“The boy did upset one person’s mind. He made one person’s mind feel like a weed in this water! And you’d be surprised to hear who that person was.”

But Wolf just then felt it very hard to give him his complete attention. For although the mystical ecstasy he had just experienced had faded, everything about the day had become momentous in his hidden secretive life; and he felt detached, remote, disembodied, for all his Sunday clothes. He could hear the cawing of a couple of rooks high up in the sky; and even when they ceased cawing, the creaking of their wings seemed like the indolence of the very day itself. “A weed in the water,” he echoed mechanically; while his mind, voyaging over those hushed West Country pastures, followed the creaking wings.

“Who was it, Mr. Otter, who was so upset by Redfern?”