Meanwhile, the view from the train had shaken off the brief suburbs of the town and displayed a landscape of small steep hills and hanging woods. A brook ran counter to the train’s course. It was in flood, and a hackle of foam rode on it. Evan had fished it during the summer holidays, and during the summer holidays before that, and before that. There was not an alder bush along its course that his line had not tangled in. He was tired to death of it, and of the woods where his family took picnics, and of the fields where they looked for mushrooms. If it had not been for the absence of illustrated papers on the lap opposite, he would have opened his suitcase, taken out the volume of Thomas Hardy’s poems, and read himself into detachment. But to do so under her observation would appear uncivil, so he continued to look out of the window, and the lady continued to admire his eyelashes.

She saw them flick suddenly, and remain poised apart. Instead of just looking, he was now staring with all his eyes. His attention was so obviously arrested that she glanced out, too. She could see nothing to account for such rapt interest. The railway track had turned eastward into a landscape of shaggy, muddied pastures, hitched to the contours of chalk downs. On the horizon a roofless barn stood out against the 40sky. Beech trees had been planted round it as a windbreak; their boughs streamed in the wind like the skeleton of a wave. It was the image of desolation, so probably it was this that had caught his fancy. The young love desolation. Positively, he had flushed with pleasure, gazing at his gaunt and draughty Dulcinea.

But as Evan saw this same scene, the trees were heavy with foliage, and nothing stirred them but the occasional flight of a wood-pigeon, tumbling from one bough to another. At their feet were inlets of green moss, hot velvet in the sun, cold as ermine in the shade. Between the tree-trunks, as from a pillared portico, he looked out on the vast composure of a September day: the shorn fields, the ricks in the rickyards like loaves of bread on the baker’s counter, the cattle grazing in the green aftermath meadows. He was alone there, with a day of flawless solitude before him, and he had never been there before, or known of it. The place was entirely his. Roofless to the blue sky, the barn was solemn as a cathedral, and so thickly carpeted with leaf mould that young trees were springing up within it. Stepping on a floor of thirty autumns, he had walked round—reading the epitaphs, as one does in a cathedral, but beset by no harrying verger or trailing sightseers; and the epitaphs had not a brag of virtue or regret or achievement among them, but were only names, or initials, or dates, with sometimes a heart, sometimes a phallus and sometimes a Union Jack scored in the chalk blocks of which the barn was built. His feet scuffed up the smell of leaf mould, and from a near-by field came the smell of a newly cut clover crop, steadfast, 41caressing and sweet as the sea is salt. He had spent the whole day there, a day so freed from time that when he disengaged his bicycle from an elder bush it seemed to him that the twigs had lengthened over the saddle and ripened their berries from red to purple since he leaned the bicycle there on his arrival.