There was another cat, he noticed, on a doorstep a few yards away, and he wondered how any living creature in this heat could possibly lie like that, face coiled round to the feet, and the tail laid neatly across the nose.

A dreaming cock crooned heart-brokenly somewhere out of sight, and a little hot breeze scooped up a feather of dust in the middle of the road and dropped again.
Even the presbytery looked inviting on a day like this.

He had walked a good twenty-five miles to-day, and the suggestion of a dark, cool room was delicious.

It was a little pinched-looking house, of brick, like the church, squeezed between the church and a large grocery with a flamboyant inscription over its closed shutters.

All the windows were open, hung inside with cheap lace curtains, and protected with dust-screens.