enty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above
storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous
hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so
to speak, of the place.

In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed
little from their ancestors, the East-enders of Queen Victoria's time;
but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under
ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life
to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such
circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge
would have seemed more terrible than death.

"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.

Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he
was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the
strength of her expectations.

The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their
means; and in Paris, as in any other city in the world, life would be
just as costly and impossible as in London.

Well might Denton cry aloud: "If only we had lived in those days,
dearest! If only we had lived in the past!" For to their eyes even
nineteenth-century Whitechapel was seen through a mist of romance.

"Is there _nothing_?" cried Elizabeth, suddenly weeping. "Must we really
wait for those three long years? Fancy _three_ years--six-and-thirty
months!" The human capacity for patience had not grown with the ages.

Then suddenly Denton was moved to speak of something that had already
flickered across his mind. He had hit upon it at last. It seemed to him
so wild a suggestion that he made it only half seriously. But to put a
thing into words has ever a way of making it seem more real and possible
than it seemed before. And so it was with him.

"Suppose," he said, "we went into the country?"

She looked at him to see if he was serious in proposing such an
adventure.

"The country?"

"Yes--beyond there. Beyond the hills."

"How could we live?" she said. "_Where_ could we live?"

"It is not impossible," he said. "People used to live in the country."

"But then there were houses."

"There are the ruins of villages and towns now.