Front matter (continued 6)

Edwin did not seriously mind that; but what he did mind was their accent--in those days termed throughout the Midlands "lah-di-dah" (an onomatopoeic description), which, falsifying every vowel sound in the language, and several consonants, magically created around them an aura of utter superiority to the rest of the world. He quite unreasonably hated them, and he also envied them, because this accent was their native tongue, and because their clothes were not cut like his, and because they were entirely at their ease. Useless for the official to throw him an urbane word now and then; neither his hate nor his constraint would consent to be alleviated; the urbane words grew less frequent. Also Edwin despised them because they were seemingly insensible to the tremendous horror of the jail set there like an outrage in the midst of primitive and sane Dartmoor. "Yes," their attitude said. "This is a prison, one of the institutions necessary to the well being of society, like a workhouse or an opera house,--an interesting sight!"

A second pair of iron gates were opened with the same elaborate theatricality as the first, and while the operation was being done the official, invigorated by the fawning of turnkeys, conversed with Alicia, who during her short married life had acquired some shallow acquaintance with the clans, and he even drew a reluctant phrase from Hilda. Then, after another open space, came a third pair of iron gates, final and terrific, and at length the party was under cover, and even the sky of the moor was lost. Edwin, bored, disgusted, shamed, and stricken, yielded himself proudly and submissively to the horror of the experience.

III

Hilda had only one thought--would she catch sight of the innocent prisoner? The party was now deeply engaged in a system of corridors and stairways. The official had said that as the tour of inspection was to be short he would display to them chiefly the modern part of the prison. So far not a prisoner had been seen, and scarcely a warder. The two male visitors were scientifically interested in the question of escapes. Did prisoners ever escape?

"Never!" said the official, with satisfaction.

"Impossible, I suppose. Even when they're working out on the moor? Warders are pretty good shots, eh?"

"Practically impossible," said the official. "But there is one way." He looked up the stairway on whose landing they stood, and down the stairway, and cautiously lowered his voice. "Of course what I tell you is confidential. If one of our Dartmoor fogs came on suddenly, and kind friends outside had hidden a stock of clothes and food in an arranged spot, then theoretically--I say, theoretically--a man might get away. But nobody ever has done."

"I suppose you still have the silent system?"

The official nodded.

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely."

"How awful it must be!" said Alicia, with a nervous laugh.

The official shrugged his shoulders, and the other two males murmured reassuring axioms about discipline.

They emerged from the stairway into a colossal and resounding iron hall. Round the emptiness of this interior ran galleries of perforated iron protected from the abyss by iron balustrades. The group stood on the second of the galleries from the stony floor, and there were two galleries above them. Far away, opposite, a glint of sunshine had feloniously slipped in, transpiercing the gloom, and it lighted a series of doors. There was a row of these doors along every gallery. Each had a peep-hole, a key-hole and a number. The longer Hilda regarded, the more nightmarishly numerous seemed the doors. The place was like a huge rabbit-hutch designed for the claustration of countless rabbits. Across the whole width and length of the hall, and at the level of the lowest gallery, was stretched a great net.

"To provide against suicides?" suggested one of the men.

"Yes," said the official.

"A good idea."

When the reverberation of the words had ceased, a little silence ensued. The ear listened vainly for the slightest sound. In the silence the implacability of granite walls and iron reticulations reigned over the accursed vision, stultifying the soul.

"Are these cells occupied?" asked Alicia timidly.

"Not yet, Mrs. Hesketh. It's too soon. A few are."

Hilda thought:

"He may be here,--behind one of those doors." Her heart was liquid with compassion and revolt. "No," she assured herself. "They must have taken him away already. It's impossible he should be here. He's innocent."

"Perhaps you would like to see one of the cells?" the official suggested.

A warder appeared, and, with the inescapable jangle of keys, opened a door. The party entered the cell, ladies first, then the official and his new acquaintances; then Edwin, trailing. The cell was long and narrow, fairly lofty, bluish-white colour, very dimly lighted by a tiny grimed window high up in a wall of extreme thickness. The bed lay next the long wall; except the bed, a stool, a shelf, and some utensils, there was nothing to furnish the horrible nakedness of the cell. One of the visitors picked up an old book from the shelf. It was a Greek Testament. The party seemed astonished at this evidence of culture among prisoners, of the height from which a criminal may have fallen.

