istent wrinkles which seem to show that the middle-aged
are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would the
hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned to their
life in England.

The thought of England was delightful, for together they would see the
old things freshly; it would be England in June, and there would be June
nights in the country; and the nightingales singing in the lanes,
into which they could steal when the room grew hot; and there would be
English meadows gleaming with water and set with stolid cows, and clouds
dipping low and trailing across the green hills. As he sat in the room
with her, he wished very often to be back again in the thick of life,
doing things with Rachel.

He crossed to the window and exclaimed, "Lord, how good it is to think
of lanes, muddy lanes, with brambles and nettles, you know, and real
grass fields, and farmyards with pigs and cows, and men walking beside
carts with pitchforks--there's nothing to compare with that here--look
at the stony red earth, and the bright blue sea, and the glaring white
houses--how tired one gets of it! And the air, without a stain or a
wrinkle. I'd give anything for a sea mist."

Rachel, too, had been thinking of the English country: the flat land
rolling away to the sea, and the woods and the long straight roads,
where one can walk for miles without seeing any one, and the great
church towers and the curious houses clustered in the valleys, and the
birds, and the dusk, and the rain falling against the windows.

"But London, London's the place," Terence continued. They looked
together at the carpet, as though London itself were to be seen there
lying on the floor, with all its spires and pinnacles pricking through
the smoke.

"On the whole, what I should like best at this moment," Terence
pondered, "would be to find myself walking down Kingsway, by those big
placards, you know, and turning into the Strand. Perhaps I might go and
look over Waterloo Bridge for a moment. Then I'd go along the Strand
past the shops with all the new books in them, and through the little
archway into the Temple. I always like the quiet after the uproar. You
hear your own footsteps suddenly quite loud. The Temple's very pleasant.
I think I should go and see if I could find dear old Hodgkin--the man
who writes books about Van Eyck, you know. When I left England he was
very sad about his tame magpie. He suspected that a man had poisoned