and cards from Philip was broken by a considerable letter again, this time a whale of letter, opening with a long account of the return of the prophet Sempack to his own home. This account seemed to have been written some days ago; the handwriting and paper were different from those of the latter sheets.

It presented that large untidy person in his own distinctive¹ setting. Philip’s curt², clumsy and occasionally incisive³ sentences, breaking now and then into a new-won fluency⁴, portrayed⁵ Sempack like a big but prostrate⁶ note of interrogation, lying athwart the whole world. He had been rather more hurt it seemed than the doctors had at first supposed. There was a troublesome displacement⁷ of a wrist bone and there was something splintered at the end of a rib⁸. Philip had had to wait longer than he had expected while X-ray examinations and a minor⁹ operation were carried out, and he had taken the great man down not in his own Talbot but in a special ambulance car to his home in Dorsetshire.

Philip was evidently surprised by Sempack’s home. “I had expected something very ordinary, something like a small, square, serious house taken out of Clapham, with a rather disagreeable and unwilling¹⁰ housekeeper¹¹,” he wrote, “but as a matter of fact he has done himself extremely well. In a compact but very pretty way.”

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