"Look here, Bim," he said aloud, "I've left you up--I really am going
off my head!" he thought. He hurried away. "If I _am_ mad I'm awfully
happy," he said.
III
The white vicarage gate closed behind him with precisely the
old-remembered sound--the whiz, the sudden startled pause, the satisfied
click. Seymour stood on the sun-bathed lawn, glittering now like green
glass, and stared at the house. Its square front of faded red brick
preserved a tranquil silence; the only sound in the place was the
movement of some birds, his old friend the robin perhaps in the laurel
bushes behind him.
Although the sun was so warm there was in the air a foreshadowing of a
frosty night; and some Christmas roses, smiling at him from the flower
beds to right and left of the hall door, seemed to him that they
remembered him; but, indeed, the whole house seemed to tell him that.
There it waited for him, so silent, laid ready for his acceptance under
the blue sky and with no breath of wind stirring. So beautiful was the
silence, that he made a movement with his hand as though to tell his
companion to be quiet.
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