For another hour he sat idle in his studio; he lay on his divan and took a volume from the morraine of old _Punches_, but found the wit flat and unprofitable; he took the violin, played a dozen notes, and put it down again; he leaned out of the window, and remarked that it was an extremely fine day. But as to painting any more, he could as soon have swum through the air over the roofs of the sea of houses below him. The studio was intolerable; his thoughts, with their dismal circle that ended exactly where it began and went on tracing the same circle again and again, were intolerable also; his own company was equally so. But from that there was no relief; good or bad, it would be with him to the grave. Then suddenly an idea occurred to him which held out certain promise of relief at least, in that he could communicate his trouble, and he thought of the Hermit Merivale had always an astonishingly cooling effect on him; it was a pleasure in itself, especially to a feverish, excitable mind like his, to see anyone, and that a friend, who, with great intellectual and moral activity, was so wonderfully capable of resting, of not worrying; restful, too, would be the glades of the immemorial forest. And no sooner had the idea struck him than his mind was made up; a telegram to the Hermit, a hurried glance at a railway guide, and a bag into which he threw the requisites of a night, were all that was required. He had just time to eat a hurried lunch, and then started for Waterloo. The day had been hot and sunny when he left London, and promised an exquisite summer afternoon in the country, where the freshness would tone down a heat that in town was rather oppressive. But this pleasant probability, as the train threw the suburbs over its shoulder, did not seem likely to be fulfilled, for the air, instead of getting fresher, seemed to gather sultriness with every mile. Evelyn was himself much of a slave to climatic conditions, and this windless calm, portending thunder, seemed to press down on his head with dreadful weight. Even the draught made by the flying train had no life in it; it was a hot buffet of air as if from a furnace mouth. Then, as he neared his destination, the sky began to be overcast, lumps of dark-coloured cloud, with hard, angry edges of a coppery tinge began to mount in the sky, coming up in some mysterious manner against what wind there was. This, too, when he got out at Brockenhurst, was blowing in fitful, ominous gusts, now raising a pillar of dust along the high road, then dying again to an absolute calm. Directly to the south the clouds were most threatening, and the very leaves of the trees looked pale and milky against the black masses of the imminent storm. Yet it was some vague consolation, though he hated thunder anywhere, to know how much more intolerable this would be in London, and he arrived at the cottage glad that he had come.