“I wandered out. A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the evening. I felt infinitely at peace. I reflected with a deep satisfaction that no soul in London knew my address. My bank, my solicitors, would be extremely annoyed when they discovered that they had mislaid me. To me there was a certain satisfaction in that thought also.” “On the following morning,” continued Malory, “I rose early. I went out. The freshness of this Kentish morning was a thing new to me. The ground, the air, were wet with dew; gossamer was over all the grass and hedges, shreds of gossamer linking bramble to bramble, perfect spiders’ webs of gossamer, and a veil of gossamer seemed to hang between the earth and the sun. The grass in the field was gray with wet. A darker trail across it showed me where the cattle had passed, as though some phantom sweeper had swept with a giant broom against the pile of a velvet carpet. The peculiar light of sunrise still clung about the land.” For a moment Malory ceased speaking, and the goats, the barren mountains, the impetuous torrent, rushed again into my vision like a wrong magic-lantern slide thrown suddenly, and in error, upon the screen. Then as his voice resumed I saw once more the hedges, the clump of oaks, and the darker trail where the cattle had passed across the field. “I was at a loss,” said Malory, “to know how to employ my morning, and regretted my stipulation that my training should not begin until the following day. I wished for a pitchfork in my hand, that I might carry the crisp bracken for bedding into the empty stalls. I heard somewhere a girl’s voice singing; the voice, I later discovered, of Nancy, upraised in a then popular song which began, ‘Oh, I do love to be beside the sea-side,’ and so often subsequently did I hear this song that it is for ever associated in my mind with Nancy. I could hear somewhere also the clank of harness, and presently one of the sons came from the stable, sitting sideways upon a great shire horse and followed by two other horses; they passed me by with the heavy, swinging gait of elephants, out into the lane where they disappeared, leaving me to my loneliness. I felt that the great fat ball of the world was rolling, rolling in the limpidity of the morning, and that I alone had given no helping push.