Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying.

But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feel after they are dead.

America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Settlers in Canada” and “Round the World in Eighty Days,” had given her pictures, and from these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.

New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces.

Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these.

New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture.

What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people—that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past.

The people in the train were talking English—were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead.

It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows—it was too big.

Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.

Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling—the first breath of the South.

Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond.

Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous mornings half remembered were here again.

The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid, salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger.

“Charleston, sah.”

She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform.

Then, pushing towards her through the crowd, she saw Pinckney.

He had come to meet her, and as they shook hands, Phyl laughed.

He seemed so bright and cheerful, and the relief at finding a friend after that long, friendless journey was so great that she laughed right out with pleasure, like a little child—laughed right into his eyes.

It seemed to Pinckney that he had never seen the real Phyl before.

He took the bundle from her and gave it to a negro servant, and then, giving the luggage checks to the servant and leaving him to bring on the luggage, he led the girl through the crowd.

“We’ll walk to the house,” said he, “if you are not too tired; it’s only a few steps away—well—how do you like America?”

“America?” she replied. “I don’t know—it’s different from what I thought it would be, ever so much different—and this place—why, it is like summer here.”

“It’s the South,” said Pinckney. “Look, this is Meeting Street.”

They had turned from the street leading from the station into a broad, beautiful highway, placid, sun flooded, and leading away to the Battery, that chief pride and glory of Charleston.

On either side of the street, half hidden by their garden walls, large stately houses of the Georgian era showed themselves. Mansions that had slumbered in the sun for a hundred years, great, solid houses whose yellow-wash seemed the incrustation left by golden and peaceful afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of deep verandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled gardens.

“Oh, how beautiful!” said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street—and surely the Street of Other Days might be its name—had been waiting for her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar houses, its sunlight and placidity.

Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it, stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray scents from the gardens by the way.

Then she came back to herself, and they walked on.

“It’s just as if I knew the place,” said she, “and yet I never remember seeing anything like it before.”

“I’ve felt that way sometimes about places,” said Pinckney. “It seemed to me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I’d never been there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it’s that that makes it seem familiar. But I’m glad you like it. You like it, don’t you?”

“Like it!” said she. “I should think I did—It’s more than liking—I love it.”

He laughed.

“Better than Dublin?”

It was her turn to laugh.

“I never loved Dublin.” She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden showing through a wrought iron gate. “Oh, Dublin!—don’t talk to me about it here. I want to keep on feeling I’m here really and that there’s nowhere else.”

“There isn’t,” said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born. “There’s nowhere else but Charleston worth anything—I don’t know what it is about, but it’s so.”

They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium. It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.

Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.

“This is Vernons,” said he.