gulf of isolation opened before her. The struggle was not to be borne. It was monstrous, unforgivable, that it should be demanded of her. Yet it could not be given up. The smallest glance in the direction of even the simulation of acceptance, brought a panic sense of treachery that flung her back to cling once more to the vanishing securities of her own untouched imagination. When at last he appeared, the sight of the familiar distinctive little figure plunging energetically along, beard first, through the north London Sunday evening crowd drifting about the park gates, their sounds quenched by the blare of the Salvation Army’s band marching townwards along the battered road, for one strange moment while a moving light came across the gravel pathway at her feet, decking its shabby fringe of grass with the dewy freshness of some remembered world far away and unknown to this trampling blind north London, she asked herself what all the trouble was about. What after all had changed? Not herself, that was clear. Walking in fevered darkness had not destroyed the light. But he had joined her, pulling up before her with white ravaged face and hands stretched silently towards her. “For pity’s sake don’t touch me,” she cried involuntarily and walked on, accompanied, examining her outcry. It was right. It had a secret _knowledge_. They rode in silence on tram and bus. Below them on the dimly-lit pavements people moved, shadows broken loose and scattered in the grey of night. Gaslit, talking faces succeeded each other under the street lamps; not one speaking its thoughts; no feeling expressed that went even as deep as the screening chatter of words in the mind. But presently all about her, as she sat poised for the length of the journey between the dead stillness within her and the noise of the silence without, a world most wonderful was dawning with strange irrelevance, forcing her attention to lift itself from the abyss of her fatigue. Look at us, the buildings seemed to say, sweeping by massed and various and whole, spangled with light. We are here. We, are the accomplished marvel. Buildings had always seemed marvellous; and in their moving, changing aspects an endless fascination, except in North London, where they huddled without distinction, defaced in feature and outline by a featureless blind occupancy. But to-night, it was North London that was revealing the marvel of the mere existence of a building. North Londoners were not under the spell; but it was there. Their buildings rising out of the earth where once there had been nothing, proclaimed it as they swept dreaming by, making roadways that were like long thoughts, meeting and crossing and going on and on, deep alleyways and little courts where always was a pool of light or darkness, pouring down from their secret communion with the sky a strange single reality upon the clothed and trooping multitude below. And all the strange unnoticed