But he saw things differently now. He was going to slay no dragon. There was not indeed any monster to slay. What he had to do was to mature as rapidly as possible his plans, the great scheme which had occupied so much of his thoughts for months past, which he had been working out on paper, and building his future upon. It was, after all, the slaying of a dragon in the only practicable nineteenth century way; and perhaps the mediæval dragon meant nothing more than a great public danger which the knight-errant had to face and subdue and kill, or reform into an amiable and sociable monster, as could be done to the great river, which, a tyrant and destroyer sometimes, was at others the delight and help of man. All these ideas passed through his head as the train plunged along, with little interludes of lover-like dreaming and surprises of softer thoughts. He would recall to himself Elly on the common, as she looked when she had given herself to him, and next moment would be running over long lines of calculations in his mind, calculations made over and over again, which it was a satisfaction to prove and reprove, lest there should lurk any weak points in them. How to perfect them in every final detail, to carry them to the firm, to demonstrate the greatness of the undertaking, the impossibility of failure--which, indeed, would at once be plain and evident to those skilled eyes, was to be his occupation now. After that everything would be plain sailing enough, he felt. He had meant to delay a little, to wait until he was himself a little more mature. But what did that matter, after all? He was only all the more adapted to superintend and carry out the work for being so young as he was. Young as he was he was a fully trained engineer, and already works of some importance had been committed to his hands. He was equal to any fatigue and any exertion in the carrying out of this, and there could be no doubt that he was the only fit person to work his own plan to completion. As a matter of fact he had no doubt about anything, either in the plan itself, or his capability of executing it, or its instant and entire acceptance by those who had so long been looking for something of the kind.