the World by night.

When the Dean had finished service, a young curate, Mr. Millings,
went up into the pulpit.

He spoke of Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus: and Mary Jane was
glad that there were rivers having such names, and heard with wonder
of Nineveh, that great city, and many things strange and new.

And the light of the candles shone on the curate's fair hair, and
his voice went ringing down the aisle, and Mary Jane rejoiced that
he was there.

But when his voice stopped she felt a sudden
loneliness, such as she had not felt since the making of the
marshes; for the Wild Things never are lonely and never unhappy, but
dance all night on the reflection of the stars, and having no
souls, desire nothing more.

After the collection was made, before anyone moved to go, Mary Jane
walked up the aisle to Mr. Millings.

'I love you,' she said.

Chapter II

Nobody sympathised with Mary Jane.

'So unfortunate for Mr. Millings,' every one said; 'such a promising
young man.'

Mary Jane was sent away to a great manufacturing city of the
Midlands, where work had been found for her in a cloth factory. And
there was nothing in that town that was good for a soul to see. For
it did not know that beauty was to be desired; so it made many
things by machinery, and became hurried in all its ways, and boasted
its superiority over other cities and became richer and richer, and
there was none to pity it.

In this city Mary Jane had had lodgings found for her near the
factory.

At six o'clock on those November mornings, about the time that, far
away from the city, the wildfowl rose up out of the calm marshes and
passed to the troubled spaces of the sea, at six o'clock the factory
uttered a prolonged howl and gathered the workers together, and
there they worked, saving two hours for food, the whole of the
daylit hours and into the dark till the bells tolled six again.

There Mary Jane worked with other girls in a long dreary room, where
giants sat pounding wool into a long thread-like strip with iron,
rasping hands. And all day long they roared as they sat at their
soulless work. But the work of Mary Jane was not with these, only
their roar was ever in her ears as their clattering iron limbs went
to and fro.

Her work was to tend a creature smaller, but infinitely more
cunning.

It took the strip of wool that the giants had threshed, and whirled
it round and round until it had twisted it into hard thin threa