She nodded.

“You tried to have him tell you and he refused?” the professor persisted.

“Exactly,” she admitted.

Her father put on his hat.

“I knew that young man was something out of the common.”

CHAPTER X

THE JOY OF BATTLE

They sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, in the topmost corner of the field.  In the hedge, close at hand, was a commotion of birds.  In the elm tree, a little further away, a thrush was singing.  A soft west wind blew in their faces; the air immediately around them was filled with sunlight.  Yet almost to their feet stretched one of those great arms of the city—­a suburb, with its miles of villas, its clanging of electric cars, its waste plots, its rows of struggling shops.  And only a little further away still, the body itself—­the huge city, throbbing beneath its pall of smoke and cloud.  The girl, who had been gazing steadily downwards for several moments, turned at last to her companion.

“Do you know,” she said, “that this makes me think of the first night you spoke to me?  You remember it—­up on the roof at Blenheim House?”

Tavernake did not answer for a moment.  He was looking through a queerly-shaped instrument that he had brought with him at half-a-dozen stakes that he had laboriously driven into the ground some distance away.  He was absolutely absorbed in his task.

“The main avenue,” he muttered softly to himself.  “Yes, it must be a trifle more to the left.  Then we get all the offshoots parallel and the better houses have their southern aspect.  I beg your pardon, Beatrice, did you say anything?” he broke off suddenly.

She smiled.

“Nothing worth mentioning.  I was just thinking that it reminded me a little up here of the first time you and I ever talked together.”

He glanced down at the panorama below, with its odd jumble of hideous buildings, softened here and there with wreaths of sunstained smoke, its great blots of ugliness irredeemable, insistent.

“It’s different, of course,” she went on.  “I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night.  In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—­Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels.  Up here one sees too much.  Oh, my dear Leonard,” she continued, “to think that you, too, should be one of the devastators!”

He fitted his instrument into its case and replaced it in his pocket.

“Come,” he said, “you mustn’t call me hard names.  I shall remind you of the man whose works you are making me read.  You know what he says—­’The aesthete is, after all, only a dallier.  The world lives and progresses by reason of its utilitarians.’  This hill represents to me most of the things that are worth having in life.”