ground) he knew that if he only sat still the person from the Lily Lock
would help him, and he was not disappointed. Sometimes he was trapped in
mines of vast depth hollowed out of the heart of the world, where men
in torment chanted echoing songs; and he heard this person coming along
through the galleries, and everything was made safe and delightful. They
met again in low-roofed Indian railway-carriages that halted in a
garden surrounded by gilt-and-green railings, where a mob of stony white
people, all unfriendly, sat at breakfast-tables covered with roses,
and separated Georgie from his companion, while underground voices sang
deep-voiced songs. Georgie was filled with enormous despair till they
two met again. They foregathered in the middle of an endless, hot tropic
night, and crept into a huge house that stood, he knew, somewhere north
of the railway-station where the people ate among the roses. It was
surrounded with gardens, all moist and dripping; and in one room,
reached through leagues of whitewashed passages, a Sick Thing lay in
bed. Now the least noise, Georgie knew, would unchain some waiting
horror, and his companion knew it, too; but when their eyes met across
the bed, Georgie was disgusted to see that she was a child--a little
girl in strapped shoes, with her black hair combed back from her
forehead.

"What disgraceful folly!" he thought. "Now she could do nothing whatever
if Its head came off."

Then the Thing coughed, and the ceiling shattered down in plaster on the
mosquito-netting, and "They" rushed in from all quarters. He dragged the
child through the stifling garden, voices chanting behind them, and they
rode the Thirty-Mile Ride under whip and spur along the sandy beach by
the booming sea, till they came to the downs, the lamp-post, and the
brushwood-pile, which was safety. Very often dreams would break up
about them in this fashion, and they would be separated, to endure awful
adventures alone. But the most amusing times were when he and she had
a clear understanding that it was all make-believe, and walked through
mile-wide roaring rivers without even taking off their shoes, or set
light to populous cities to see how they would burn, and were rude as
any children to the vague shadows met in their rambles. Later in the
night they were sure to suffer for this, either at the hands of the
Railway People eating among the roses, or in the tropic uplands at the
far end of the Thirty-Mile Ride. Tog