forget--Alan is a _slow_ bowler, but he gets
wickets."

Michael watched with a smile his mother waving to him from the cab
while still she was vaguely trying to resolve the parting metaphor he
had flung at her. As soon as the cab had turned the corner, he called
for his bicycle and rode off to Wychford.

He went slowly with many roadside halts, nor was there the gentlest rise
up which he did not walk. It was after five o'clock when he dipped from
the rolling highway down into Wychford. There were pink roses everywhere
on the gray houses. As he went through the gate of Plashers Mead, he
hugged himself with the thought of Guy's pleasure at seeing him so
unexpectedly on this burnished afternoon of midsummer. The leaves of the
old espalier rustled crisply: they were green and glossy, and the
apples, still scarcely larger than nuts, promised in the autumn when he
and Guy would be together here a ruddy harvest. The house was
unresponsive when he knocked at the door. He waited for a minute or two,
and then he went into the stone-paved hall and up the steep stairs to
the long corridor, at whose far end the framed view of the open doorway
into Guy's green room glowed as vividly as if it gave upon a high-walled
sunlit garden. The room itself was empty. There were only the books and
a lingering smell of tobacco smoke, and through the bay-window the
burble of the stream swiftly flowing. Michael looked out over the
orchard and away to the far-flung horizon of the wold beyond.

Here assuredly, he told himself, was the perfect refuge. Here in this
hollow waterway was peace. From here sometimes in the morning he and Guy
would ride into Oxford, whence at twilight they would steal forth again
and, dipping down from the bleak road, find Plashers Mead set safe in a
land that was tributary only to the moon. Guy's diamond pencil, with
which he was wont upon the window to inscribe mottoes, lay on the sill.
Michael picked it up and scratched upon the glass: _The fresh green lap
of fair King Richard's land_, setting the date below.

Then suddenly coming down past the house with the stream he saw in a
canoe Guy with a girl. The canoe swept past the window and was lost
round the bend, hidden immediately by reeds and overarching willows. Yet
Michael had time to see the girl, to see her cheeks of frailest rose, to
know she was a fairy's child and that Guy was deep in love. Although the
fleet vision thrilled him with a romantic beauty, Michael w