! I might have left him
there."

"What shall we sing?" asked the man, turning his face away.

"Something pious," Joanna answered with an ugly little laugh, "since
we want our dinner. The public has still enough honesty left to pity
piety." She stepped out into the middle of the street, facing her
sisters' windows, and began, the man's voice chiming in at the third
bar--

"In the sweet by-and-bye
We shall meet on that be-yeautiful shore." . . .

PSYCHE.

"_Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her way
back to earth?_"

The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with a short beard
grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually screwed up, because his
life had run for the most part in the teeth of the wind. The lashes,
too, had been scorched off. If you penetrated the mask of oil and
coal-dust that was part of his working suit, you found a
reddish-brown phlegmatic face, and guessed its age at fifty.
He brought the last down train into Lewminster station every night at
9.45, took her on five minutes later, and passed through Lewminster
again at noon, on his way back with the Galloper, as the porters
called it.

He had reached that point of skill at which a man knows every pound
of metal in a locomotive; seemed to feel just what was in his engine
the moment he took hold of the levers and started up; and was
expecting promotion. While waiting for it, he hit on the idea of
studying a more delicate machine, and married a wife. She was the
daughter of a woman at whose house he lodged, and her age was less
than half of his own. It is to be supposed he loved her.

A year after their marriage she fell into low health, and her husband
took her off to Lewminster for fresher air. She was lodging alone at
Lewminster, and the man was passing Lewminster station on his engine,
twice a day, at the time when this tale begins.

People--especially those who live in the West of England--remember
the great fire at the Lewminster Theatre; how, in the second Act of
the _Colleen Bawn_, a tongue of light shot from the wings over the
actors' heads; how, even while the actors turned and ran, a sheet of
fire swept out on the auditorium with a roaring wind, and the house
was full of shrieks and blind death; how men and women were turned to
a white ash as they rose from their seats, so fiercely the flames
outstripped the smoke. These things were reported in the papers,
with narratives and