ess for
him in every scene on which he entered: he was proud and admired, and
very haughty, and very rich.

Presently, as if through some dexterous sleight of hand, the pictures of
his wooing blended waveringly and dimly with the pictures which emerged
for the bedraggled woman who stood beside the loafer in front of the
disc.

In the church, when the wedding-march was being played, and in the
vignettes of domestic happiness that ensued, the faces and scenes
mysteriously coalesced.

For the two spectators, who watched the shifting pictures breathlessly,
there were no longer four figures in the scene, but only two.

"Some such future I had imagined for myself," the man muttered.

And the woman mused amazedly: "These were day-dreams of my own."

The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.

The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.

There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking
at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with
great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun.
White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey
was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted
lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity,
spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene
for them both.

"My God, that is where I was born!" groaned the man.

"That's my mother's cottage!" sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.

Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl
moving flittingly through them--laughing and kissing in the lanes among
the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it
all.

"Are you Nelly King, then?" asked the man, hoarsely.

"And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?"

"If we could both die here and now!" cried the man.

Then the pictures for a while grew blurred and confused, till presently
they shewed the gas-lighted streets of London. . . .

"My God, I will see no more!" cried the girl. And she shudderingly held
her hand before her eyes.

"Nor I, either!" cried the man, with an oath.

"However much you close your eyes," said the Showman, "you will cancel
nothing of the pictures on the screen."

But they had turned and fled even while he was speaking.

"Even in the fair the pictures will pursue you!" said the stern-visaged
Showman, following them with