nearly four o'clock
His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate cries of memory and grief , he sat on beside the water , unconscious of the passing of time , his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the wood-pigeons as they flew past him , at the occasional flash of a kingfisher , at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees opposite . At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy drops of warm rain . He looked at his watch . It was nearly four o'clock . He rose , stiff and cramped with sitting , and at the same instant he saw beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common a boy 's figure , which , after a step or two , he recognised as Ned Irwin . ` You here , Ned ? ' he said , stopping , the pastoral temper in him reasserting itself at once .