The official smiled.

"They often ask for such things on purpose," said he. "They think it's effective. They're very naïve, you know, at bottom."

"This very cell may be his cell," thought Hilda. "He may have been here all these months, years, knowing he was innocent. He may have thought about me in this cell." She glanced cautiously at Edwin, but Edwin would not catch her eye.

They left. On the way to the workshops, they had a glimpse of the old parts of the prison, used during the Napoleonic wars, incredibly dark, frowsy, like catacombs.

"We don't use this part--unless we're very full up," said the official, and he contrasted it with the bright, spacious, healthy excellences of the hall which they had just quitted, to prove that civilisation never stood still.

And then suddenly, at the end of a passage, a door opened and they were in the tailors' shop, a large irregular apartment full of a strong stench and of squatted and grotesque human beings. The human beings, for the most part, were clothed in a peculiar brown stuff, covered with broad arrows. The dress consisted of a short jacket, baggy knickerbockers, black stockings, and coloured shoes. Their hair was cut so short that they had the appearance of being bald, and their great ears protruded at a startling angle from the sides of those smooth heads. They were of every age, yet they all looked alike, ridiculous, pantomimic, appalling. Some gazed with indifference at the visitors; others seemed oblivious of the entry. They all stitched on their haunches, in the stench, under the surveillance of eight armed warders in blue.

"How many?" asked the official mechanically.

"Forty-nine, sir," said a warder.

And Hilda searched their loathsome and vapid faces for the face of George Cannon. He was not there. She trembled,--whether with relief or with disappointment she knew not. She was agonised, but in her torture she exulted that she had come.

No comment had been made in the workshop, the official having hinted that silence was usual on such occasions. But in a kind of antechamber--one of those amorphous spaces, serving no purpose and resembling nothing, which are sometimes to be found between definable rooms and corridors in a vast building imperfectly planned--the party halted in the midst of a discussion as to discipline. The male visitors, except Edwin, showed marked intelligence and detachment; they seemed to understand immediately how it was that forty-nine ruffians could be trusted to squat on their thighs and stitch industriously and use scissors and other weapons for hours without being chained to the ground; they certainly knew something of the handling of men. The official, triumphant, stated that every prisoner had the right of personal appeal to the Governor every day.

"They come with their stories of grievances," said he, tolerant and derisive.

"Which often aren't true?"

"Which are never true," said the official quietly. "Never! They are always lies--always! ... Shows the material we have to deal with!" He gave a short laugh.

"Really!" said one of the men, rather pleased and excited by this report of universal lying.

"I suppose," Edwin blurted out, "you can tell for certain when they aren't speaking the truth?"

Everybody looked at him surprised, as though the dumb had spoken. The official's glance showed some suspicion of sarcasm and a tendency to resent it.

"We can," he answered shortly, commanding his features to a faint smile. "And now I wonder what Mrs. Rotherwas will be saying if I don't restore you to her." It was agreed that regard must be had for Mrs. Rotherwas's hospitable arrangements, though the prison was really very interesting and would repay study.

They entered a wide corridor--one of two that met at right-angles in the amorphous space--leading in the direction of the chief entrance. From the end of this corridor a file of convicts was approaching in charge of two warders with guns. The official offered no remark, but held on. Hilda, falling back near to Edwin in the procession, was divided between a dreadful fear and a hope equally dreadful. Except in the tailors' shop, these were the only prisoners they had seen, and they appeared out of place in the half-freedom of the corridor; for nobody could conceive a prisoner save in a cell or shop, and these were moving in a public corridor, unshackled.

Then she distinguished George Cannon among them. He was the third from the last. She knew him by his nose and the shape of his chin, and by his walk, though there was little left of his proud walk in the desolating, hopeless prison-shuffle which was the gait of all six convicts. His hair was iron-grey. All these details she could see and be sure of in the distance of the dim corridor. She no longer had a stomach; it had gone, and yet she felt a horrible nausea.

She cried out to herself:

"Why did I come? Why did I come? I am always doing these mad things. Edwin was right. Why do I not listen to him?"

