"I'm different," Mr. Gustard pronounced, very solemnly. "I've lived my life. If I was to take a walk round Hampstead I couldn't hardly peep into a garden without seeing a tree as I'd planted myself. And when I'm gone, the trees 'll still be there. That's something to _think_ about, that is. There was a clergyman came nosing round here the other day to ask me why I didn't go to church. I told him I'd done without church as a lad, and I couldn't see why I shouldn't do without it now. 'But you're growing old, Mr. Gustard,' he says to me. 'That's just it,' I says to him. 'I'm getting very near the time when, if all they say is true, I shall be in the heavenly choir for ever and ever, amen, and the less singing I hear for the rest of my time on earth the better.' 'That's a very blasphemous remark,' he says to me. 'Is it?' says I to him. 'Well, here's another. Perhaps all this talk by parsons,' I says, 'about this life on earth being just a choir practice for heaven won't bear looking into. Perhaps we shall all die and go to sleep and never wake up and never dream and never do nothing at all, never. And if that's true,' I says, 'I reckon I shall bust my coffin with laughing when I think of my trees growing and growing and growing and you preaching to a lot of old women and children about something you don't know nothing about and they don't know nothing about and nobody don't know nothing about.' With that I offered him a pear, and he walked off very offended with his head in the air. You get out and about, my dear. Bustle around and enjoy yourself. That's my motto for the young." Sylvia felt that there was much to be said for Mr. Gustard's attitude, and she took his advice so far as to go for a long walk on the Heath that very afternoon. Yet there was something lacking. When she got home again she found that the book of adventure which she had been reading was no longer capable of keeping her thoughts fixed. The stupid part of it was that her thoughts wandered nowhere in particular and without attaching themselves to a definite object. She would try to concentrate them upon Jimmy and speculate what he was doing, but Jimmy would turn into Claude Raglan; and when she began to speculate what Claude was doing, Claude would turn back again into Jimmy. Her own innermost restlessness made her so fidgety that she went to the window and stared at the road along the dusky Heath. The garden gate of next door swung to with a click, and Sylvia saw a young man coming toward the house. She was usually without the least interest in young men, but on this afternoon of indefinable and errant thoughts she welcomed the least excuse for bringing herself back to a material object; and this young man, though it was twilight and his face was not clearly visible, managed to interest her somehow, so that at tea she found herself asking Mr. Gustard who he might be and most unaccountably blushing at the question.