“But the dust chokes me,” said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of the green roads of England that lay beside him on the table.  But he did not open it.  He held it in his hand and said the thing he had had in mind to say all that evening.  “I do not think that I shall stir up my motives any more for a time.  Better to go on into the west country cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the past.”

“I can prescribe nothing better,” said Dr. Martineau.  “Incidentally, we may be able to throw a little more light on one or two of your minor entanglements.”

“I don’t want to think of them,” said Sir Richmond.  “Let me get right away from everything.  Until my skin has grown again.”

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

Section 1

Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over the downs round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and Netheravon and Amesbury to Stonehenge.

Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now, with Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing than he had remembered it to be.  Sir Richmond was frankly disappointed.  After the real greatness and mystery of the older place, it seemed a poor little heap of stones; it did not even dominate the landscape; it was some way from the crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was further dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and clustering offices of the air station that the great war had called into existence upon the slopes to the south-west.  “It looks,” Sir Richmond said, “as though some old giantess had left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside.”  Far more impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that capped the neighbouring crests.

The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to pay for admission at a little kiosk by the gate.  At the side of the road stood a travel-stained middle-class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein—­a family automobile with father no doubt at the wheel.  Sir Richmond left his own trim coupe at its tail.

They were impeded at the entrance by a difference of opinion between the keeper of the turnstile and a small but resolute boy of perhaps five or six who proposed to leave the enclosure.  The custodian thought that it would be better if his nurse or his mother came out with him.

“She keeps on looking at it,” said the small boy.  “It isunt anything.  I want to go and clean the car.”

“You won’t see Stonehenge every day, young man,” said the custodian, a little piqued.

“It’s only an old beach,” said the small boy, with extreme conviction.  “It’s rocks like the seaside.  And there isunt no sea.”

The man at the turnstile mutely consulted the doctor.

“I don’t see that he can get into any harm here,” the doctor advised, and the small boy was released from archaeology.