With a threatening gesture of his hand, he turned from the door, and Ferrier heard his heavy steps scrunching along the shingly path.

He was still sitting with his elbow upon his knee, considering how he should broach the matter to his daughter, when a soft hand was laid upon his, and looking up, he saw her standing beside him. One glance at her pale, frightened face showed him that she had heard what had passed.

“I could not help it,” she said, in answer to his look. “His voice rang through the house. Oh, father, father, what shall we do?”

“Don’t you scare yourself,” he answered, drawing her to him, and passing his broad, rough hand caressingly over her chestnut hair. “We’ll fix it up somehow or another. You don‘t find your fancy kind o’ lessening for this chap, do you?”

A sob and a squeeze of his hand were her only answer.

“No; of course not. I shouldn’t care to hear you say you did. He’s a likely lad, and he‘s a Christian, which is more than these folks here, in spite o’ all their praying and preaching. There’s a party starting for Nevada to-morrow, and I’ll manage to to send him a message letting him know the hole we are in. If I know anything o’ that young man, he’ll be back with a speed that would whip electro-telegraphs.”

Lucy laughed through her tears at her father’s description.

“When he comes, he will advise us for the best. But it is for you that I am frightened, dear. One hears — one hears such dreadful stories about those who oppose the Prophet; something terrible always happens to them.”

“But we haven’t opposed him yet,” her father answered. “It will be time to look out for squalls when we do. We have a clear month before us; at the end of that, I guess we had best shin out of Utah.”

“Leave Utah!”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“But the farm?”

“We will raise as much as we can in money, and let the rest go. To tell the truth, Lucy, it isn’t the first time I have thought of doing it. I don’t care about knuckling under to any man, as these folk do to their damed Prophet. I’m a freeborn American, and it‘s all new to me. Guess I’m too old to learn. If he comes browsing about this farm, he might chance to run up against a charge of buckshot travelling in the opposite direction.”

“But they won’t let us leave,” his daughter objected.

“Wait till Jefferson comes, and we’ll soon manage that. In the meantime, don’t you fret yourself, my dearie, and don‘t get your eyes swelled up, else he’ll be walking into me when he sees you. There’s nothing to be afeared about, and there‘s no danger at all.”

John Ferrier uttered these consoling remarks in a very confident tone, but she could not help observing that he paid unusual care to the fastening of the doors that night, and that he carefully cleaned and loaded the rusty old shot-gun which hung upon the wall of his bedroom.

Birkin knew this. He knew that Gerald wanted to be FOND of him without taking him seriously. And this made him go hard and cold. As the train ran on, he sat looking at the land, and Gerald fell away, became as nothing to him.

Birkin looked at the land, at the evening, and was thinking: ‘Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is, in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they will only be there. Humanity doesn’t embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let humanity disappear as quick as possible.’

Gerald interrupted him by asking,

‘Where are you staying in London?’

Birkin looked up.

‘With a man in Soho. I pay part of the rent of a flat, and stop there when I like.’

‘Good idea—have a place more or less your own,’ said Gerald.

‘Yes. But I don’t care for it much. I’m tired of the people I am bound to find there.’

‘What kind of people?’

‘Art—music—London Bohemia—the most pettifogging calculating Bohemia that ever reckoned its pennies. But there are a few decent people, decent in some respects. They are really very thorough rejecters of the world—perhaps they live only in the gesture of rejection and negation—but negatively something, at any rate.’

‘What are they?—painters, musicians?’

‘Painters, musicians, writers—hangers–on, models, advanced young people, anybody who is openly at outs with the conventions, and belongs to nowhere particularly. They are often young fellows down from the University, and girls who are living their own lives, as they say.’

‘All loose?’ said Gerald.

Birkin could see his curiosity roused.

‘In one way. Most bound, in another. For all their shockingness, all on one note.’

He looked at Gerald, and saw how his blue eyes were lit up with a little flame of curious desire. He saw too how good–looking he was. Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful passivity in all his body, his moulding.

‘We might see something of each other—I am in London for two or three days,’ said Gerald.

‘Yes,’ said Birkin, ‘I don’t want to go to the theatre, or the music hall—you’d better come round to the flat, and see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd.’