oval face whose length was increased by a short, dark, pointed beard--a
visage such as Vandyk might have painted, grave and gentle, but for its
bright grey eyes, cinder-lashed and crow's-footed, and its strange look
of not seeing what was before it. He walked quickly, though he was tired
and hot; tall, upright, and thin, in a grey parsonical suit, on whose
black kerseymere vest a little gold cross dangled.

Above his brother's house, whose sloping garden ran down to the railway
line and river, a large room had been built out apart. Pierson stood
where the avenue forked, enjoying the sound of the waltz, and the cool
whipping of the breeze in the sycamores and birches. A man of fifty,
with a sense of beauty, born and bred in the country, suffers fearfully
from nostalgia during a long unbroken spell of London; so that his
afternoon in the old Abbey had been almost holy. He had let his senses
sink into the sunlit greenery of the towering woods opposite; he had
watched the spiders and the little shining beetles, the flycatchers,
and sparrows in the ivy; touched the mosses and the lichens; looked
the speedwells in the eye; dreamed of he knew not what. A hawk had been
wheeling up there above the woods, and he had been up there with it in
the blue. He had taken a real spiritual bath, and washed the dusty fret
of London off his soul.

For a year he had been working his parish single-handed--no joke--for
his curate had gone for a chaplain; and this was his first real holiday
since the war began, two years ago; his first visit, too, to his
brother's home. He looked down at the garden, and up at the trees of the
avenue. Bob had found a perfect retreat after his quarter of a century
in Ceylon. Dear old Bob! And he smiled at the thought of his elder
brother, whose burnt face and fierce grey whiskers somewhat recalled a
Bengal tiger; the kindest fellow that ever breathed! Yes, he had found