In those days Ernie learned to know the corner of England in the triangle between Lewes, the Seven Sisters, and Beau-nez as he had never known it before. And the closer grew his intimacy the greater became his love. The quiet, the strength, the noble rounded comeliness of the hills reminded him of the woman he sought. True, she disturbed him, present or absent; while they, in act or retrospect, comforted. But their full round breasts, rising clean and clear before him, stubble-crowned, green, purple, or golden against the blue, gave him a sense of earth rooted in the immensity of spirit and washed by the winds of heaven as did nothing else he knew but the woman he had lost. "Wish I were a poet," he sometimes said to his father. "To put it all down what I feel, so others could see it too." "Perhaps you are," his father replied. And certainly if to be a poet is to love the familiar objects of the road, a poet Ernie was: for he loved them all--Lewes with its narrow streets, its steep hill to which you cling like a fly on a pane and look across to Mount Caburn for help; the old _Pelham Arms_, its walnut-tree at the back, the _Fox_, the _Barley Mow_, the _Newmarket_ on the Brighton road; the hills running down in glorious nakedness to the highway, the tanned harvesters sitting among their sheaves; peeps of the blue Weald islanded with woods; and always accompanying him the long wall of the Downs, gloomy or gleaming, here smooth as the flanks of a race-horse, there scarred, grim, weather-worn and pocked, in winter dazzling white beneath the blue, ruddy in autumn sunsets, emerald in April days; and all the year gathering the shadows at evening in the Northward coombes to spill them over the expectant Weald like purple wine when the door of night had closed upon the sun. The lorries to and from Newhaven always took their way through the valley of the Ruther. Once or twice in that winter, as they bumped down High'nd Over from Sea-foord into Aldwoldston at evening, Ernie was surprised to find the chocolate-bodied car lying apparently derelict in the roadway at the steep entrance to the village; and wondered if the surviving Miss Caryll who still lived in the Dowerhouse at the foot of the hill was ill. And again one evening in the spring, as he jolted through the village-street, past the great chestnut lit with a thousand tapers in the market-square, he was aware of a man on a motor-bicycle pelting past him up the hill. The man wore motor-goggles; but there was no mistaking Alf, bowed over his handles, flashing past the _Lamb_, down the hill, and out of sight. What was Alf doing at that hour of the evening on the road to Sea-foord? BOOK VII THE OUTCAST CHAPTER L THE CRUMBLES Nature's punishments of her erring children are slow as they are sure. If the inexorable Dame cannot forget, neither can she hurry.