They waited for twenty minutes in the sun before they found a place in one of those reckless tramway-cars that go roaring like spent shells through all the wastes of the black country. They could not speak for the jolt and jangle of its progress, for the clanging of its bell and the alarming sputter of electric sparks when it swayed on its springs and threatened to jump the rails. In all their four miles of journey they could see no green. They passed through endless streets of grimy brick, baked culverts from which a blast of acrid and lifeless air rushed through the front of the car like a sirocco. Even though the fires of the furnaces and factories had been banked down for the holidays they could still smell the heat which had scorched and blackened this volcanic country on every side. At last they were jolted through the narrow streets of Dulston, happily without catastrophe, and ejected at the foot of the hill on which its medieval castle stands. Here the crowd was at its thickest. Noisy hawkers sold ticklers and leaden water-squirts and programmes of the fête. Tram after tram disgorged its sweaty contents to mix with the cooler occupants of brakes and char-a-bancs. Through the dense foliage of the castle woods that hung limp in the heat like painted leafage in a theatre, the discordant music of competing roundabouts floated down, and beneath it one could hear the low, exciting rumour of the fair, toward which the steady stream of new arrivals was setting. It was a stiff pull up the slope of the castle hill and every one who climbed it seemed bitten with an infectious speed. At the top of it the crowd thickened beneath the constriction of a narrow Norman arch and then burst and scattered into the huge central courtyard where gray ruins looked down upon this modern substitute for the tourneys of the middle ages. Abner and Alice were caught up in the excitements of the fair. He soon added to his burdens by knocking down three cocoa-nuts. At a shooting-gallery to the admiration of Alice he smashed thin globes of glass spinning above a jet of water. For his prize he chose a brooch of imitation gold: a heart pierced by an arrow and surmounted by the word ‘Alice.’ She laughed and pinned it in the neck of her black bodice. She marvelled at the sureness of his hand and eye. There was no one in all that crowd whom she would have chosen for her escort rather than him. She rejoiced, for the first time in many months, to find him a happy and natural companion, only wishing that she could forget the fact that John Fellows also was there, drinking, no doubt, in one of the canvas marquees that the firm of Astill had erected in each corner of the courtyard. Once, and only once, she spoke her thoughts. ‘I wonder where he is, Abner. . . .’ she said. He only laughed at her. ‘I’ll find him if you like.’ ‘Oh, don’t be soft, Abner,’ she said. ‘I was only wondering. . .’