“Something pious,” Joanna answered with an ugly little laugh, “since we want our dinner.  The public has still enough honesty left to pity piety.”  She stepped out into the middle of the street, facing her sisters’ windows, and began, the man’s voice chiming in at the third bar—­

     “In the sweet by-and-bye
      We shall meet on that be-yeautiful shore.” . . .

PSYCHE.

“Among these million Suns how shall the strayed Soul find her way back to earth?”

The man was an engine-driver, thick-set and heavy, with a short beard grizzled at the edge, and eyes perpetually screwed up, because his life had run for the most part in the teeth of the wind.  The lashes, too, had been scorched off.  If you penetrated the mask of oil and coal-dust that was part of his working suit, you found a reddish-brown phlegmatic face, and guessed its age at fifty.  He brought the last down train into Lewminster station every night at 9.45, took her on five minutes later, and passed through Lewminster again at noon, on his way back with the Galloper, as the porters called it.

He had reached that point of skill at which a man knows every pound of metal in a locomotive; seemed to feel just what was in his engine the moment he took hold of the levers and started up; and was expecting promotion.  While waiting for it, he hit on the idea of studying a more delicate machine, and married a wife.  She was the daughter of a woman at whose house he lodged, and her age was less than half of his own.  It is to be supposed he loved her.

A year after their marriage she fell into low health, and her husband took her off to Lewminster for fresher air.  She was lodging alone at Lewminster, and the man was passing Lewminster station on his engine, twice a day, at the time when this tale begins.

People—­especially those who live in the West of England—­remember the great fire at the Lewminster Theatre; how, in the second Act of the Colleen Bawn, a tongue of light shot from the wings over the actors’ heads; how, even while the actors turned and ran, a sheet of fire swept out on the auditorium with a roaring wind, and the house was full of shrieks and blind death; how men and women were turned to a white ash as they rose from their seats, so fiercely the flames outstripped the smoke.  These things were reported in the papers, with narratives and ghastly details, and for a week all England talked of Lewminster.

This engine-driver, as the 9.45 train neared Lewminster, saw the red in the sky.  And when he rushed into the station and drew up, he saw that the country porters who stood about were white as corpses.

“What fire is that?” he asked one.

“’Tis the theayter!  There’s a hundred burnt a’ready, and the rest treadin’ each other’s lives out while we stand talkin’, to get ’pon the roof and pitch theirselves over!”