away from the exigencies of affairs — his grandchildren, and the flowers, trees, birds of his little domain, to say nothingof sun and moon and stars above them, said, ‘Open, sesame,’ to him day and night. And sesame had opened — how much, perhaps,he did not know. He had always been responsive to what they had begun to call ‘Nature,’ genuinely, almost religiouslyresponsive, though he had never lost his habit of calling a sunset a sunset and a view a view, however deeply they mightmove him. But nowadays Nature actually made him ache, he appreciated it so. Every one of these calm, bright, lengtheningdays, with Holly’s hand in his, and the dog Balthasar in front looking studiously for what he never found, he would stroll,watching the roses open, fruit budding on the walls, sunlight brightening the oak leaves and saplings in the coppice,watching the water-lily leaves unfold and glisten, and the silvery young corn of the one wheat field; listening to thestarlings and skylarks, and the Alderney cows chewing the cud, flicking slow their tufted tails; and every one of these finedays he ached a little from sheer love of it all, feeling perhaps, deep down, that he had not very much longer to enjoy it.The thought that some day — perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five — all this world would be taken away from him,before he had exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an injustice brooding over his horizon. Ifanything came after this life, it wouldn’t be what he wanted; not Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and pretty faces — toofew, even now, of those about him! With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the‘sixties, as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance, had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before threethings alone — beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty. He had always