"Can't you see what that legend meant to us?" she went on. "It was a
thing of beauty. And now you have spoilt it. It's like burning down the
trees of the Fairy Glen. You--you _Goth_!"

"But suppose I am drowned before the year is out--like Roberts?" he
suggested jocularly.

"Then I will forgive you," she said. And to Cargill it sounded exactly
as if she meant what she said.

A few days later he returned to town. For six months he thought little
about the legend. Then he was reminded of it.

He had been spending a week-end at Brighton. On the return journey he
had a first-class smoker in the rear of the train to himself. Towards
the end of the hour he dozed and dreamt of the day he had looked on the
sunken village. He was awakened when the train made its usual stop on
the bridge outside Victoria.

It had been a pleasant dream, and he was still trying to preserve the
illusion when his eye fell lazily on the window, and he noticed that
there was a dense fog.

"Bit rough on the legend that I happened to be a Londoner!" he mused.
"It isn't easy to drown a man in town!"

He stood up with the object of removing his dressing-case from the rack.
But before he reached it there was the shriek of a whistle, a violent
shock, and he was hurled heavily into the opposite seat.

It was not a collision in the newspaper sense of the word. No one was
hurt. A local train, creeping along at four miles an hour, had simply
missed its signal in the fog and bumped the Brighton train.

Young Cargill, in common with most other passengers put his head out of
the window. He saw nothing--except the parapet of the bridge.

"By God!" he muttered. "If that other train had been going a little
faster----"

 Prev. P 39/82 next