“Damned beast . . . great beefy beast. . . . If only the men could see what a damned beast he is. If Layton or some one could give him what he wants. Only no one could fight him. . . . He’s got a weak heart, and it might kill him. I suppose that would be murder. . . .” The word suddenly got a new significance. They called this road Murderer’s Cross Road. High up in the grassy bank some pious person had cut a St. Andrew’s cross to commemorate the murder of a postman who had been relieved of his bags and his life on a dark night a century ago. The college tradition said that it was haunted. Certainly it had an ugly sound. Murderer’s Cross Road: a name to be whispered. “Funny . . .” said Edwin. “There’s nothing very awful about it. I could understand a chap wanting to murder a chap. Quite easily. Only he might be sorry about it afterwards. I wouldn’t mind murdering Griffin.” He took a silver watch out of his pocket and laid it on the bank beside him. He could see that there was a full hour to spare before the bell in the water tower would jangle for the evening roll-call in the corner of the Quad; and so he lay back easily on the bank, stretching out his legs and arms in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross scored in the hedge a little farther on. Lying thus he could watch the shimmer on the bearded wheat. He had always loved the softness of this dip in the downs. He had loved it on winter mornings delicately dusted with rime, in November when flints lay like a bloom on the pale fallow, in March when the bloom turned green. Now the thunder-clouds had rolled away, rumbling, from the south, and a breath of cooler air was moving through the valley, throwing the surface of that green sea into wave-like motion; the waves shuddered faintly and the sound came to his ears as though re-echoed from the heavy woods which stood still in the heat, bounding the green ripples; and lying there, with his eyes half-closed, Edwin was already afloat, bearing westward with the set of the tide in the track of Cortes and Columbus and Pizarro and other adventurous voyagers. It was not really very difficult for him to forget his tears. Although the fear of Griffin, that had first driven him afield, was a cruel obsession to which he was liable by night and day, he had long ago discovered that silence and solitude could make him free of any wonder which he chose to imagine. It had been like that even when he was quite little; he had always possessed the faculty of day-dreaming; and now that his imagination was beginning to flush at the sound of great names, and the pomps of chivalry and legend were slowly unfolding before him with their subtle suggestiveness unhampered by such knowledge of detail as would be alive to incongruities, his idleness became daily more precious. He suddenly remembered that Achaean assembly stirred by Agamemnon’s words “as when the West wind cometh to stir a deep cornfield with violent blast, and the ears bow down. . . .”