The butterfly gave its message to the boy's heart and settling on a blue flower, began to sip leisurely. Dash it!--the meadow-brown wasn't afraid. Need he be? His soul took charge again with a smile. III Over there on the left that sheer white bluff, thrusting out into the sea, would be Seaford Head. Beyond it lay Newhaven; behind it somewhere Lewes. To get there he had only to keep along the highlands. He held on at a steady jog-trot. The grass sparkled with dew; mushroom bulbs shoved through the turf at his toes; above him and beneath all was blaze. He crossed a shoulder, threading the gorse; skirted the edge of another huge coombe, troughed out beneath him; passed an ancient withered elder, squatting crone-like on the brow, and climbed a knoll that rose up bald out of the gorse. He topped the crest, and stopped suddenly. A little dewy-eyed pond, blue as the sky, was staring at him out of a saucer of green. In a moment he was on his knees at the edge of it, and drinking greedily. Then he took off his coat and laid it on the edge of the saucer to dry. That done he flung himself on his back to think. After all there was no hurry. Young as he was, he knew his England well enough to know the reception that awaited him at Lewes. He could see them about him, that cluster of Army officers, as he told his story--stonily incredulous, grimly silent, some sniggering, others jeering openly. The boy's head had been turned by his first brush!-- You'd only to look at him to see his sort--the romantic sort, commonly called liars! Great eyes like a girl! What did a chap with eyes like that want in the Service?--Scent-bottle--loss of the _Tremendous_ --kidnapping Nelson! Lorlumme, what a yarn! A clamour of feet close by startled his heart. He leapt up, expecting cavalry. But no: it was a patter-footed multitude of sheep, who welled in staring yellow flood over the edge of the saucer and down to the pond. Behind them stalked Abraham, a black and white bobtail at heel. The patriarch wore a slouch-hat and old cloak, loose as a cloud. A wild beard flamed all about him; and in his hand was a long crook. He stood on the rim of the saucer and looked down at his drinking flock. Kit expected him to raise his hands and bless somebody. Instead he spat luxuriously, and addressed his dog in gibberish. "Ge ou tha go!" he growled, and only the dog knew he was being desired to get out of that gorse. Kit watched the man placidly. Instinct, which is inherited experience, reassured him. There was nothing to be feared from this chap, and nothing to be got from him. Abraham was shaggy, he was unintelligible, he was harmless. In his few days' experience of life, the boy had already learned one great truth: that every man is exactly what he _looks_. The face always reveals or betrays. And in this face, wild with the wildness of storms and skies, there was nothing but the stupid innocence of one of his own sheep.