Then he kicked viciously at a daisy and blinked up at the friendly sun.
The poet stepped out on the lawn beside him with a worried wrinkle on his forehead.
"I feel rather upset," he said.
"Let's go for a walk," suggested Tommy.
The poet considered a moment.
An epic, which lagged somewhat, held out spectral arms to him from the recesses of his writing-desk, but the birds' spring songs were too winsome for prolonged resistance, and to their wooing the poet capitulated.
"Let us come," he said, and they stepped through the wicker gate into the water-meadows.
The Becklington brook is only a thin thread here, but lower down it receives tributaries from two adjoining valleys and becomes a stream of some importance, turning, indeed, a couple of mills, before it reaches the Arrowley, which enters the Isis.
The day was hot—one of those early heralds of June so often encountered in late April, and the meadows basked dreamily in the sun, while from the hills came a dull glow of budding gorse.
The poet was full of fancies, and as the house grew farther behind them, and the path led ever more deeply among copse and field, his natural calm soon reasserted itself. From time to time he would jot down a happy phrase or quaint expression, enlarging thereon to Tommy, who listened patiently enough.