Maisie Shepherd, a stranger in a strange land, pretty, pink, blushing, hatefully self-conscious, detached herself, after a minute or two, from the group and looked with timid curiosity on the children.  She was a London girl, her head still dancing with the delights of her first season, and she had never been to a Sunday-school treat in her life.  Madge Merewether, her old schoolfellow, had told her she was to help amuse the little girls.  Heaven knew how she was to do it.  Already the unintelligibility of Lancashire speech had filled her with dismay.  The array of hard-faced little girls daunted her; she turned to the boys, but she only saw one—­the little hatless, coatless scarecrow with the perfect features And arresting grace, who stood out among his smug companions with the singularly vivid incongruity of a Greek Hermes in the central hall of Madame Tussaud’s waxwork exhibition.  Fascinated, she strayed down the line toward him.  She halted, looked for a second or two into a pair of liquid black eyes and then blushed in agonized shyness.  She stared at the beautiful boy, and the beautiful boy stared at her, and not a word could she find in her head to speak.  She turned abruptly and moved away.  The boy broke rank and slowly followed her.

For little Paul Kegworthy the heavens had opened and flooded his senses, till he nearly fainted, with the perfume of celestial lands.  The intoxicating sweetness of it bewildered his young brain.  It was nothing delicate, evanescent, like the smell of a flower.  It as thick, pungent, cloying, compelling.  Mouth agape and nostril wide, he followed the exquisite source of the emanation like one in a dream, half across the yard.  A curate laughingly and unsuspectingly brought him back to earth by laying hands on him and bundling him back into his place.  There he remained, being a docile urchin; but his eyes remained fixed on Maisie Shepherd.  She was only a rosebud beauty of an English girl, her beauty heightened by the colour of distress, but to Paul the radiance of her person almost rivalled the wonder of her perfume.  It was his first meeting of a goddess face to face, and he surrendered his whole being in adoration.

In a few minutes the children were marched through the squalid streets, a strident band, to the dingy railway station, a grimy proletariat third-class railway station in which the sign “First Class Waiting Room” glared an outrage and a mockery, and were marshalled into the waiting train.  The wonderful experience of which Paul had dreamed for weeks—­he had never ridden in a train before—­began; and soon the murky environs of the town were left behind and the train sped through the open country.

His companions in the railway carriage crowded at the windows, fighting vigorously for right of place; but Paul sat alone in the middle of the seat, unmoved by the new sensation and speed, and by the glimpses of blue sky and waving trees above the others’ heads.  The glory of the day was blotted out until he should see and smell the goddess again.  At the wayside station where they descended he saw her in the distance, and the glory came once more.  She caught his eye, smiled and nodded.  He felt a queer thrill run through him.  He had been singled out from among all the boys.  He alone knew her.