The party of visitors led by the high official, and the file of convicts in charge of armed warders, were gradually approaching one another in the wide corridor. It seemed to Hilda that a fearful collision was imminent, and that something ought to be done. But nobody among the visitors did anything or seemed to be disturbed. Only they had all fallen silent; and in the echoing corridor could be heard the firm steps of the male visitors accompanying the delicate tripping of the women, and the military tramp of the warders with the confused shuffling of the convicts.

"Has he recognised me?" thought Hilda, wildly.

She hoped that he had and that he had not. She recalled with the most poignant sorrow the few days of their union, their hours of intimacy, his kisses, her secret realisation of her power over him, and of his passion. She wanted to scream:

"That man there is as innocent as any of you, and soon the whole world will know it! He never committed any crime except that of loving me too much. He could not do without me, and so I was his ruin. It is horrible that he should be here in this hell. He must be set free at once. The Home Secretary knows he is innocent, but they are so slow. How can anyone bear that he should stop here one instant longer?"

But she made no sound. The tremendous force of an ancient and organised society kept her lips closed and her feet in a line with the others. She thought in despair:

"We are getting nearer, and I cannot meet him. I shall drop." She glanced at Edwin, as if for help, but Edwin was looking straight ahead.

Then a warder, stopping, ejaculated with the harsh brevity of a drill-serjeant:

"Halt!"

The file halted.

"Right turn!"

The six captives turned, with their faces close against the wall of the corridor, obedient, humiliated, spiritless, limp, stooping. Their backs presented the most ridiculous aspect; all the calculated grotesquerie of the surpassingly ugly prison uniform was accentuated as they stood thus, a row of living scarecrows, who knew that they had not the right even to look upon free men. Every one of them except George Cannon had large protuberant ears that completed the monstrosity of their appearance.

The official gave his new acquaintances a satisfied glance, as if saying:

"That is the rule by which we manage these chance encounters."

The visitors went by in silence, instinctively edging away from the captives. And as she passed, Hilda lurched very heavily against Edwin, and recovered herself. Edwin seized her arm near the shoulder, and saw that she was pale. The others were in front.

Behind them they could hear the warder:

"Left turn! March!"

And the shuffling and the tramping recommenced.

IV

In the garden of the Governor's house tennis had already begun when the official brought back his convoy. Young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas were pitted against Harry Hesketh and a girl of eighteen who possessed a good wrist but could not keep her head. Harry was watching over his partner, quietly advising her upon the ruses of the enemy, taking the more difficult strokes for her, and generally imparting to her the quality which she lacked. Harry was fully engaged; the whole of his brain and body was at strain; he let nothing go by; he missed no chance, and within the laws of the game he hesitated at no stratagem. And he was beating young Truscott and Mrs. Rotherwas, while an increasing and polite audience looked on. To the entering party, the withdrawn scene, lit by sunshine, appeared as perfect as a stage-show, with its trees, lawn, flowers, toilettes, the flying balls, the grace of the players, and the grey solidity of the governor's house in the background.

Alicia ran gawkily to Janet, who had got a box of chocolates from somewhere, and one of the men followed her, laughing. Hilda sat apart; she was less pale. Edwin remained cautiously near her. He had not left her side since she lurched against him in the corridor. He knew; he had divined that that which he most feared had come to pass,--the supreme punishment of Hilda's morbidity. He had not definitely recognised George Cannon, for he was not acquainted with him, and in the past had only once or twice by chance caught sight of him in the streets of Bursley or Turnhill. But he had seen among the six captives one who might be he, and who certainly had something of the Five Towns look. Hilda's lurch told him that by vindictiveness of fate George Cannon was close to them.

He had ignored his own emotion. The sudden transient weight of Hilda's body had had a strange moral effect upon him. "This," he thought, "is the burden I have to bear. This, and not lithography, nor riches, is my chief concern. She depends on me. I am all she has to stand by." The burden with its immense and complex responsibilities was sweet to his inmost being; and it braced him and destroyed his resentment against her morbidity. His pity was pure. He felt that he must live more nobly--yes, more heroically--than he had been living; that all irritable pettiness must drop away from him, and that his existence in her regard must have simplicity and grandeur. The sensation of her actual weight stayed with him. He had not spoken to her; he dared not; he had scarcely met her eyes; but he was ready for any emergency. Every now and then, in the garden, Hilda glanced over her shoulder at the house, as though her gaze could pierce the house and see the sinister prison beyond.

