ing approval was to ask personal questions. "I'll walk ahead, if you'll bring the luggage." He turned down a broad road into the village, avoiding the eyes of passersby. It was late afternoon and he felt he could not face his townsmen until twilight had fallen. He needed an hour or two behind closed doors to get used to being at home.
At the hotel, which was merely an overgrown private dwelling, Paul signed the register as "P. W. Minas." The name evoked no sign of interest on the part of his landlord, who seemed bored at the necessity of attending to a guest. Paul realized that, for the first time in his life, he was being incuriously taken for granted "as one of them Minases from Bridgetown way," and he mounted the stairs to his linoleum carpeted room with a whimsical sense of anticlimax. He had, he mused, a positive genius for anticlimax.
Dinner turned out to be a humble early meal called "supper," which he ate in solitude. He had washed off the grime of his travels and, for the sake of comfort, changed into a tweed sport suit. Daylight still lingered as he left the broad veranda of the hotel and passed through the gate into Prince William Road, which stretched up the hill under a luxuriant roof of maples toward an orange and scarlet sky.
Avoiding the knot of people before the combined post office, barber shop and town hall, he walked slowly along a footpath overrun with clover. At the widely-separated gates, bushes of syringa, laden with cream-coloured blossoms, gave forth a sweet, heavy perfume. Amongst the grass he detected long-forgotten flowers, nameless purple clusters which Gritty, with her melodramatic imagination, had once sworn were "poison," and a little
