hat point. Their seat looked far over London. To convey the
appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century reader would have been
difficult. One would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels--as those little affairs
were called--of the larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions and run together and
continuous over the whole metropolitan area. If then he was told that
this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest of rotating wind-wheels,
he would have begun very dimly to appreciate what to these young people
was the commonest sight in their lives.

To their eyes it had something of the quality of a prison, and they were
talking, as they had talked a hundred times before, of how they might
escape from it and be at last happy together: escape from it, that is,
before the appointed three years were at an end. It was, they both
agreed, not only impossible but almost wicked, to wait three years.
"Before that," said Denton--and the notes of his voice told of a
splendid chest--"_we might both be dead_!"

Their vigorous young hands had to grip at this, and then Elizabeth had a
still more poignant thought that brought the tears from her wholesome
eyes and down her healthy cheeks. "_One_ of us," she said, "_one_ of us
might be--"

She choked; she could not say the word that is so terrible to the young
and happy.

Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of that time was--for any
one who had lived pleasantly--a very dreadful thing. In the old
agricultural days that had drawn to an end in the eighteenth century
there had been a pretty proverb of love in a cottage; and indeed in
those days the poor of the countryside had dwelt in flower-covered,
diamond-windowed cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet air and
earth about them, amidst tangled hedges and the song of birds, and with
the ever-changing sky overhead. But all this had changed (the change was
already beginning in the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life was
opening for the poor--in the lower quarters of the city.

In the nineteenth century the lower quarters were still beneath the sky;
they were areas of land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,
insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear
of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the
tw