“They must be somewhere—the people that live like they used to. Keepin’ quiet, I dessay, till things gets more settled. When things is settled they’ll get a move on and come along and find us. It stands to reason they can’t be so very far off, because I remember the teacher tellin’ us when we ’ad our jography lesson that England’s quite a small country. So they ’aven’t got so very far to come.... I expect an aeroplane’ll come first.” He felt her thrill in expectation of the moment when she sighted the swiftly moving speck aloft, the bearer of deliverance drawing nigh. Wouldn’t it be heavenly when they saw one at last—after all these awful months and years!... In the war they were beastly, but, now that the war was over, what had become of all the passenger ’planes and the airships? She was always looking out for one—always; every morning when she came out of the hut the first thing she did was to look up at the sky.... And some day one was bound to come. When things had settled down and got straight, it was bound to.... But it never did; and in the end she ceased to look for it. * * * * * His attempts—they were many in the first few years—to break away from his world and his bondage of ignorance were made always with cunning precaution and subterfuge; not even the pitiable need of his wife would have served as excuse for the backsliding which was search after the forbidden. To a fanaticism dominated by the masculine element the pains of childbirth were once more an ordinance of God; and when, a few weeks before Ada’s time of trial, Theodore absented himself from the camp for a night or two, he gave no one (save Ada) warning of his journey, and later accounted for his absence by a plausible story of straying and a hunter’s misfortunes. He had ceased, since he took up his dwelling with the tribe, to believe in the neighbourhood of a civilization in being; all he hoped for was the neighbourhood, not too distant, of men who had not acquiesced in ruin and put hope of recovery behind them. What he sought primarily was that aid and comfort in childbirth for which his wife appealed to him with insistence that grew daily more terrified; what he sought fundamentally was escape from a people vowed to ignorance. The goal of his first journey was the town lying lower down the river, the forbidden city which had once bred pestilence and flies. He approached it deviously, keeping to the hills and avoiding districts he knew to be inhabited; hoping against hope, that, in spite of report, he might find some rebuilding of a civic existence and human life as he had known it.... What he found when he came down from the foothills and trudged through its outskirts was the customary silent desolation; a desolation flooded and smelling of foul water—untenanted streets that were channels and backwaters, and others where the slime of years lay thick and scum bred rank vegetation.