Alf was not in the least offended. Indeed he was rather pleased. He stood in his favourite position in the window with his back to his mother and cleaned his nails with a pen-knife. "Crucified for conscience' sake," he muttered. "I dare say I'm not the first, nor I won't be the last neether." Alf was confirmed into the church, and persecuted for it by his mother, a few weeks before his brother's return home. CHAPTER XXVI MR. PIGOTT Ernie, bag in hand, and sore of heart, sauntered along to the end of Rectory Walk. There Beech-hangar, swirling in the wind under the shoulder of the Downs that shut off Beau-nez, called to his wounded spirit. He walked slowly along the New Road, away from the houses, across the Golf Links towards this favourite retreat of his boyhood where of old, when in trouble with his mother, he would retire. There on the slope amid the beech-trees, the Links billowing away before him to the woods that ambushed the Duke's Lodge, he lay down. The smooth stems rose about him like columns in the choir of a church. The wind strayed amid a sea of sun-lit leaves. The cool, the comfort, the bright graciousness of these comrades of his youth soothed and satisfied him. He studied them with kind eyes. The harsh male quality of the oak was not theirs. They could not stand the buffeting of Time as did the fierce old warriors of the Weald; but they could sustain the spirit in the hour of need. They were for him the women among trees. Ernie lay with his eyes shut, and his hands behind his head, listening to the wind flowing through the tree-tops. The murmur of flies, the under-song of birds, the moving stillness, the secret stir of life, filled him to overflowing. Alf had made him feel an isolated atom, the sport of incredibly cruel devils. Now he knew that he was part of an immense and harmonious whole. The sense of dislocation, exile and disease passed away. His mind was an open cistern into which a myriad healing streams were pouring from an unknown source. Who was Alf to disturb his peace of mind? Alf, the puny, the pretentious, who was not really alive at all. There was something greater in the world than Alf, and that something was on his side. He was sure of it. He sat up and laughed. Then above the murmur of insects and birds the louder hum of Man and his machinery, setting the world to rights, stole in upon his mind. Two groundmen were mowing the green just under the Hangar. It was time to be moving. He sauntered back along the New Road, eyeing the spruce villas on the northern side, where of old allotment gardens had been. At the corner of Church Street he asked a policeman where Mr. Pigott lived now. The man pointed down the Lewes Road, now fringed with houses. The old schoolmaster had, it seemed, left Huntsman's Lodge at the foot of the Downs, and moved in nearer to his work when he became Manager of the South Downs Transport Co.