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