A day or two later and Mendel was in the train, being whirled North through the dull, rolling Midlands and the black, smirched valleys of the West Riding. The gloomy sky filled him with terror. At first he thought there was going to be a storm, but there seemed to be no life in the sky, and its strangeness oppressed him. The people in the train spoke a language which seemed almost as foreign as French, and when the train darted through forests of smoking chimney-stacks and he looked down into the grimy, trough-like streets, he was dismayed to think that here were depths of misery compared with which the East End was as a holiday ground. This, too, was England, and he had said that England was best. He remembered Jews in the East End who had fled from the North and said they would rather go back to Russia than return to the tailoring shops and the boot factories. So this vile, busy blackness was the North! For some mysterious reason it made him think of Logan and Oliver, and the thought of them filled him with an added uneasiness. He had not thought of them once since the trip to Paris, and now he felt bound to them, and that they were a weight upon him. They stood out vividly against the murky, lifeless sky. He could see them standing hand in hand, smiling a little foolishly, and a physical tremor shot through him as he thought of the contact of their two hands, thrilling together, pressing together, to tell of their terrible need of each other. . . . This man and this woman. Mendel was haunted by the images of all the couples he knew, and they passed before him like a shadowy procession of the damned, all hand in hand, across the lifeless sky, all shadowy except Logan and Oliver, and then two others, his father and his mother; but they were not hand in hand. They were seated side by side, like two statues, and behind them the lifeless sky broke and opened to show the infinite blue space beyond the clouds. He had changed at the darkest of the chimneyed towns, and the shabby local train went grinding and puffing through a tunnel into a vast green valley. At the first station he saw Edward Tufnell on the platform. He had changed a good deal, and was no longer the lanky, earnest youth of the Settlement, but his eyes still had their steady, serene expression and their sunny, beautiful smile. He flung up his hand as he saw Mendel, smiled, and came fussily, as though he were meeting the Prime Minister himself. He insisted on carrying Mendel's bag and canvases and made him feel small and young again, as he used to when he went trotting along by Edward's side on his way to the French class. "It's a long journey," said Edward. "You must be tired." "Oh no! I don't mind any journey as long as I don't have to cross the sea." "It is only two miles now." They climbed into a dogcart and drove, for the most part at a walk, up a long, winding road that crept like a worm along the flanks of a huge hill.