An Act in a Backwater by E.F. Benson — Read

Jack Collingwood started from London next morning, before the arrival of his mother's letter, and travelled with only a Saturday-till-Monday bag as representing the necessaries of life, but with a bicycle and a great number of golf clubs for its luxuries. Arthur had been away when he was at Wroxton only a fortnight before, and he had been delighted to accept the invitation, for he not only very much wished to see Arthur, but he had an affair of some importance to talk over with his mother. His last visit home had been, with the exception of that sultry conversation about Lady Hamilton and the sunset, unusually harmonious, and he was, for his own peace of mind, at present unconscious of the squall which had struck the close on the occasion of the opening of the picture exhibition. He was a person of simple, boyish pleasures, and he found entertainment enough in the express to make him abstain from any search for excitement in the daily papers.

He timed the speed of the train with the quarter-of-a-mile posts by the side of the line; he leaned out of the window as they swept through flying stations, and he had the prodigious luck of being stopped by signal just opposite the golf-links, when he saw an angry man in a red coat play an absurdly bad shot into a bunker, and his low, furious exclamation flecked the beauty of the morning. Still unconscious of all that lay before him, he arrived at Bolton Street, and was told that Arthur was not in yet, but that Miss Avesham was out in the garden. He followed the butler through the hall and the little conservatory that lay beyond, and as the door was opened he stopped a moment, with a dizzy, bewildered feeling that all this had happened before.