Far-off a cuckoo called; a wood-pigeon was cooing from the first elm-tree in the field, and how the daisies and buttercups had sprung up after the last mowing!  The wind had got into the sou’ west, too—­a delicious air, sappy!  He pushed his hat back and let the sun fall on his chin and cheek.  Somehow, to-day, he wanted company—­wanted a pretty face to look at.  People treated the old as if they wanted nothing.  And with the un-Forsytean philosophy which ever intruded on his soul, he thought:  ’One’s never had enough.  With a foot in the grave one’ll want something, I shouldn’t be surprised!’ Down here—­away from the exigencies of affairs—­his grandchildren, and the flowers, trees, birds of his little domain, to say nothing of sun and moon and stars above them, said, ’Open, sesame,’ to him day and night.  And sesame had opened—­how much, perhaps, he did not know.  He had always been responsive to what they had begun to call ‘Nature,’ genuinely, almost religiously responsive, though he had never lost his habit of calling a sunset a sunset and a view a view, however deeply they might move him.  But nowadays Nature actually made him ache, he appreciated it so.  Every one of these calm, bright, lengthening days, with Holly’s hand in his, and the dog Balthasar in front looking studiously for what he never found, he would stroll, watching the roses open, fruit budding on the walls, sunlight brightening the oak leaves and saplings in the coppice, watching the water-lily leaves unfold and glisten, and the silvery young corn of the one wheat field; listening to the starlings and skylarks, and the Alderney cows chewing the cud, flicking slow their tufted tails; and every one of these fine days he ached a little from sheer love of it all, feeling perhaps, deep down, that he had not very much longer to enjoy it.  The thought that some day—­perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not five—­all this world would be taken away from him, before he had exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an injustice brooding over his horizon.  If anything came after this life, it wouldn’t be what he wanted; not Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and pretty faces—­too few, even now, of those about him!  With the years his dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the ’sixties, as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance, had long dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone—­beauty, upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these now was beauty.  He had always had wide interests, and, indeed could still read The Times, but he was liable at any moment to put it down if he heard a blackbird sing.  Upright conduct, property—­somehow, they were tiring; the blackbirds and the sunsets never tired him, only gave him an uneasy feeling that he could not get enough of them.  Staring into the stilly radiance of the early evening and at the little gold and white flowers on the lawn, a thought came to him:  This