The set ended, to Harry Hesketh's satisfaction; and, another set being arranged, he and Mrs. Rotherwas, athletic in a short skirt and simple blouse, came walking, rather flushed and breathless, round the garden with one or two others, including Harry's late partner. The conversation turned upon the great South Wales colliery strike against a proposed reduction of wages. Mrs. Rotherwas' husband was a colliery proprietor near Monmouth, and she had just received a letter from him. Everyone sympathised with her and her husband, and nobody could comprehend the wrongheadedness of the miners, except upon the supposition that they had been led away by mischievous demagogues. As the group approached, the timid young girl, having regained her nerve, was exclaiming with honest indignation: "The leaders ought to be shot, and the men who won't go down the pits ought to be forced to go down and made to work." And she picked at fluff on her yellow frock. Edwin feared an uprising from Hilda, but naught happened. Mrs. Rotherwas spoke about tea, though it was rather early, and they all, Hilda as well, wandered to a large yew tree under which was a table; through the pendant branches of the tree the tennis could be watched as through a screen.

The prison clock tolled the hour over the roofs of the house, and Mrs. Rotherwas gave the definite signal for refreshments.

"You're exhausted," she said teasingly to Harry.

"You'll see," said Harry.

"No," Mrs. Rotherwas delightfully relented. "You're a dear, and I love to watch you play. I'm sure you could give Mr. Truscott half fifteen."

"Think so?" said Harry, pleased, and very conscious that he was living fully.

"You see what it is to have an object in life, Hesketh," Edwin remarked suddenly.

Harry glanced at him doubtfully, and yet with a certain ingenuous admiration. At the same time a white ball rolled near the tree. He ducked under the trailing branches, returned the ball, and moved slowly towards the court.

"Alicia tells me you're very old friends of theirs," said Mrs. Rotherwas, agreeably, to Hilda.

Hilda smiled quietly.

"Yes, we are, both of us."

Who could have guessed, now, that her condition was not absolutely normal?

"Charming people, aren't they, the Heskeths?" said Mrs. Rotherwas. "Perfectly charming. They're an ideal couple. And I do like their house, it's so deliciously quaint, isn't it, Mary?"

"Lovely," agreed the young girl.

It was an ideal world, full of ideal beings.

Soon after tea the irresistible magnetism of Alicia's babies drew Alicia off the moor, and with her the champion player, Janet, Hilda and Edwin. Mrs. Rotherwas let them go with regret, adorably expressed. Harry would have liked to stay, but on the other hand he was delightfully ready to yield to Alicia.

V

On arriving at Tavy Mansion Hilda announced that she should lie down. She told Edwin, in an exhausted but friendly voice, that she needed only rest, and he comprehended, rightly, that he was to leave her. Not a word was said between them as to the events within the prison. He left her, and spent the time before dinner with Harry Hesketh, who had the idea of occupying their leisure with a short game of bowls, for which it was necessary to remove the croquet hoops.

Hilda undressed and got into bed. Soon afterwards both Alicia, with an infant, and Janet came to see her. Had Janet been alone, Hilda might conceivably in her weakness have surrendered the secret to her in exchange for that soft and persuasive sympathy of which Janet was the mistress, but the presence of Alicia made a confidence impossible, and Hilda was glad. She plausibly fibbed to both sisters, and immediately afterwards the household knew that Hilda would not appear at dinner. There was not the slightest alarm or apprehension, for the affair explained itself in the simplest way,--Hilda had had a headache in the morning, and had been wrong to go out; she was now merely paying for the indiscretion. She would be quite recovered the next day. Alicia whispered a word to her husband, who, besides, was not apt easily to get nervous about anything except his form at games. Edwin also, with his Five Towns habit of mind, soberly belittled the indisposition. The household remained natural and gay. When Edwin went upstairs to prepare for dinner, moving very quietly, his wife had her face towards the wall and away from the light. He came round the bed to look at her.

