e Gap and picked up her coat, her towel,
and the tackle she had thrown down, she saw him.

He was standing in the Gap, between the white chalk walls, nursing his
hand.

She was glad he was down there. He would be safe at least from Mr.
Silver.

As she put on her coat she looked at him with calm, musing eyes. The
Spirit of Action was laid to sleep in her. In its place a Moving Dream,
welling up as it were out of Time into Eternity, possessed her slowly.
These Other-Conscious Moments, as Mr. Haggard called them, grew on the
girl with the growing years. She was aware of them in others--in her
mother, Mr. Haggard, her grand-dad--but hardly so in herself. They were
of her, yet beyond her--mysterious invasions from she knew not where,
gleams of Eden from exile. At these times she saw men as trees walking
and all created things as part and expression of a Huge Vague Life of
Wonder and Beauty without end.

And now, as she looked at the man in the Gap she said with quiet
severity, as though addressing one of the lads at Bible Class:

"You _are_ a naughty boy."

He glanced up at her from his earth.

She saw his eyes, and the suffering in them, and recognised them with a
start. They were the eyes of a fox she had seen last season dug out of
an earth to the screams of men and halloos of women, after a long run,
that hounds might not be defrauded of blood.

And she felt now as she had felt then. A passion of sympathy, a sea of
furious indignation, boiled up within her. Something pitifully forlorn
about the man struck her to the heart. Quite suddenly she felt sorry for
him; sorry with the sorrow that has sent heroes and saints throughout
the ages to persecution and death with joy, if only they may relieve by
ever so little the sufferings of sinful humanity.

Boy Woodburn was not a saint and was not a hero; but she was on the way
to be a woman. The Voice that was not hers spoke out of her deeps.

"Why did you do that?" she asked quietly.

There was no anger in her tone or spirit; no sorrow, no surprise. She
was curiously impersonal.

The fox showed his teeth.

"I'll do worse than that yet," he said.

The girl found herself gulping.

She looked at him through shining eyes. And as she did so it came in
upon her that this degraded creature had once been beautiful. Ruin as he
was, there was still about him something tragic and forlorn as of a
great moor over which a beaten host has retreated, leaving desolation in
its