He had risen early, so as to go down into Surrey on his bicycle.  About noon he struck into the long golden road that goes straight across the high moor where the great poet had built him a house.  Inside his gates, a fork of the road sloped to the shore of a large lake fringed with the crimson heather.  The house stood far back on a flat stretch of moor, that looked as if it had been cut with one sweep of a gigantic scythe from the sheltering pine-woods.

He saw Fielding far off, standing at the door of his house to welcome him.  Fielding was seventy-five and he looked sixty.  A strong straight figure, not over tall nor over slender, wearing, sanely but loosely, the ordinary dress of an English gentleman.  A head with strong straight features, masses of white hair that hid the summit of the forehead, a curling moustache and beard, close-clipped, showing the line of the mouth still red as in his youth.  A head to be carved in silver or bronze, its edges bitten by time, like the edges of an antique bust or coin.

“So you’ve come, have you?” was his greeting which the grasp of his hand made friendly.

He took Rickman straight into his study, where a lady sat writing at a table in the window.

“First of all,” said he, “I must introduce you to Miss Gurney, who introduced you to me.”

Miss Gurney rose and held out a slender feverish hand.  She did not smile (her face narrowed so abruptly below her cheekbones that there was hardly room for a smile on it), but her eyes under their thick black brows turned on him an eager gaze.

Her eyes, he thought, were too piercing to be altogether friendly.  He wondered whether it was the flame in them that had consumed her face and made it so white and small.

She made a few unremarkable remarks and turned again to her writing table.

“Yes, Gertrude, you may go.”

Her sallow nervous hands had already begun gathering up her work in preparation for the word that banished her.  When it came she smiled (by some miracle), and went.

They had a little while to wait before luncheon.  The poet offered whisky and soda, and could hardly conceal his surprise when it was refused.

“You must forgive me,” he said presently, “for never having heard of you till yesterday.  My secretary keeps these things from me as a rule.  This time she allowed herself to be corrupted.”

Rickman felt a sudden interest in Miss Gurney.

“Your poems were sent to her by a friend of hers, with the request—­a most improper one—­that I should read them.  I had no intention of reading them; but I was pleased with the volume at first sight.  It was exactly the right length.”

“The right length?”

“Yes, small octavo; the very best length for making cigar lighters.”

Rickman had heard of the sardonic, the cruel humour with which Fielding scathed his contemporaries; still, he could hardly have expected even him to deal such a violent and devilish blow.  Though he flushed with the smart he bore himself bravely under it.  After all, it was to see Fielding that he had come.