"If only our beloved son were with us," said the princess, wiping
away a tear.

"We must be patient, my sweet Highness," replied the prince, with
lofty resignation stamped on his noble brow. "Let us trust to Heaven
to remove the cankerworm that is gnawing our vitals."

Paul felt very sorry for them, and he, too, wiped away a tear.

For many years he remembered that day. He was alone in his
brickfield on a gusty March morning-the Easter holidays had released
him from school-squatting by his hole under the lee of a mass of
earth and rubbish. It was a mean expanse, blackened by soot and
defiled by refuse. Here and there bramble and stunted gorse
struggled for an existence; but the flora mainly consisted in bits
of old boots and foul raiment protruding grotesquely from the soil,
half-buried cans, rusty bits of iron, and broken bottles. On one
side the backs of grimy little houses, their yards full of
fluttering drab underwear' marked the edge of the hopeless town
which rose above them in forbidding 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