Witching Hill by E.W. Hornung

That spring I did what a great many young fellows were doing in those particular days. I threw up my work at short notice, and went very far afield from Witching Hill. It was a long year before I came back, unscathed as to my skin, but with its contents ignobly depreciated and reduced, on a visit to 7, Mulcaster Park.

Uvo Delavoye met me at the station, and we fled before the leisurely tide of top-hats and evening papers, while one of the porters followed with my things. There were no changes that I could see, except in myself as I caught sight of myself in my old office window. The creepers might have made a modest stride on the Queen Anne houses; brick and tile were perhaps a mellower red; and more tenants appeared to be growing better roses in their front gardens. But the place had always been at its best at the end of May: here was a giant's nosegay of apple-blossom, and there a glimpse of a horse-chestnut laden like a Christmas-tree with its cockades of pure cream. One felt the flight of time only at such homely spectacles as Shoolbred's van, delivering groceries at the house which Edgar Nettleton had tried to burn down with me in it.