ntly.

"You will find it all so different," she said. "You will be bitterly
disappointed."

He set his lips firmly together.

"I have no fear," he said. "I shall find it possible to live there, at
any rate. If I stayed where I was, I must have gone mad."

"You are going to friends?" she asked.

He laughed softly.

"I have not a friend in the world," he said. "In London I do not know a
soul. What matter? There is life to be lived there, prizes to be won.
There is room for every one."

She half closed her eyes, watching him keenly all the time with an
interest which was certainly not diminished.

"London is a wonderful city," she said, "but she is not always kind to
the stranger. You have spoken of De Quincey who wove fairy fancies
about her, and Lamb, who was an affectionate stay-at-home, a born
dweller in cities. They were dreamers both, these men. What about
Chatterton?"

"An unhappy exception," he said. "If only he had lived a few months
longer his sorrows would have been over."

"To-day," she said, "there are many Chattertons who must die before the
world will listen to them. Are you going to take your place amongst
them?"

He smiled confidently.

"Not I," he answered. "I shall work with my hands if men will have none
of my brains. Indeed," he continued, turning towards her with a swift,
transfiguring smile, "I am not a village prodigy going to London with a
pocketful of manuscripts. Don't think that of me. I am going to London
because I have been stifled and choked--I want room to breathe, to see
men and women who live. Oh, you don't know the sort of place I have
come from--the brain poison of it, the hideous sameness and narrowness
of it all."

"Tell me a little," she said, "and why at last you made up your mind to
leave. It is not so long, you know, since I saw you in somewhat
different guise."

A quick shiver seemed to pass through him; underneath his tanned skin he
was paler, and the blood in his veins was cold. His eyes, fixed upon
the flying landscape, were set in a fixed, unseeing stare--surely the
fields were peopled with evil memories, and faces in the trees were
mocking him. So he remained for several moments as though in the grip
of a nightmare, and the lady watched him. There was a little tragedy,
then, behind.

"There was a man once," he said, "who drew a line through his life, and
said to himself that everything behind it concerned some other
person--not him. So with me. Such memo