Young Norman was being whirled in one of the newest streamlined expresses towards the north. He leaned back in his first-class Smoker and lit a cigarette. On the rack in front of him was his gun-case with the pair of guns he never willingly allowed out of his sight, his magazine with over a thousand cartridges beside it, and the rest of his luggage, he knew, was safely in the van. He was looking forward to a really good week’s shooting at Greystones, one of the best moors in England. He realised that he was uncommonly lucky to have been invited at all. Yet a question mark lay in him. Why precisely, he wondered, had he been asked? For one thing, he knew his host. Sir Hiram Digby, very slightly. He had met him once or twice at various shoots in Norfolk, and while he had acquitted himself well when standing near him, he could not honestly think this was the reason for the invitation. There had been too many good shots present, and far better shots, for him to have been specially picked out. There was another reason, he was certain. His thoughts, as he puffed his cigarette reflectively, turned easily enough in another direction⁠—towards Diana Travers, Sir Hiram Digby’s niece. The wish, he remembered, is often father to the thought, yet he clung to it obstinately, and with lingering enjoyment. It was Diana Travers who had suggested his name; it well might be, it probably was, and the more he thought it over, the more positive he felt. It explained the invitation, at any rate. A curious thrill of excitement and delight ran through him as memory went backwards and played about her. A curious being, he saw quite unlike the usual run of girls, but curious, in the way that he himself perhaps was curious, for he was just old enough to have discovered that he was curious, standing apart somehow from the young men of his age and station. Well born, rich, sporting and all the rest, he yet did not quite belong to his time in certain ways. He could drink, revel, go wild, enjoy himself with his companions, but up to a point only⁠—when he withdrew unsatisfied. There were “other things” that claimed him with some terrible inner power; and the two could not mix. These other things he could not quite explain even to himself, but to his boon companions⁠—never. Were they things of the spirit? He could not say. Wild, pagan things belonging to an older day? He knew not. They were of unspeakable loveliness and power, drawing him away from ordinary modern life⁠—that he knew. He could not define them to himself, much less speak of them to others. And then he met Diana Travers and knew, though he did not dare put his discovery into actual words, that she felt something similar. He came across her first at a dance in town, he remembered, remembering also how bored he had been until the casual introduction, and after it, how happy, enchanted, satisfied. It was assuredly not that he had fallen suddenly in love, nor that she was wildly beautiful⁠—a tall, fair girl with a radiant, yet not lovely face, soft voice, graceful movements⁠—for there were thousands, Norman knew, who excelled her in all these qualities. No, it was not the usual love attack, the mating fever, the herd-instinct that she might be his girl, but the old conviction, rather, that there lay concealed in her the same nameless, mysterious longings that lay also in himself⁠—the terrible and lovely power that drew him from his human kind towards unknown “other things.” As they stood together on the balcony, where they had escaped from the heat and clamour of the ballroom, he acknowledged to himself, yet without utterance, this overpowering, strange conviction that their fates were in some way linked together. He could not explain it at the time, he could not explain it now⁠—while he thought it over in the railway carriage, and his conscious mind rejected it as imagination. Yet it remained. Their talk, indeed, had been ordinary enough, nor was he conscious of the slightest desire to flirt or make love; it was just that, as the saying is, they “clicked” and that each felt delightfully easy in the other’s company, happy and at home. It was almost, he reflected, as though they shared some rather wonderful deep secret that had no need of words, a secret that lay, indeed, beyond the reach of words altogether. They had met several times since, and on each occasion he had been aware of the same feeling; and once when he ran across her by chance in the park they walked together for over an hour and she had talked more freely. Talked suddenly about herself, moreover, openly and naturally, as though she knew he would understand. In the open air, it struck him, she was more spontaneous than in the artificial surroundings of walls and furniture.