"I only mean--you made it sound so beautiful that it was like listening to--to an organ. I didn't bother about the words while you read. It was all colours and gold--like the things in the Venetian room. You know. The meaning didn't matter. But I did mean something, not half so good, of course, only quite different. Horrid and grizzly like the plain he travelled through, Childe Roland. It ought to have sounded harsh and starved, like rats pattering--what I meant--not beautiful." "I see." Clare was interested. She was quite aware that she had used her magnificent voice to impress arbitrarily her opinion of Louise's work upon the class. That Louise, impressionable as she knew her to be, should have yet detected the trick, amused her greatly. "So you think I didn't understand your essay?" Louise's shy laugh was very pleasant. "Oh, Miss Hartill. I'm not so stupid. It's only that I can't have got the--the----" "Atmosphere!" The girl in spectacles helped her. "The atmosphere that I meant to; so you put in a different one to help it. And it did. But it wasn't what I meant." Clare glanced at her inscrutably, and began to score the other essays. She would get at Louise's meaning in her own way. She skimmed a couple, Agatha, be it recorded, receiving the coveted initials, before she spoke again. "Didn't I tell you to learn _Childe Roland_, too? Ah, I thought so. Begin, Marion, while I finish these. Two verses." Her pen scratched on, as Marion's expressionless voice rose, fell and finished. Agatha continued, jarringly dramatic. Two more followed her. Then Clare put down her pen. "'For mark!'..." There was a warning undertone in Louise's colourless voice, that crept across the room like a shadow. Clare lifted her head and stared at her. "For mark! no sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backward a last view O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round: Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. I might go on; nought else remained to do." There was horror in the whispering voice: the accents of one bowed beneath intolerable burdens, sick with the knowledge of nearing doom, gay with the flippancy of despair. Louise was looking straight before her, vacant as a medium, her hands lying laxly in her lap. Clare made a quick sign to her neighbour to be silent, and the strained voice rose anew. Clare listened perplexedly. She told herself that this was sheer technique--some trick had been played, she was harbouring some child actress of parts--only to be convinced of folly. She knew all about Louise. Besides, she had heard the child read aloud before. Good, clean, intelligent delivery. But nothing like this--this was uncanny. Uncanny, yet magnificent. The artist in her settled down to enjoyment; yet she was uneasy, too. "And just as far as ever from the end!" The creeping voice toiled on across the haunted plain, growing louder, clearer, nearer.