"I'm all right," she murmured.

"Want nothing at all?" he asked, with nervous gruffness.

She shook her head.

Very impatiently she awaited his departure, exasperated more than she had ever been by his precise deliberation over certain details of his toilet. As soon as he was gone she began to cry; but the tears came so gently from her eyes that the weeping was as passive, as independent of volition, as the escape of blood from a wound.

She had a grievance against Edwin. At the crisis in the prison she had blamed herself for not submitting to his guidance, but now she had reacted against all such accusations, and her grievance amounted to just an indictment of his commonsense, his quietude, his talent for keeping out of harm's way, his lack of violent impulses, his formidable respectability. She was a rebel; he was not. He would never do anything wrong, or even perilous. Never, never would he find himself in need of a friend's help. He would always direct his course so that society would protect him. He was a firm part of the structure of society; he was the enemy of impulses. When he foresaw a danger, the danger was always realised: she had noticed that, and she resented it. He was infinitely above the George Cannons of the world. He would be incapable of bigamy, incapable of being caught in circumstances which could bring upon him suspicion of any crime whatever. Yet for her the George Cannons had a quality which he lacked, which he could never possess, and which would have impossibly perfected him--a quality heroic, foolish, martyr-like! She was almost ready to decide that his complete social security was due to cowardice and resulted in self-righteousness! ... Could he really feel pity as she felt it, for the despised and rejected, and a hatred of injustice equal to hers?

These two emotions were burning her up. Again and again, ceaselessly, her mind ran round the circle of George Cannon's torture and the callousness of society. He had sinned, and she had loathed him; but both his sin and her loathing were the fruit of passion. He had been a proud man, and she had shared his pride; now he was broken, unutterably humiliated, and she partook of his humiliation. The grotesque and beaten animal in the corridor was all that society had left of him who had once inspired her to acts of devotion, who could make her blush, and to satisfy whom she would recklessly spend herself. The situation was intolerable, and yet it had to be borne. But surely it must be ended! Surely at the latest on the morrow the prisoner must be released, and soothed and reinstated! ... Pardoned? No! A pardon was an insult, worse than an insult. She would not listen to the word. Society might use it for its own purposes; but she would never use it. Pardon a man after deliberately and fiendishly achieving his ruin? She could have laughed.

Exhaustion followed, tempering emotion and reducing it to a profound despairing melancholy that was stirred at intervals by frantic revolt. The light failed. The windows became vague silver squares. Outside fowls clucked, a horse's hoof clattered on stones; servants spoke to each other in their rough, good-natured voices. The peace of the world had its effect on her, unwilling though she was. Then there was a faint tap at the door. She made no reply, and shut her eyes. The door gently opened, and someone tripped delicately in. She heard movements at the washstand.... One of the maids. A match was struck. The blinds were stealthily lowered, the curtains drawn; garments were gathered together, and at last the door closed again.

She opened her eyes. The room was very dimly illuminated. A night-light, under a glass hemisphere of pale rose, stood on the dressing-table. By magic, order had been restored; a glinting copper ewer of hot water stood in the whiteness of the basin with a towel over it; the blue blinds, revealed by the narrowness of the red curtains, stirred in the depths of the windows; each detail of the chamber was gradually disclosed, and the chamber was steeped in the first tranquillity of the night. Not a sound could be heard. Through the depths of her bitterness, there rose slowly the sensation of the beauty of existence even in its sadness....

A long time afterwards it occurred to her in the obscurity that the bed was tumbled. She must have turned over and over. The bed must be arranged before Edwin came. He had to share it. After all, he had committed no fault; he was entirely innocent. She and fate between them had inflicted these difficulties and these solicitudes upon him. He had said little or nothing, but he was sympathetic. When she had stumbled against him she had felt his upholding masculine strength. He was dependable, and would be dependable to the last. The bed must be creaseless when he came; this was the least she could do. She arose. Very faintly she could descry her image in the mirror of the great wardrobe--a dishevelled image. Forgetting the bed, she bathed her face, and, unusually, took care to leave the washstand as tidy as the maid had left it. Then, having arranged her hair, she set about the bed. It was not easy for one person unaided to make a wide bed. Before she had finished she heard footsteps outside the door. She stood still. Then she heard Edwin's voice:

"Don't trouble, thanks. I'll take it in myself."

