Derek broke in:  “Mother’s right.  And it doesn’t matter, except that we’ve got to see that the men don’t follow his example.  They’ve a funny feeling about him.”

Kirsteen shook her head.

“You needn’t be afraid.  He’s always been too strange to them!”

“Well, I’m going to stiffen their backs.  Coming Sheila?” And they went.

Left, as she seemed always to be in these days of open mutiny, Nedda said sadly: 

“What is coming, Aunt Kirsteen?”

Her aunt was standing in the porch, looking straight before her; a trail of clematis had drooped over her fine black hair down on to the blue of her linen dress.  She answered, without turning: 

“Have you ever seen, on jubilee nights, bonfire to bonfire, from hill to hill, to the end of the land?  This is the first lighted.”

Nedda felt something clutch her heart.  What was that figure in blue?  Priestess?  Prophetess?  And for a moment the girl felt herself swept into the vision those dark glowing eyes were seeing; some violent, exalted, inexorable, flaming vision.  Then something within her revolted, as though one had tried to hypnotize her into seeing what was not true; as though she had been forced for the moment to look, not at what was really there, but at what those eyes saw projected from the soul behind them.  And she said quietly: 

“I don’t believe, Aunt Kirsteen.  I don’t really believe.  I think it must go out.”

Kirsteen turned.

“You are like your father,” she said—­“a doubter.”

Nedda shook her head.

“I can’t persuade myself to see what isn’t there.  I never can, Aunt Kirsteen.”

Without reply, save a quiver of her brows, Kirsteen went back into the house.  And Nedda stayed on the pebbled path before the cottage, unhappy, searching her own soul.  Did she fail to see because she was afraid to see, because she was too dull to see; or because, as she had said, there was really nothing there—­no flames to leap from hill to hill, no lift, no tearing in the sky that hung over the land?  And she thought:  ’London—­all those big towns, their smoke, the things they make, the things we want them to make, that we shall always want them to make.  Aren’t they there?  For every laborer who’s a slave Dad says there are five town workers who are just as much slaves!  And all those Bigwigs with their great houses, and their talk, and their interest in keeping things where they are!  Aren’t they there?  I don’t—­I can’t believe anything much can happen, or be changed.  Oh!  I shall never see visions, and dream dreams!’ And from her heart she sighed.