E was pale-faced, round-shouldered, and anæmic, a creature obviously deficient in vitality, with the hall-mark of servitude stamped very clearly upon his commonplace features, and the patience of Job shining in his hollow-set brown eyes. In every respect he was entirely out of touch with his environment; one could only wonder what had brought him so far from his accustomed haunts. His shabby yet respectable black clothes, his well-frayed linen, and the ink-stains still lingering upon his finger-nails—these things bespoke his occupation as plainly as though he had stood there among the bracken with a ledger under his arm and a pen behind his ear.
For by some strange chance he had wandered far from the city, and found his way into a very world of sunshine; over his head it came streaming through the delicate interlacings of those gently waving green elm-leaves—a rich golden flood, warm, yet very soft and sweet, there in the deep shade. He had thrown himself, after a moment's silent absorption, upon a grassy bank; his limbs stretched out over the mossy earth, his recumbent form the very personification of absolute yet awkward ease. His eyes began slowly to blink and then to close: the murmurous drone of bees at work and the pleasant heat had made him sleepy. It was really the country into which he had roamed; there were birds and insects everywhere, as well as wild flowers and sunshine: the perfume-laden air was all alive with them, just now a bumble-bee had balanced himself upon that stiff blade of grass yonder—hear him now, buzzing away in the bracken behind; what a lazy, sense-lulling noise! A brown tortoiseshell butterfly came floating in from the flower-lined hedgerow alongside the cornfield, and a beetle whose curved shell-like back was as black as night crept out from behind that piece of grey boulder where the honeysuckle hung down in long odoriferous wreaths. To one born in the country these are all common things enough, but to him, a city clerk, a counting-house machine whose life had been spent upon an office-stool, and whose walks were ever upon the stone pavements of a Babylonic wilderness—to him they were all new and full of wonder. It was many a year since he had seen an uncaged singing-bird so close as the bright-eyed linnet who had perched himself only a few yards away upon that slender hawthorn twig, calling with shrill, sweet notes to his mate, whose far-off chirping sounded like a weaker echo of his own more musical note. And what air—how bright and pure, how smokeless! Was the sky ever really so blue as that over Tooley Street, he wondered? Surely not! And those little fleecy, white clouds—surely they never floated like that over Bermondsey! Listen! There in his ears, like the soft music of the sea, came the gentle rushing of a summer breeze, rustling amongst the bending corn, whose tops were full even to bursting. His eyes closed of their own accord, he could not keep them open any longer; a sort of Nirvana of dreamless repose crept over his brain, a day-sleep from which he was suddenly awakened by the sharp snapping of a twig close at hand. He sat up, vaguely alarmed! Yonder, in the lowest fork of that elm-tree, sat the wanton disturber of his drowsiness. It was—yes, he decided that it must be, a squirrel!. He had never seen one before but it could be nothing else. What bright little black eyes, and what a tail! Off he scampered up into the deeper recesses of the thick-leaved hazel-bush beyond. The man regretted his disappearance and sighed.
He was awake now and beginning to feel lonely. He drew out his watch, a time-worn Waterbury, with a little black cord attached, and he sighed. Surely she would not be long now! He was impatient to think that she should be losing, for his sake, one moment of this wonderful morning. Cooking! He was quite content to live without it for these few halcyon days; they would so soon be over, and then—God only knew when they would come again! For the door of his prison-house had been opened quite by chance: it was surely nothing but a whim of Mr. Rupert's to lend his uncle-clerk this little Surrey cottage and to insist upon a week's holiday for him! Good-natured! Of course it was good-natured; but, all the same, it was a whim. The man fell to wondering—wondering whence had come to him this unexpected kindness. For years Mr. Rupert, junior partner in the "firm" had barely answered his respectful "Good Morning." What had made him carelessly and without explanation offer this strange kindness? The man's brain had grown misty through many years of mechanical work. There was something there—a thought without substance, or was it a fear? he pressed his hand to his forehead and sighed.