e said, "in London you have many beautiful ceilings. Artists
paint them and stud them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling more
beautiful than any in London...."

"But where?"

"It is the ceiling under which we two would be alone...."

"You mean...?"

"Dear," he said, "it is something the world has forgotten. It is Heaven
and all the host of stars."

Each time they talked the thing seemed more possible and more desirable
to them. In a week or so it was quite possible. Another week, and it was
the inevitable thing they had to do. A great enthusiasm for the country
seized hold of them and possessed them. The sordid tumult of the town,
they said, overwhelmed them. They marvelled that this simple way out of
their troubles had never come upon them before.

One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the
flying stage, and Denton's place was to know him no more.

Our two young people had secretly married, and were going forth manfully
out of the city in which they and their ancestors before them had lived
all their days. She wore a new dress of white cut in an old-fashioned
pattern, and he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart his back,
and in his hand he carried--rather shame-facedly it is true, and under
his purple cloak--an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted thing of
tempered steel.

Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of
Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little
gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled wat