in the background, which only the foolish forget. "And as I am not a
candidate for the place," thought Lydia, "I won't be misunderstood!"

She did not intend indeed to be troubled--for the present--with such
matters at all.

"Marrying is not in the bill!" She declaimed it to a lilac-bush, standing
with her hands behind her, and face uplifted. "I have no money, and no
position--therefore the vast majority of men won't want to marry me.
And as to scheming to make them want it--why!--good heavens!--when there
are such amusing things to do in the world!"

She paced the garden paths, thinking passionately, defiantly of her art,
yet indignant with herself for these vague yearnings and languors that
had to be so often met and put down.

"Men!--_men!_--what do they matter to me, except for talk--and fun!
Yet there one goes thinking about them--like any fool. It's sex of
course--and youth. I can no more escape them than anybody else. But I
Can be mistress of them. I will. That's where this generation differs.
We needn't drift--we see clear. Oh! those clouds--that blue!--those
stars! Dear world! Isn't beauty enough?"

She lifted her arms above her head in a wild aspiration. And all in a
moment it surprised her to feel her eyes wet with tears.

* * * * *

Meanwhile the young man who had rescued her press cuttings had fallen,
barely an hour after his parting from her, upon evil fortunes.

His bicycle had carried him swiftly down the valley toward the Whitebeck
bridge. Just above the bridge, a steep pitch of hill, one of those
specimens of primitive road-making that abound in Cumbria, descended
rapidly into a dark hollow, with a high wall on one side, overhung by
trees, and on the other a bank, broken three parts of tie way down by the
entrance of a side road. At the top of the hill, Faversham, to give the
youth his name, stopped to look at the wall, which was remarkable for
height and strength. The thick wood on his right hid any building there
might be on the farther side of the stream. But clearly this was the
Ogre's wall--ogreish indeed! A man might well keep a cupboard full of
Fatimas, alive or dead, on the other side of it, or a coiner's press, or
a banknote factory, or any other romantic and literary villainy.
Faversham found himself speculating with amusement on the old curmudgeon
behind the wall; always with the vision, drawn by recollection on the
leafy background, of a girl's charmi