tion and looked at the metals gleaming coldly.

"You should see the Flying Scotsman come through at half-past six!" said
Leonard, whose father was a signalman. "Lad, but she doesn't half buzz!"
and the little party looked up the lines one way, to London, and the
other way, to Scotland, and they felt the touch of these two magical
places.

In Ilkeston the colliers were waiting in gangs for the public-houses to
open. It was a town of idleness and lounging. At Stanton Gate the iron
foundry blazed. Over everything there were great discussions. At Trowell
they crossed again from Derbyshire into Nottinghamshire. They came to
the Hemlock Stone at dinner-time. Its field was crowded with folk from
Nottingham and Ilkeston.

They had expected a venerable and dignified monument. They found
a little, gnarled, twisted stump of rock, something like a decayed
mushroom, standing out pathetically on the side of a field. Leonard and
Dick immediately proceeded to carve their initials, "L. W." and "R. P.",
in the old red sandstone; but Paul desisted, because he had read in the
newspaper satirical remarks about initial-carvers, who could find no
other road to immortality. Then all the lads climbed to the top of the
rock to look round.

Everywhere in the field below, factory girls and lads were eating
lunch or sporting about. Beyond was the garden of an old manor. It had
yew-hedges and thick clumps and borders of yellow crocuses round the
lawn.

"See," said Paul to Miriam, "what a quiet garden!"

She saw the dark yews and the golden crocuses, then she looked
gratefully. He had not seemed to belong to her among all these others;
he was different then--not her Paul, who understood the slightest quiver
of her innermost soul, but something else, speaking another language
than hers. How it hurt her, and deadened her very perceptions. Only when
he came right back to her, leaving his other, his lesser self, as she
thought, would she feel alive again. And now he asked her to look at
this garden, wanting the contact with her again. Impatient of the set
in the field, she turned to the quiet lawn, surrounded by sheaves of
shut-up crocuses. A feeling of stillness, almost of ecstasy, came over
her. It felt almost as if she were alone with him in this garden.

Then he left her again and joined the others. Soon they started home.
Miriam loitered behind, alone. She did not fit in with the others; she
could very rarely get into human relations with an