head by standing on
tiptoe, and I laughed at the framed "presentation plates" from old
Christmas numbers on the walls. These things are merely curious when the
sun is shining and it is high May, and one is free to do the desired
work after twenty years in a galley.

V

At a quarter to eight that evening I saw the sun set behind the hills.
As I wandered reflectively down the lane that goes towards Challis
Court, a blackbird was singing ecstatically in a high elm; here and
there a rabbit popped out and sat up, the picture of precocious
curiosity. Nature seemed to be standing in her doorway for a careless
half-hour's gossip, before putting up the shutters to bar the robbers
who would soon be about their work of the night.

It was still quite light as I strolled back over the Common, and I chose
a path that took me through a little spinney of ash, oak, and beech,
treading carefully to avoid crushing the tender crosiers of bracken that
were just beginning to break their way through the soil.

As I emerged from the little clump of wood, I saw two figures going away
from me in the direction of Pym.

One was that of a boy wearing a cricket-cap; he was walking
deliberately, his hands hanging at his sides; the other figure was a
taller boy, and he threw out his legs in a curious, undisciplined way,
as though he had little control over them. At first sight I thought he
was not sober.

The two passed out of sight behind a clump of hawthorn, but once I saw
the smaller figure turn and face the other, and once he made a repelling
gesture with his hands.

It occurred to me that the smaller boy was trying to avoid his
companion; that he was, in one sense, running away from him, that he
walked as one might walk away from some threatening animal,
deliberately--to simulate the appearance of courage.

I fancied the bigger boy was the idiot Harrison I had seen that
afternoon, and Farmer Bates's "We hoped we were shut of him" recurred to
me. I wondered if the idiot were dangerous or only a nuisance.

I took the smaller boy to be one of the villagers' children. I noticed
that his cricket-cap had a dark patch as though it had been mended with
some other material.

The impression which I received from this trivial affair was one of
disappointment. The wood and the Common had been so deserted by
humanity, so given up to nature, that I felt the presence of the idiot
to be a most distasteful intrusion. "If that horrible thing is goi