re quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and
shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New
Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the
morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired
to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
During the week the children are all at school or too young to go
further than the recreation grounds. There's nothing to bring these
people here, and they never come."

She again struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between
these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically
night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever
visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should
continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, Ellen, you like
lonely country yourself," she addressed herself. "You liked the
Pentlands for being so lonely. There's no difference between you
really...." But indeed there was a difference. She had liked places to
be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life
of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum. Since the engineer had
erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless
for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone
waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery
army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and
white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters
from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in
his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.

But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that
nobody was there. Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as
unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks
would have been to her like sand in the sugar. They came presently to a
knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in
which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees
lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part. Ellen would
have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as
possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to
hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and
excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys'
doffing of their caps. There was something at