h a gentle pity.

On the day the letter came from Nicky, nearly two years after he had
gone away, Ishmael went over to see Boase and tell him the news. The
Parson could not often get over to Cloom Manor now, but it was the
highest tribute to him that not only Ishmael and Judy and Georgie, when
she could spare the time, but the children too, considered a visit to
the Parson in the light of a pleasure. Boase knew it and was glad--even
his sturdy aloofness and self-reliance would have felt a pang at being
called on for decency's sake.

Ishmael found Boase lying on the long chair in his study, that for him
always held something, some smell or atmosphere of the mind, that
carried him back to his childhood. He felt in the midst of the old days
again at once, when he was not looking at Boase, who was grown very old,
his once rather square face and blunt features having taken on a
transparency of texture that was in itself ageing, while his hair,
sparse about the big brow, was a creamy white like froth. Boase called
to Ishmael, recognising his step, to take off his wet things in the
hall, for it was raining hard, with that whole-hearted rain of the West
which when it begins seems as though it could never stop again. That was
a wet summer, when the stalks of the growing harvest were flattened to
the earth and the corn sprouted green in the ear and the hay rotted on
the ground before ever it could be carried. Ishmael had to be careful
about getting wet since that night when he had run to the burning of
Angwin's ricks, and he did not scorn the Parson's offer of a pair of
shabby old slippers that lurked under the hall chair for just such
occasions as this.

It seemed to Ishmael that if he had not been feeling such a different
being himself he might have been a little boy again and time never have
moved on from the days when he lived here with the Parson and did his
lessons in this room. Outside the shrubs bent before the rainy wind, as
they had done so many times before his childish eyes; the scrap of lawn
visible between them showed as sopping and as green; the fuchsia had
grown bigger; but its purple and scarlet blossoms, so straightly
pendant, each held a drop of clear water at the tip, as they had ever
done in weather such as this. Within the room might be a little fuller,
a little smaller, whether owing to the Parson's untidiness, with which
the new housekeeper could not cope as well as had old Mrs. Tippet, long
dead, or wh