His mother would be in the kitchen, preparing breakfast in her blue wrapper, while his father would be dressing.
Standing in the tiny square of garden among the tall tobacco plants, he tossed a cautious pebble through the upper window which was open.
"Dad!" he called, low.
The old man, spectacled, but collarless, in all the purity of a clean Sunday shirt, thrust out a touzled head.
"Found her," whispered Ernie.
His father nodded down benevolently. Then there sparkled in his eyes that remote and frosty twinkle which was the outward and visible sign of the change that had been wrought in him.
"And finding's keeping," he said.
In the glorious morning Ernie took the hill, marching through the gorse to the song of larks. On the one hand the Weald lay spread beneath him like a green lagoon, dimming to blue; and on the other the great waters rose up to meet and mingle with the greater sky.
It was still early when he dropped down kestrel-haunted Wind-hover, over the corn-covered foothills, into the Brooks.
A white hand-bridge on red girders crossed the stream just under the mound on which stood the short-backed cathedral church with its thick-set tower, half-hidden by ash and sycamore.