't like to ask for
your money. And besides--at first I thought this would be rather fine."

There was a pause.

"It _has_ been fine," he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder.
"Until all this began."

"Yes," she said, "those first days. The first three days."

They looked for a space into one another's faces, and then Denton slid
down from the wall and took her hand.

"To each generation," he said, "the life of its time. I see it all
plainly now. In the city--that is the life to which we were born. To
live in any other fashion ... Coming here was a dream, and this--is the
awakening."

"It was a pleasant dream," she said,--"in the beginning."

For a long space neither spoke.

"If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must
start," said Denton. "We must get our food out of the house and eat as
we go."

Denton glanced about him again, and, giving the dead dogs a wide berth,
they walked across the garden space and into the house together. They
found the wallet with their food, and descended the blood-stained stairs
again. In the hall Elizabeth stopped. "One minute," she said. "There is
something here."

She led the way into the room in which that one little blue flower was
blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.

"I want it," she said; and then, "I cannot take it...."

Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.

Then silently, side by side, they went across the empty garden-space
into the old high road, and set their faces resolutely towards the
distant city--towards the complex mechanical city of those latter days,
the city that had swallowed up mankind.

III--THE WAYS OF THE CITY

Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the
history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began
with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor and the
patent road. That these contrivances, together with the device of
limited liability joint stock companies and the supersession of
agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would
necessarily concentrate mankind in cities of unparallelled magnitude and
work an entire revolution in human life, became, after the event, a
thing so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more
clearly anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to anticipate
the miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have
been suggested; and th