They sat and looked into the quarry. The weathered place was hung with ferns and heath. Deep, green pools lay in the bottom of it and a ring-ousel sat and sang his elfin song, perched on a rusty fragment of iron, driven into the granite by men long since in their graves.
"This was my playground and a place of magic to me when I was a child," said Lawrence, to the surprise of the listener.
"I thought you was a foreigner," she said.
"No. But let everybody else go on thinking so, please. I want it a secret, though it's of little consequence really. I was born a mile from here. The cottage where I lived with my family is a ruin now—I'll show it to you—and me and a little sister used to play on the heath and make our games. They're all gone except that sister. She married and went to Australia. The rest are dead."
"You'm a lonely man then?"
"Used to it. It's only my childhood that the face on the rock comes into, and this deserted quarry. I met a gentleman here once, who told me all about the place. He knew its history and cared for such things. And his talk put great thoughts in my head, for I was thirteen by then and full of ideas already. I got 'em from my mother. She was better bred and born than father and wishful to see me higher than a labourer some day."
Dinah threw herself into his narrative.
"To think of that," she said. "How terrible interesting everybody is, the moment you begin to know the least bit about 'em!"
"I suppose they are. Not that there's anything interesting in me. Only I often catch myself turning back to when I was a boy. The gentleman told me that a lot of the stone cut out from this place is in London now. London Bridge be made of it, and part of the British Museum too. And I never forgot that. I envied those stones, because it seemed to me it would be better to be a bit of London Bridge than what I was."
"What a queer thought," murmured Dinah.