not unduly worry themselves with this reproach.

That was (in his turn) the lookout of the Rev. Harold Aubyn--also
his outlook.

He is to be imagined, in those days when Rosalie first came to know
him and to think of him as Prospero, as a terribly lonely man. He
stalked fatiguingly about the countryside in search of his parishioners,
and his parishioners were suspicious of him and disliked his fierce,
thrusting nose, and he returned from them embittered with them and
hating them. He genuinely longed to be friendly with them and on
terms of Hail, fellow, well met, with them; but they exasperated him
because they could not meet him either on his own quick intellectual
level or upon his own quick and very sensitive emotional level.
They could not respond to his humour and they could not respond,
in the way he thought they ought to respond, to his sympathy.

He once found a man--a farm labourer--who in conversation disclosed
a surprising interest in the traces of early and mediaeval habitation
of the country. The discovery delighted him. In the catalogue of
a secondhand bookseller of Ipswich he noticed the "Excursions in
the County of Suffolk," two volumes for three shillings, and he
wrote and had them posted to the man. For days he eagerly looked
in the post for the grateful and delighted letter that in similar
circumstances he himself would have written. He composed in his mind
the phrases of the letter and warmed in spirit over anticipation
of reading them. No letter arrived.

When he came into the rectory from visiting he was always asking,
"Has that man Bolas from Hailsham called?" Bolas never called. He