He was just in time to stop a singularly hard stone with his marble brow.

Then he found a gorse-bush (by tripping over a root) a gorse-bush which seemed unwilling to release him from its stimulating, not to say prickly, embrace.

As he wallowed in it another stone found him, his ankle-bone.
He wrenched himself from the embrace of the gorse-bush, found his feet and realized that there was only one thing to do.

He tore along the turf road to Colet House as hard as he could pelt.

A stone struck the garden gate as he opened it.