The train swung down the shining rails and rumbled into Paddington. Passengers pulled down their parcels from the racks, jumped out and disappeared in the crowd. Peter sat on. This carriage at least had known her; she had looked in through its window and had waved her hand. Out there in the stone-paved wilderness of London there was nothing they had shared. A porter looked in at the door. “Train don't go no further, sir. Lend you a 'and? Want a keb?” In the cab, Peter closed his eyes, shutting out the cheerful grime of streets, the nipped impertinence of Cockney faces, the monotonous anonymity of the ceaseless procession--the stench of this vast human stable where lives were stalled and broken. He was trying to get back to green banks, to a river molten in the sunset, and to a redlipped girl. Was she thinking of him? If they thought of one another at the same moment, could their thoughts meet and interchange?--But she didn't love him. Oh, the things he had left unsaid--the things he would say to make her love him now, if she sat beside him!--She had spoken truly--happiness had to be paid for with sorrow. His share of the paying had commenced, and hers----? Would she dodge payment by forgetting? The law of change was cruel; it diminished all things, even the most sacred, to mere incidents in a passing pageant. A pigmy charioteer, with the futile hands of imagination, he was making the old foolish endeavor to rein in Time's stallions. He pictured himself as painted on a frieze with her in the moment of their supreme elation--the moment when attainment had been certain, just before it was realized. The frieze should represent a meadow in the early morning, a river with mists rising from off it, and a boy, stooping his lips over the naked feet of a girl. Someone else had uttered the same fancy: “Fair Youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal--yet do not grieve! She cannot fade-” _She cannot fade_. Already it seemed that the sharp edges of his memories were lost to him. How was it that her face lit up? How did her voice shudder and slur from sudden piping notes into tenderness? How----? Things grew vague--he had meant to treasure them so poignantly. Like a dream from which, against his will, he was waking, Illusion gathered in her skirts from his clutching hands, growing faint against the background of reality. The waking had commenced before he left Henley. On his return to _The Skylark_ he had found a note waiting him. It had been forwarded from Topbury. His name and address were printed, evidently to disguise the hand of the sender. Inside, on a half sheet of note-paper, was scrawled: “_For God's sake meet me. Seven o'clock at the bottom of the Crescent. I'm lonely.”_ It was signed with the initials, O. W.