“But aren’t you …”
“No, I’m taking the Down train. Good-bye …”
He shut the door with a slam which was echoed from Gibbie’s compartment at the other end of the train. For a moment, in the silence before they moved again, the voice of the chicken-field triumphed.
“Chuck–chuck–chuck–chuck–chuck–chuck–chuck–chuck …”
Hugo turned to listen with a grin of pleasure, as if an old friend had called to him. He did not see the departing train, or the startled face which Adrian thrust out of the window. He saw only those uncharted regions of his Other Life, lying all round him, open to the adventures of thought and sense. And to his ears the diminishing thunder of the wheels came faintly like the beat of muffled drums, a last reverberation from the land of his captivity.
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
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Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books bought by the prestigious literary hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present. In 2012 Vintage Children’s Classics was launched to include the much-loved authors of our youth.
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Copyright © Margaret Kennedy 1931
Margaret Kennedy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1931
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