perfectly he assumed it was
undiscovered land, and beyond it lay in a field and dozed, his hat over
his eyes, and learned how blessed it is to be alone in freedom, even
afar from Lydias and Esthers. Healing had not begun in him until that
day. Here were none to sympathise, none to summon him to new relations
or recall the old. The earth had taken him back to her bosom, to cherish
gravely, if with no actual tenderness, that he might be of the more use
to her. If he did not that afternoon hear the grass growing, at least
something rose from the mould that nourished it, into his eyes and ears
and mouth and the pores of his skin, and helped him on to health. At
five he remembered his father, who had begged him not to go away, got up
and turned back on his steps. Now he was hungry and bought rolls and
cheese at a little shop, and walked on eating them. The dusk came, and
only the robin seemed of unabated spirit, flying to topmost twigs, and
giving the evening call, the cry that was, he thought, "grief! grief!"
and the following notes like a sob.

Jeffrey came into Addington by another road, one that would take him
into town along the upland, and now he lingered purposely and chose
indirect ways because, although it was unlikely that any one would know
him, he shrank from the prospect of demanding eyes. At nine o'clock even
he was no farther than the old circus ground, and, nearing it, he heard,
through the evening stillness, a voice, loud, sharp, forensic. It was
hauntingly familiar to him, a voice he might not know at the moment, yet
one that had at least belonged to some part of his Addington life. The
response it brought from him, in assaulted nerves and repugnant ears,
was entirely distasteful. Whatever the voice was, he had at some time
hated it. Why it was continuing on that lifted note he could not guess.
With a little twitch of the lips, the sign of a grim amusement, he
thought this might even be an orator, some wardroom Demosthenes,
practising against the lonely curtain of the night.

"You have no country," the voice was bastinadoing the air. "And you
don't need one. Your country is the whole earth and it belongs to you."

Jeff halted a rod before the nearer entrance to the field. He had
suddenly the sense of presences. The nerves on his skin told him
humanity was near. He went on, with an uncalculated noiselessness, for
the moment loomed important, and since what humanity was there was
silent--all but that one h