Chapter 1

CHAPTER I.

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed.
All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the
stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart.
Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West
Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he
always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward,
goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England.

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next
station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and
piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile
proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had
finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was
extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life;
two hours in which he might have done so much, so much--written
the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book.
Instead of which--his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty
cushions against which he was leaning.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be
done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds
of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the
precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all
his works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy
corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive? None, none,
none.

Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was
twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.

The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last.
Denis jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile
of baggage, leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter,
seized a bag in either hand, and had to put them down again in
order to open the door. When at last he had safely bundled
himself and his baggage on to the platform, he ran up the train
towards the van.

"A bicycle, a bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He
felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but
continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages
labelled to Camlet. "A bicycle!" Denis repeated. "A green
machine, cross-framed, name of Stone. S-T-O-N-E."

"All in good time, sir," said the guard soothingly. He was a
large, stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home,
drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that
tone that he must have spoken to his children when they were
tiresome. "All in good time, sir." Denis's man of action
collapsed, punctured.

He left his luggage to be called