He hurried away.

"If I _am_ mad I'm awfully happy," he said.
III The white vicarage gate closed behind him with precisely the old-remembered sound--the whiz, the sudden startled pause, the satisfied click.

Seymour stood on the sun-bathed lawn, glittering now like green glass, and stared at the house.

Its square front of faded red brick preserved a tranquil silence; the only sound in the place was the movement of some birds, his old friend the robin perhaps in the laurel bushes behind him.
Although the sun was so warm there was in the air a foreshadowing of a frosty night; and some Christmas roses, smiling at him from the flower beds to right and left of the hall door, seemed to him that they remembered him; but, indeed, the whole house seemed to tell him that.
There it waited for him, so silent, laid ready for his acceptance under the blue sky and with no breath of wind stirring.

So beautiful was the silence, that he made a movement with his hand as though to tell his companion to be quiet.