The Blotting Book by E. F. Page B

first he changed the quill for his own stylograph, and wrote with
that. This was soon written, and by the time he had read it through it
was dry, and did not require to be blotted. He placed it in a plain
envelope, directed it, and with it in his hand left the room, and went
briskly downstairs.
    Martin was standing in the hall.
    "I want this given to Mrs. Assheton when she comes in, Martin," he said.
    He looked round, as he had done once before when speaking to the boy.
    "I left it at the door," he said with quiet emphasis. "Can you remember
that? I left it. And I hope, Martin, that you have made a fresh start,
and that I need never be obliged to tell anybody what I know about you.
You will remember my instructions? I left this at the door. Thank you.
My hat? Yes, and my stick."
    Mr. Taynton went straight back to his office, and though this morning
there had seemed to him to be a good deal of work to be got through, he
found that much of it could be delegated to his clerks. So before leaving
to go to his lunch, he called in Mr. Timmins.
    "Mr. Mills not been here all morning?" he asked. "No? Well, Timmins,
there is this packet which I want him to look at, if he comes in before
I am back. I shall be here again by five, as there is an hour's work for
me to do before evening. Yes, that is all, thanks. Please tell Mr. Mills
I shall come back, as I said. How pleasant this freshness is after the
rain. The 'clear shining after rain.' Wonderful words! Yes, Mr. Timmins,
you will find the verse in the second book of Samuel and the
twenty-third chapter."

Chapter VII
*
    Mr. Taynton made but a short meal of lunch, and ate but sparingly, for
he meant to take a good walk this afternoon, and it was not yet two
o'clock when he came out of his house again, stick in hand. It was a
large heavy stick that he carried, a veritable club, one that it would
be easy to recognise amid a host of others, even as he had recognised it
that morning in the rather populous umbrella stand in the hall of Mrs.
Assheton's house. He had, it may be remembered, more office work to get
through before evening, so he prepared to walk out as far as the limits
of the time at his disposal would admit and take the train back. And
since there could be nothing more pleasurable in the way of walking
than locomotion over the springy grass of the downs, he took, as he had
done a hundred times before, the road that led to Falmer. A hundred
yards out of Brighton there was a stile by the roadside; from there a
footpath, if it could be dignified by the name of path at all, led over
the hills to a corner of Falmer Park. From there three or four hundred
yards of highway would bring him to the station. He would be in good
time to catch the 4.30 train back, and would thus be at his office again
for an hour's work at five.
    His walk was solitary and uneventful, but, to one of so delicate and
sensitive a mind, full of tiny but memorable sights and sounds. Up on
these high lands there was a considerable breeze, and Mr. Taynton paused
for a minute or two beside a windmill that stood alone, in the expanse
of down, watching, with a sort of boyish wonder, the huge flails swing
down and aspire again in the circles of their tireless toil. A little
farther on was a grass-grown tumulus of Saxon times, and his mind was
distracted from the present to those early days when the unknown dead was
committed to this wind-swept tomb. Forests of pine no doubt then grew
around his resting place, it was beneath the gloom and murmur of their
sable foliage that this dead chief was entrusted to the keeping of the
kindly earth. He passed, too, over the lines of a Roman camp; once this
sunny empty down re-echoed to the clang of arms, the voices of the living
were mingled with the cries and groans of the dying, for without doubt
this stronghold of Roman arms was not won, standing, as it did, on the
top-most commanding slope of the hills, without slaughter. Yet to-day the
peaceful clumps of cistus and the trembling