wned by smoke. But even as Scorrier looked, a
white puff went soaring up. It was the footnote to his memories.

February 1901.

THE END.

SAINTS PROGRESS

By John Galsworthy

PART I

I

Such a day made glad the heart. All the flags of July were waving; the
sun and the poppies flaming; white butterflies spiring up and twining,
and the bees busy on the snapdragons. The lime-trees were coming into
flower. Tall white lilies in the garden beds already rivaled the
delphiniums; the York and Lancaster roses were full-blown round their
golden hearts. There was a gentle breeze, and a swish and stir and hum
rose and fell above the head of Edward Pierson, coming back from his
lonely ramble over Tintern Abbey. He had arrived at Kestrel, his brother
Robert's home on the bank of the Wye only that morning, having stayed at
Bath on the way down; and now he had got his face burnt in that
parti-coloured way peculiar to the faces of those who have been too long
in London. As he came along the narrow, rather overgrown avenue, the
sound of a waltz thrummed out on a piano fell on his ears, and he smiled,
for music was the greatest passion he had. His dark grizzled hair was
pushed back off his hot brow, which he fanned with his straw hat. Though
not broad, that brow was the broadest part of a narrow oval face whose
length was increased by a short, dark, pointed beard--a visage such as
Vandyk might have painted, grave and gentle, but for its bright grey
eyes, cinder-lashed and crow's-footed, and its strange look of not seeing
what was before it. He walked quickly, though he was tired and hot;
tall, upright, and thin, in a grey parsonical suit, on whose black
kerseymere vest a little gold cross dangled.

Above his brother's house, whose sloping garden ran down to the railway
line and river, a large room had been built out apart. Pierson stood
where the avenue forked, enjoying the sound of the waltz, and the cool
whipping of the breeze in the sycamores and birches. A man of fifty,
with a sense of beauty, born and bred in the country, suffers fearfully
from nostalgia during a long unbroken spell of London; so that his
afternoon in the old Abbey had been almost holy. He had let his senses
sink into the sunlit greenery of the towering woods opposite; he had
watched the spiders and the little shining beetles, the flycatchers, and
sparrows in the ivy; touched the mosses and the lichens; looked the
speedwells