He entered, carrying a tray, and shut the door, and instantly she busied herself once more with the bed.

"My poor girl," he said with quiet kindliness, "what are you doing?"

"I'm just putting the bed to rights," she answered, and almost with a single movement she slid back into the bed. "What have you got there?"

"I thought I'd ask for some tea for you," he said. "Nearly the whole blessed household wanted to come and see you, but I wouldn't have it."

She could not say: "It's very nice of you." But she said, simply to please him: "I should like some tea."

He put the tray on the dressing-table; then lit three candles, two on the dressing-table and one on the night-table, and brought the tray to the night-table.

He himself poured out the tea, and offered the cup. She raised herself on an elbow.

"Did you recognise him?" she muttered suddenly, after she had blown on the tea to cool it.

Under ordinary conditions Edwin would have replied to such an unprepared question with another, petulant and impatient: "Recognise who?" pretending that he did not understand the allusion. But now he made no pretences.

"Not quite," he said. "But I knew at once. I could see which of them it must be."

The subject at last opened between them, Hilda felt an extraordinary solace and relief. He stood by the bedside, in black, with a great breastplate of white, his hair rough, his hands in his pockets. She thought he had a fine face; she thought of him as, at such a time, her superior; she wanted powerfully to adopt his attitude, to believe in everything he said. They were talking together in safety, quietly, gravely, amicably, withdrawn and safe in the strange house--he benevolent and assuaging and comprehending, she desiring the balm which he could give. It seemed to her that they had never talked to each other in such tones.

"Isn't it awful--awful?" she exclaimed.

"It is," said Edwin, and added carefully, tenderly: "I suppose he is innocent."

She might have flown at him: "That's just like you--to assume he isn't!" But she replied:

"I'm quite sure of it. I say--I want you to read all the letters I've had from Mrs. Cannon. I've got them here. They're in my bag there. Read them now. Of course I always meant to show them to you."

"All right," he agreed, drew a chair to the dressing-table where the bag was, found the letters, and read them. She waited, as he read one letter, put it down, read another, laid it precisely upon the first one, with his terrible exactitude and orderliness, and so on through the whole packet.

"Yes," said he at the end, "I should say he's innocent this time, right enough."

"But something ought to be done!" she cried. "Don't you think something ought to be done, Edwin?"

"Something has been done. Something is being done."

"But something else!"

He got up and walked about the room.

"There's only one thing to be done," he said.

He came towards her, and stood over her again, and the candle on the night-table lighted his chin and the space between his eyelashes and his eyebrows. He timidly touched her hair, caressing it. They were absolutely at their ease together in the intimacy of the bedroom. In her brief relations with George Cannon there had not been time to establish anything like such intimacy. With George Cannon she had always had the tremors of the fawn.

"What is it?"

"Wait. That's all. It's not the slightest use trying to hurry these public departments. You can't do it. You only get annoyed for nothing at all. You can take that from me, my child."

He spoke with such delicate persuasiveness, such an evident desire to be helpful, that Hilda was convinced and grew resigned. It did not occur to her that he had made a tremendous resolve which had raised him above the Edwin she knew. She thought she had hitherto misjudged and underrated him.

"I wanted to explain to you about that ten pounds," she said.

"That's all right--that's all right," said he hastily.

"But I must tell you. You saw Mrs. Cannon's letter asking me for money. Well, I borrowed the ten pounds from Janet. So of course I had to pay it back, hadn't I?"

"How is Janet?" he asked in a new, lighter tone.

"She seems to be going on splendidly, don't you think so?"

"Well then, we'll go home to-morrow."

"Shall we?"

She lifted her arms and he bent. She was crying. In a moment she was sobbing. She gave him violent kisses amid her sobs, and held him close to her until the fit passed. Then she said, in her voice reduced to that of a child:

"What time's the train?"

