As a sort of deliberate retort to these wild fancies, the tall spire of Salisbury Cathedral rose suddenly before him. Here the train stopped; and though even here⁠—possibly because his absorption in his thoughts gave him a morose and uncongenial appearance⁠—no one entered his third-class carriage, the stream of his cogitations began to grow less turbid, less violent, less destructive. The austerity of Salisbury Plain yielded now to the glamour of Blackmore Vale. Dairy-farms took the place of sheep-farms; lush pastures, of bare chalk-downs; enclosed orchards, of open cornfields; and park-like moss-grown oaks, of windswept naked thorn-bushes.

The green, heavily-grassed meadows through which the train moved now, the slow, brown, alder-shaded streams, the tall hedgerows, the pollarded elms⁠—all these things made Solent realize how completely he had passed from the sphere of his mother’s energetic ambitions into the more relaxed world, rich and soft and vaporous as the airs that hung over those mossy ditches, that had been the native land of the man in the Ramsgard cemetery.