Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/324

 He left them all—the doctor, the policeman, Dunbar and Hesther. He did not even stop at Jabez's cottage to inquire. That was for later. As half-past seven struck from the church tower below the hill he flung the gate behind him, crossed the road, and struck off onto the Downs above the sea.

By a kind of second sight he knew exactly where he would go. There was a path that crossed the Downs that ran slipping into a little cove, across whose breast a stream trickled, then up on to the Downs again, pushing up over fields of corn, past the cottage gardens up to the very gate of the hotel.

It was all mapped in his mind in bright clear-painted colours.

The world was indeed as though it had only that morning been painted in green and blue and gold. While the fog hung, under its canopy the master-artist had been at work. Now from the shoulder of the Downs a shimmer of mist tempered the splendour of the day. Harkness could see it all. The long line of sea on whose blue surface three white sails hovered, the bend of the Downs where it turned to deeper green, the dip of the hill out of whose hollow the church spire like a spear steel-tipped gesticulated, the rising hill with the wood and the tall white tower, the green Downs far to the right where tiny sheep like flowers quivered in the early morning haze.

All was peace. The rustling whisper of the sea.