And, when he looked at her photograph, he saw behind the clear beauty of the face, with its smile of tenderness and large eyes that never left him, an Elizabeth Carr divinely meek ... utterly unlike the Elizabeth Carr he knew, who carried herself with such graceful pride and seemed so far above him.
He took up the portrait for a moment. "She hasn't been here lately?" he said.
"Who?" asked Kenneth, at his writing-table.
"Your sister ... you were speaking about the statistics you did for her."
"Oh? Elizabeth. No. She's been pretty busy with her work."
"That's about it. I don't know half her schemes. Wonderful girl, Elizabeth. Now I come to think of it, I've got to go down to Epping Forest to-morrow. Some bean-feast she's giving to a thousand slum kids. There's sure to be a ticket in your office, why don't you ask to do it?"
"I will," said Humphrey. "A day's fresh air in the forest would do me good."
And he did. Things happened to be slack that day in Fleet Street, and Rivers thought there would be plenty of human interest in the story, "though, of course, it's a chestnut," so that was how Humphrey found himself on the platform at Loughton Station an hour later.
The morning was rich with the warmth and colour of June. The clear fresh smell of the country was all about him. The scent of the flowers, the sight of the green fields dappled with the yellow and white of kingcup and daisy, the pale sky above him with the sun beating down from the cloudless blue, called him back to Easterham, and the life that now seemed centuries away. Throughout all the comings and goings of years, throughout the change, and the unrest of men and women, the old Cathedral close would be unaltered. The rooks would still clamour and circle about the beeches, and the ivy would grow more thickly. Looking back on Easterham, now on the odd market-place, and on the streets that wandered out to the hedgerows and meadow-lands towards the New Forest, he looked back on a picture of infinite peace.
A bird's song and the croon of bees as they swung in their flower-cradles; a horse galloping freely in a field, and cattle browsing in the sunshine--were not all these of more worth than anything else in life?
Unnoticed, he had relinquished everything to Fleet Street. The poison of its promise had drugged him. He could appreciate nothing outside its narrow area ... news! news! and the talking of news; fifty steps round to the Pen Club, and fifty steps back to the office; all the day spent in that world of bricks and mortar, which had once seemed so vast, and was now to him nothing more than a very much magnified Easterham.