Apart from its joint composers, no one
can ever know its contents but the charwoman, who, noticing the
feminine writing, took it back to Lambeth and pored over it with a
candle for full half an hour, greatly disappointed. 'Things like
that,' she grumbled to her husband, whose appearance suggested that he
went for bigger game, 'ain't worth the trouble of taking at all,
whichever way you looks at it.' And probably she was right.
CHAPTER III
And what if All of animated nature
Be but as Instruments diversely framed
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
One infinite and intellectual Breeze,
At once the Soul of each, and God of all?
_The AEolian Harp_, S. T. COLERIDGE.
In the train, even before St. John's was passed, a touch of inevitable
reaction had set in, and Rogers asked himself why he was going. For a
sentimental journey was hardly in his line, it seemed. But no
satisfactory answer was forthcoming--none, at least, that a Board or a
Shareholders' Meeting would have considered satisfactory.
There was an answer in him somewhere, but he couldn't quite get down
to it. The spring glory had enticed him back to childhood. The journey
was symbolical of escape. That was the truth. But the part of him that
knew it had lain so long in abeyance that only a whisper flitted
across his mind as he sat looking out of the carriage window at the
fields round Lee and Eltham.
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