He almost believed that he was contented; he had never cared for people so much as for books, and now he saw no people, and his books began to crowd his shelves. No one passed by "The Yews"--so called, he imagined, in extravagant compliment to the decaying cypress--for it stood by a grass-grown by-way that had once connected two main roads, each a couple of miles distant. These were now joined by a better road down in the valley, and no one came past Maurice's window save the milk, the bread, the butcher, and the postman. Summer turned brown and dry and became autumn, autumn turned wet and chilly and grew into winter, and all the winds of heaven blew cold and damp through the cracks of the ill-built house. Maurice was glad when the spring came; he had taken the house for three years, and he was a careful man, and also, in his way, a determined. Yet it was good to look out once more on something green, and to see sunshine and a warm sky; it was near Easter now. In all these ten months nothing whatever had happened to him. He had never been beyond his five acres--and no one had been to see him. He had no relations, and friends soon forget; besides, after all, friends, unlike relations, cannot go where they are not invited. It was on the Saturday before Easter that the quarryside fell in. Maurice was working in his study when he heard a sudden crack and a slow, splitting sound, and then a long, loud, rumbling noise, like thunder, that echoed and re-echoed from the hills on each side. And, looking from his window, he saw the cloud of white dust rise high above the edge of the old quarry, and seem to drift off to join the cotton-wool clouds in the blue sky. "I suppose it's all safe enough here," he said, and went back to his manuscripts. But he could not work. At last something had happened; he found himself shaken and excited. He laid down the pen. "I wonder if any one was hurt?" he said; "the road runs just below, of course. I wonder whether there'll be any more of it--I wonder?" A wire jerked, the cracked bell sounded harshly through the silence of the house. He sprang to his feet. "Who on earth----" he said. "The house isn't safe after all, perhaps, and they've come to tell me." As he went along the worn oil-cloth of the hall he saw through the comfortless white-spotted glass of his front door the outline of a woman's hat. He opened the door--it stuck as usual--but he got it open. There stood a girl holding a bicycle. "Oh!" she said, without looking at him, "I'm so sorry to trouble you--my bicycle's run down--and I'm afraid it's a puncture, and could you let me have some water, to find the hole--and if I might sit down a minute." Her voice grew lower and lower. He opened the door wide and put out his hand for the bicycle. She took two steps past him, rather unsteadily, and sat down on the stairs--there were no chairs: the furniture of the hall was all oil-cloth and hat pegs.