village, or some signpost.

Anyhow, whatever happened, he could not go back. That was the one
certain thing. The broad stretches of country to right and left held no
shapes of houses, no glimmer of warm candle-light; they were bare and
bleak, only broken by circles of trees that stood out like black islands
in the misty grey of the twilight.

'I shall have to sleep behind a hedge,' he said bravely enough; but
there did not seem to be any hedges. And then, quite suddenly, he came
upon it.

A scattered building, half transparent as it seemed, showing black
against the last faint pink and primrose of the sunset. He stopped, took
a few steps off the road on short, crisp turf that rose in a gentle
slope. And at the end of a dozen paces he knew it. Stonehenge!
Stonehenge he had always wanted so desperately to see. Well, he saw it
now, more or less.

He stopped to think. He knew that Stonehenge stands all alone on
Salisbury Plain. He was very tired. His mother had told him about a girl
in a book who slept all night on the altar stone at Stonehenge. So it
was a thing that people did--to sleep there. He was not afraid, as you
or I might have been--of that lonely desolate ruin of a temple of long
ago. He was used to the forest, and, compared with the forest, any
building is homelike.

There was just enough light left amid the stones of the wonderful broken
circle to guide him to its centre. As he went his hand brushed a plant;
he caught at it, and a little group of flowers came away in his hand.

'St. John's wort,' he said, 'that's the magic flower.' And he remembered
that it is only magic when you pluck it on Midsummer Eve.

'And this _is_ Midsummer Eve,' he told himself, and put it in his
buttonhole.

'I don't know where the altar stone is,' he said, 'but that looks a cosy
little crack between those two big stones.'

He crept into it, and lay down on a flat stone that stretched between
and under two fallen pillars.

The night was soft and warm; it was Midsummer Eve.

'Mother isn't going till the twenty-sixth,' he told himself. 'I sha'n't
bother about hotels. I shall send her a telegram in the morning, and get
a carriage at the nearest stables and go straight back to her. No, she
won't be angry when she hears all about it. I'll ask her to let me go to
sea instead of to school. It's much more manly. Much more manly ... much
much more, much.'

He was asleep. And the wild west wind that swept across the plain spared