SELF.... One goes back to one's home unable to recover.
Fighting it over again. All night sometimes.... I get up and walk about
the room and curse.... Martineau, how is one to get the Avebury frame of
mind to Westminster?"

"When Westminster is as dead as Avebury," said the doctor, unhelpfully.
He added after some seconds, "Milton knew of these troubles. 'Not
without dust and heat' he wrote--a great phrase."

"But the dust chokes me," said Sir Richmond.

He took up a copy of THE GREEN ROADS OF ENGLAND that lay beside him on
the table. But he did not open it. He held it in his hand and said the
thing he had had in mind to say all that evening. "I do not think that
I shall stir up my motives any more for a time. Better to go on into
the west country cooling my poor old brain in these wide shadows of the
past."

"I can prescribe nothing better," said Dr. Martineau. "Incidentally,
we may be able to throw a little more light on one or two of your minor
entanglements."

"I don't want to think of them," said Sir Richmond. "Let me get right
away from everything. Until my skin has grown again."

CHAPTER THE SIXTH

THE ENCOUNTER AT STONEHENGE

Section 1

Next day in the early afternoon after a farewell walk over the downs
round Avebury they went by way of Devizes and Netheravon and Amesbury to
Stonehenge.

Dr. Martineau had seen this ancient monument before, but now, with
Avebury fresh in his mind, he found it a poorer thing than he had
remembered it to be. Sir Richmond was frankly disappointed. After the
real greatness and mystery of the older place, it seemed a poor little
heap of stones; it did not even dominate the landscape; it was some way
from the crest of the swelling down on which it stood and it was further
dwarfed by the colossal air-ship hangars and clustering offices of the
air station that the great war had called into existence upon the slopes
to the south-west. "It looks," Sir Richmond said, "as though some old
giantess had left a discarded set of teeth on the hillside." Far more
impressive than Stonehenge itself were the barrows that capped the
neighbouring crests.

The sacred stones were fenced about, and our visitors had to pay for
admission at a little kiosk by the gate. At the side of the road stood
a travel-stained middle-class automobile, with a miscellany of dusty
luggage, rugs and luncheon things therein--a family automobile with
father no doubt at the wheel. Sir Richmond left his own