y denoted.

Paul would say: "Then a prince will be no better than a factory hand?"

"There won't be any princes, I tell thee," his friend would reply, and
launch out into a denunciation of tyrants.

But this did not suit Paul. If there were to be no princes, where,
would he come in? So, while grateful to the evangelist for talking to
him and treating him as a human being, he totally rejected his gospel.
It struck at the very foundations of his visionary destiny. He was
afraid to argue, for his friend was vehement. Also confession of
aristocratic prejudices might turn friendship into enmity. But his
passionate antagonism to the communistic theory, all the more intense
through suppression, strengthened his fantastic faith. Still, the
transient smile of a marchioness and the political economy of a
sour-avised operative are not enough to keep alive the romance of
underfed, ill-clad, overdriven childhood. And after a while he was
deprived even of the latter consolation, his friend being shifted to
another end of the factory. In despair he turned to Ada, the eldest of
the little Buttons, who now had reached years of comparative
discretion, and strove to interest her in his dreams, veiling his
identity under a fictitious name; but Ada, an unimaginative and
practical child with a growing family to look after, either listened
stupidly or consigned him, in the local vernacular, to perdition.

"But suppose 'it was me that was the unknown prince? Supposing it was
me I've been talking about all the time? Supposing it was me that went
away and came back in a gold coach and six horses, with a duke's
daughter all over diamonds by my side, what would tha say?"

"I think tha art nowt but a fool," said the elderly child of ten, "and,
if mother heard thee, she'd lamm the life out of thee."

Paul had the sickening sensation of the man who has confided the high
secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away, darkly
conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him
into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in
her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an
unnoticeable item in the cosmos.

One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close
round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely
animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his
portion at the factory; curses and beatings--deserved if Justice held a
hurried