“But suppose ’it was me that was the unknown prince?  Supposing it was me I’ve been talking about all the time?  Supposing it was me that went away and came back in a gold coach and six horses, with a duke’s daughter all over diamonds by my side, what would tha say?”

“I think tha art nowt but a fool,” said the elderly child of ten, “and, if mother heard thee, she’d lamm. the life out of thee.”

Paul had the sickening sensation of the man who has confided the high secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman.  He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused.  Thenceforward Ada was to him an unnoticeable item in the cosmos.

One hopeless month succeeded another, until a cloud seemed to close round Paul’s brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites.  Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings—­deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home.  Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death.  But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond’ his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling from a rope fixed to the hook in the kitchen ceiling.  He posed cadaverous before a shocked Budge Street, before a conscience-stricken factory; and he wept on his sack bed in the scullery because the prince and the princess, his august parents, would never know that he had died.  A whit less gloomy were his imaginings of the said prince and princess rushing into the house, in the nick of time, just before life was extinct, and cutting him down.  How they were to find him he did not know.  This side-track exploration of possibilities was a symptom of sanity.

Yet, Heaven knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the wide and breezy spaces of the world, had not limped into his life.

Barney Bill wore the cloth cap and conventional and unpicturesque, though shapeless and weather-stained, garment of the late nineteenth century.  Neither horns nor goat’s feet were visible; nor was the pipe of reed on which he played.  Yet he played, in Paul’s ear, the comforting melody of Pan, and the glory of the Vision once more flooded Paul’s senses, and the factory and Budge Street and the Buttons and the scullery faded away like an evil dream.

CHAPTER III

The Fates arranged Barney Bill’s entrance late on a Saturday afternoon in August.  It was not dramatic.  It was merely casual.  They laid the scene in the brickfield.