CHAPTER XVI

THE GHOST

I

It was six-thirty. The autumn dusk had already begun to fade; and in the damp air, cold, grimy, and vaporous, men with scarves round their necks and girls with shawls over their heads, or hatted and even gloved, were going home from work past the petty shops where sweets, tobacco, fried fish, chitterlings, groceries, and novelettes were sold among enamelled advertisements of magic soaps. In the feeble and patchy illumination of the footpaths, which left the middle of the streets and the upper air all obscure, the chilled, preoccupied people passed each other rapidly like phantoms, emerging out of one mystery and disappearing into another. Everywhere, behind the fanlights and shaded windows of cottages, domesticity was preparing the warm relaxations of the night. Amid the streets of little buildings the lithographic establishment, with a yellow oblong here and there illuminated in its dark façades, stood up high, larger than reality, more important and tyrannic, one of the barracks, one of the prisons, one of the money-works where a single man or a small group of men by brains and vigour and rigour exploited the populace.

Edwin, sitting late in his private office behind those façades, was not unaware of the sensation of being an exploiter. By his side on the large flat desk lay a copy of the afternoon's Signal containing an account of the breaking up by police of an open-air meeting of confessed anarchists on the previous day at Manchester. Manchester was, and is still, physically and morally, very close to the Five Towns, which respect it more than they respect London. An anarchist meeting at Manchester was indeed an uncomfortable portent for the Five Towns. Enormous strikes, like civil wars at stalemate, characterised the autumn as they had characterised the spring, affecting directly or indirectly every industry, and weakening the prestige of government, conventions, wealth, and success. Edwin was successful. It was because he was successful that he was staying late and that a clerk in the outer office was staying late and that windows were illuminated here and there in the façades. Holding in his hand the wage-book, he glanced down the long column of names and amounts. Some names conveyed nothing to him; but most of them raised definite images in his mind--of big men, roughs, decent clerks with wristbands, undersized pale machinists, intensely respectable skilled artisans and daughtsmen, thin ragged lads, greasy, slatternly, pale girls, and one or two fat women,--all dirty, and working with indifference in dirt. Most of them kowtowed to him; some did not; some scowled askance. But they were all dependent on him. Not one of them but would be prodigiously alarmed and inconvenienced--to say nothing of going hungry--if it he did not pay wages the next morning. The fact was he could distribute ruin with a gesture and nobody could bring him to book....

Something wrong! Under the influence of strikes and anarchist meetings he felt with foreboding and even with a little personal alarm that something was wrong. Those greasy, slatternly girls, for instance, with their coarse charm and their sexuality,--they were underpaid. They received as much as other girls, on pot-banks, perhaps more, but they were underpaid. What chance had they? He was getting richer every day, and safer (except for the vague menace); yet he could not appreciably improve their lot, partly for business reasons, partly because any attempt to do so would bring the community about his ears and he would be labelled as a doctrinaire and a fool, and partly because his own commonsense was against such a move. Not those girls, not his works, not this industry and that, was wrong. All was wrong. And it was impossible to imagine any future period when all would not be wrong. Perfection was a desolating thought. Nevertheless the struggle towards it was instinctive and had to go on. The danger was (in Edwin's eyes) of letting that particular struggle monopolise one's energy. Well, he would not let it. He did a little here and a little there, and he voted democratically and in his heart was most destructively sarcastic about toryism; and for the rest he relished the adventure of existence, and took the best he conscientiously could, and thought pretty well of himself as a lover of his fellowmen. If he was born to be a master, he would be one, and not spend his days in trying to overthrow mastery. He was tired that evening, he had a slight headache, he certainly had worries; but he was not unhappy on the throbbing, tossing steamer of humanity. Nobody could seem less adventurous than he seemed, with his timidities and his love of moderation, comfort, regularity and security. Yet his nostrils would sniff to the supreme and all-embracing adventure.

He heard Hilda's clear voice in the outer office: "Mr. Clayhanger in there?" and the clerk's somewhat nervously agitated reply, repeating several times in eager affirmative. And he himself, the master, though still all alone in the sanctum, at once pretended to be very busy.

