buildings, belching chimney shafts and the spikes of a couple of spires.  On the other sides it was bounded by the brick walls of factories, the municipal gasworks and the approach to the railway station, indicated by signal-posts standing out against the sky like gallows, and a tram-line bordered by a row of skeleton cottages.  Golgotha was a grim garden compared with Paul’s brickfield.  Sometimes the children of the town scuttled about it like dingy little rabbits.  But more often it was a desolate solitude.  Perhaps all but the lowest of the parents of Bludston had put the place out of bounds, as gipsies and other dwellers in vans were allowed to camp there.  It also bore an evil name because a night murder or two had been committed in its murky seclusion.  Paul knew the exact spot, an ugly cavity toward the gasworks end, where a woman had been “done in,” and even he, lord of the brickfield, preferred to remain at a purifying distance.  But it was his own domain.  He felt in it a certain pride of possession.  The hollow under the lee of the rubbish-heap, by the side of the hole where he kept his paper library, was the most homelike place he knew.

For many years he remembered that day.  The light that never was on sea or land fell upon the brickfield.  He had read the story at one stretch.  He had sat there for hours reading, for hours rapt in his Vision.  At last material darkness began to gather round him, and he awoke with a start to realization that he had been sitting there most of the day.  With a sigh he replaced his book in the hole, which he cunningly masked with a lump of hard clay, and, feeling stiff and cold, ran, childlike, homeward.  In the silence of the night he took out his cornelian heart and fondled it.  The day had been curiously like, yet utterly unlike, the day on which she had taken it from her neck.  In a dim fashion he knew that the two days were of infinite significance in his life and were complementary.  He had been waiting, as it were, for nine months for this day’s revelation, this day’s confirmation.

Paul rose the next morning, a human being with a fixed idea, an unquestioned faith in his destiny.  His star shone clear.  He was born to great things.  In those early years that followed it was not a matter of an imaginative child’s vanity, but the unalterable, serene conviction of a child’s soul.  The prince and princess were realities, his future greatness a magnificent certitude.  You must remember this, if you would understand Paul’s after-life.  It was built on this radiant knowledge.  In the afternoon he met Billy Goodge and the gang.  They were playing at soldiers, Billy distinguished by a cocked hat made out of newspaper and a wooden sword.

“Coom on, Susie, wi be going to knock hell out of the boys in Stamford Street.”

Paul folded his arms and looked at him contemptuously, as became one of his noble blood.  “You could no’ knock hell out of a bug.”

“What’s that tha says?”