Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of nothing but that grisly moment of waiting in the empty room, when still believing it night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious pang had found himself alone. His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate cries of memory and grief, he sat on beside the water, unconscious of the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees opposite. At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four o’clock. He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting and at the same instant he saw beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common, a boy’s figure, which, after a start or two, he recognized as Ned Irwin. ‘You here, Ned?’ he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him reasserting itself at once. ‘Why aren’t you harvesting?’ ‘Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr. Carter’s job don’t begin till to-morrow. He’s got a machine coming from Witley, he hev, and they won’t let him have it till Thursday, so I’ve been out after things for the club.’ And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the day’s capture of butterflies, and some belated birds’ eggs, the plunder of a bit of common where the turf for the winter’s burning was just being cut. Goatsucker, linnet, stonechat,’ said the Rector, fingering them. ‘Well done for August, Ned. If you haven’t got anything better to do with them, give them to that small boy of Mr. Carter’s that’s been ill so long. He’d thank you for them, I know.’ The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent. Then his new-born scientific ardor seemed to struggle with his rustic costiveness of speech. ‘I’ve been just watching a queer creetur,’ he said at last hurriedly; ‘I b’leeve he’s that un.’ And he pulled out a well-thumbed handbook, and pointed to a cut of the grasshopper warbler. ‘Whereabouts?’ asked Robert, wondering the while at his own start of interest. ‘In that bit of common t’other side the big pond,’ said Ned pointing, his brick-red countenance kindling into suppressed excitement. ‘Come and show me!’ said the Rector, and the two went off together. And sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note which had roused the lad’s curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature that should have been a grasshopper, and was not.