She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens overgrown with weeds.

"Are they yours?" she asked. She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as "Allway's Folly."

"Your mother's," he answered. "I built them the year I came back from America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps it would, if I had left her to her own ways."

"Why didn't they want them?" she asked.

"They did, at first," he answered. "The time-servers and the hypocrites among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents and share of profits. And then the Union came, and that of course finished it."

So he, too, had thought to build Jerusalem.

"Yes," he said. "I'll sound him about giving up his lodgings."

Joan lay awake for a long while that night. The moon looked in at the window. It seemed to have got itself entangled in the tops of the tall pines. Would it not be her duty to come back--make her father happy, to say nothing of the other. He was a dear, sweet, lovable lad. Together, they might realize her father's dream: repair the blunders, plant gardens where the weeds now grew, drive out the old sad ghosts with living voices. It had been a fine thought, a "King's thought." Others had followed, profiting by his mistakes. But might it not be carried further than even they had gone, shaped into some noble venture that should serve the future.

(Editor：law)