hurried down the drive. 'What detail! What a sense of reality! How
carefully I must have _thought_ these creatures as a boy! How
thoroughly! And what a good idea to go out and see Jack's children at
Bourcelles. They've never known these English sprites. I'll introduce
'em!'

He thought it out in detail, very vividly indeed. His imagination
lingered over it and gave it singular reality.

Up the road he fairly ran. For Henry Rogers was a punctual man; these
last twenty years he had never once been late for anything. It had
been part of the exact training he had schooled himself with, and the
Vicar's invitation was not one he desired to trifle with. He made his
peace, indeed, easily enough, although the excuses sounded a little
thin. It was something of a shock, too, to find that the married
daughter after all was not the blue-eyed girl of his boyhood's
passion. For it was Joan, not May, who came down the gravel path
between the roses to greet him.

On the way up he had felt puzzled. Yet 'bemused,' perhaps, is the word
that Herbert Minks would have chosen for one of his poems, to describe
a state of mind he, however, had never experienced himself. And he
would have chosen it instinctively--for onomatopoeic reasons--because
it hums and drones and murmurs dreamily. 'Puzzled' was too sharp a
word.

Yet Henry Rogers, who felt it, said 'puzzled' without more ado,
although mind, imagination, memory all hummed and buzzed pleasantly
about his ears even while he did so.