62 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



shop — hoisery, leather bags, purses, cheap jewellery, fish- 

 ing-tackle, cricket-bats, umbrellas, walking-sticks. A 

 staircase led out of the shop to the bedrooms, just as it 

 had done when the window on the narrow landing looked 

 over hay-fields to Banstead Downs. When the cat was 

 not lying upon the socks in the window, she had, very 

 likely, been kept away by a litter of kittens somewhere 

 among the seldom disturbed bundles of unfashionable ties, 

 or she lay in the sun beneath the lime and watched her 

 kittens pursuing the spiral flight of the yellow leaves. 



The owner made no concessions except such as he 

 was forced to, as when he bought the stock of jewellery 

 because the traveller praised his cat; or allowed the cherry 

 tree to be mutilated because the new Borough Council 

 commanded. He dressed in breeches, gaiters and heavy 

 boots, and never wore a coat or took his pipe out of his 

 mouth (except to play with puss). Seldom did he leave 

 the house, unless it was to go into the garden or to take 

 a walk down the emptied busy street at night, when the 

 only sound was the crickets' song from the bakers' shops. 

 The little old house rippled over by creeper was beautiful 

 then — the lime tree and the creeper trembling in the 

 gusty moonlight, and the windows and doorway hollow 

 and dark and romantic as if a poet had made them to 

 sting men's hearts with beauty and with regret. 



No one can ever say what the old man thought as 

 he slammed the door after one of these walks and was 

 alone with himself. Certainly he regretted the big 

 decorous high-gated houses that used to stand opposite 

 his, veiled by wistaria, passion flower and clematis; the 

 limes that used to run the whole length of his father's 



