There is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind.  A vague excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood.  The curtain of fog waved momentarily aside.  Henriot fancied a star peeped down at him.

“It will change things a bit—­at last,” he sighed, settling back into his chair.  “It will bring movement!”

Already something in himself had changed.  A restlessness, as of that wandering wind, woke in his heart—­the desire to be off and away.  Other things could rouse this wildness too:  falling water, the singing of a bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road.  But the cry of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world’s great routes, remained ever the master-touch.  High longing took his mood in hand.  Mid seven millions he felt suddenly—­lonely.

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
    I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

He murmured the words over softly to himself.  The emotion that produced Innisfree passed strongly through him.  He too would be over the hills and far away.  He craved movement, change, adventure—­somewhere far from shops and crowds and motor-’busses.  For a week the fog had stifled London.  This wind brought life.

Where should he go?  Desire was long; his purse was short.

He glanced at his books, letters, newspapers.  They had no interest now.  Instead he listened.  The panorama of other journeys rolled in colour through the little room, flying on one another’s heels.  Henriot enjoyed this remembered essence of his travels more than the travels themselves.  The crying wind brought so many voices, all of them seductive: 

There was a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the world like flying dreams.  He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount Ida’s slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon.  It was dawn once more upon the Ionian Sea, and he smelt the perfume of the Cyclades.  Blue-veiled islands melted in the sunshine, and across the dewy lawns of Tempe, moistened by the spray of many waterfalls, he saw—­Great Heavens above!—­the dancing of white forms ... or was it only mist the sunshine painted against Pelion?...  “Methought, among the lawns together, we wandered underneath the young grey dawn.  And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind....”

And then, into his stuffy room, slipped the singing perfume of a wall-flower on a ruined tower, and with it the sweetness of hot ivy.  He heard the “yellow bees in the ivy bloom.”  Wind whipped over the open hills—­this very wind that laboured drearily through the London fog.