He caught up with me at the gate, and we walked rapidly across Big Klaus's fields. While we were going by the pond, in the lower meadow, a moorhen scuttled to her nest in the tangle on the bank. Her creaking cry had always sounded so cheerful since my mother pointed out that the mechanic "click! click!" was like a Christmas toy. To-day I knew it for a warning.
The man had caught up a stick. He struck sharply with it, as he passed, at the tall nettles growing in the ditch.
What was happening at home all this time? I began to walk faster, with a great misery at my heart. What was the good of this man who wasn't a general practitioner? He was too like all the other broad-shouldered young golfers in Norfolk jackets–far too like them, to help in so dire a need as ours.
I tried to hearten myself by recalling what Lord Helmstone had said of him. That "the bigwigs in the world of science spoke of Annan with enthusiasm." "An original mind." "A demon for work" (that was, perhaps, why he hadn't wanted to come with me). Odds and ends came back. "Annan would go far." He had gone too
