t the bars, pressing his eyes under them, peering,
waiting.

He heard them coming up across the heavy turf, rounding the curve in the
Willow Road. He opened his eyes and closed them again. The soft menacing
sound deepened, as heat deepens, strikes through the skin into the very
flesh. Head on, with long legs rising, falling, rising again, striking
the ground insanely, like needles taking terrible, impossible and
purposeless stitches.

He saw their bellies, fawn colored, pitching from side to side, flashing
by, straining the fence, and he rose up on his feet and silently,
swiftly, fled on beside them.

Something delirious, hysterical, came over him and he fell. Blood
trickled into his eyes down from his forehead. It had a fine feeling for
a moment, like a mane, like that roan mare's mane that had passed
him--red and long and splendid.

He lifted his hand, and closed his eyes once more, but the soft pounding
did not cease, though now, in his sitting position, it only jogged him
imperceptibly, as a child on a knee.

It seemed to him that he was smothering, and he felt along the side of
his face as he had done in youth when they had put a cap on him that was
too large. Twining green things, moist with earth-blood, crept over his
fingers, the hot, impatient leaves pressed in, and the green of the
matted grass was deathly thick. He had heard about the freeness of
nature, thought it was so, and it was not so.

A trailing ground pine had torn up small blades in its journey across
the hill, and a vine, wrist-thick, twisted about a pale oak, hideously,
gloriously, killing it, dragging it into dust.

A wax Patrick Pipe leaned against his neck, staring with black eyes, and
John opened his mouth, running his tongue across his lips snapping it
off, sighing.

Move as he would, the grass was always under him, and the crackling of
last autumn's leaves and last summer's twigs--minute dead of the
infinite greatness--troubled him. Something portentous seemed connected
with the patient noises about him. An acorn dropped, striking a thin
fine powder out of a frail oak pod. He took it up, tossing it. He had
never liked to see things fall.

He sat up, with the dim thunder of the horses far off, but quickening
his heart.

He went over the scene he had with Freda Buckler, back there in the
house, the long quivering spears of pot-grass standing by the window as
she walked up and down, pulling at them, talking to him.

Small, with c