Her presence would thus often produce an excitation in the organism of the business. She was so foreign to it, so unsoiled by it, so aloof from it, so much more gracious, civilised, enigmatic than anything that the business could show! And, fundamentally, she was the cause of the business; it was all for her; it existed with its dirt, noise, crudity, strain, and eternal effort so that she might exist in her elegance, her disturbing femininity, her restricted and deep affections, her irrational capriciousness, and her strange, brusque commonsense. The clerks and some of the women felt this; Big James certainly felt it; and Edwin felt it, and denied it to himself, more than anybody. There was no economic justice in the arrangement. She would come in veiled, her face mysterious behind the veil, and after a few minutes she would delicately lift her gloved fingers to the veil, and raise it, and her dark, pale, vivacious face would be disclosed. "Here I am!" And the balance was even, her debt paid! That was how it was.

In the month that had passed since the visit to Dartmoor, Edwin, despite his resolve to live heroically and philosophically, had sometimes been forced into the secret attitude: "This woman will kill me, but without her I shouldn't be interested enough to live." He was sometimes morally above her to the point of priggishness, and sometimes incredibly below her; but for the most part living in a different dimension. She had heard nothing further from Mrs. Cannon; she knew nothing of the bigamist's fate, though more than once she had written for news. Her moods were unpredictable and disconcerting, and as her moods constituted the chief object of Edwin's study the effect on him was not tranquillising. At the start he had risen to the difficulty of the situation; but he could not permanently remain at that height, and the situation had apparently become stationary. His exasperations, both concealed and open, were not merely unworthy of a philosopher, they were unworthy of a common man. "Why be annoyed?" he would say to himself. But he was annoyed. "The tone--the right tone!" he would remind himself. Surely he could remember to command his voice to the right tone? But no! He could not. He could infallibly remember to wind up his watch, but he could not remember that. Moreover, he felt, as he had felt before, on occasions, that no amount of right tone would keep their relations smooth, for the reason that principles were opposed. Could she not see? ... Well, she could not. There she was, entire, unalterable--impossible to chip inconvenient pieces off her--you must take her or leave her; and she could not see, or she would not--which in practice was the same thing.

And yet some of the most exquisite moments of their union had occurred during that feverish and unquiet month--moments of absolute surrender and devotion on her part, of protective love on his; and also long moments of peace. With the early commencement of autumn, all the family had resumed the pursuit of letters with a certain ardour. A startling feminist writer, and the writer whose parentage and whose very name lay in the Five Towns, who had re-created the East and whose vogue was a passion among the lettered--both these had published books whose success was extreme and genuine. And in the curtained gas-lit drawing-room of a night Hilda would sit rejoicing over the triumphant satire of the woman-novelist, and Edwin and George would lounge in impossible postures, each mesmerised by a story of the Anglo-Indian; and between chapters Edwin might rouse himself from the enchantment sufficiently to reflect: "How indescribably agreeable these evenings are!" And ten to one he would say aloud, with false severity: "George! Bed!" And George, a fine judge of genuineness in severity, would murmur carelessly: "All right! I'm going!" And not go.

And now Edwin in the office thought:

"She's come to fetch me away."

He was gratified. But he must not seem to be gratified. The sanctity of business from invasion had to be upheld. He frowned, feigning more diligently than ever to be occupied. She came in, with that air at once apologetic and defiant that wives have in affronting the sacred fastness. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been a business woman, arriving regularly at just such an office every morning, shorthand-writing, twisting a copying-press, filing, making appointments. Nobody could have guessed that she had ever been in business for herself, and had known how sixpence was added to sixpence and a week's profit lost in an hour. All such knowledge had apparently dropped from her like an excrescence, had vanished like a temporary disfigurement, and she looked upon commerce with the uncomprehending, careless, and yet impressed eyes of a young girl.

"Hello, missis!" he exclaimed casually.

Then George came in. Since the visit to Dartmoor Hilda had much increased her intimacy with George, spending a lot of time with him, walking with him, and exploring in a sisterly and reassuring manner his most private life. George liked it, but it occasionally irked him and he would give a hint to Edwin that mother needed to be handled at times.

"You needn't come in here, George," said Hilda.

"Well, can I go into the engine-house?" George suggested. Edwin had always expected that he would prefer the machine-room. But the engine-house was his haunt, probably because it was dirty, fiery, and stuffy.

"No, you can't," said Edwin. "Pratt's gone by this, and it's shut up."

"No, it isn't. Pratt's there."

"All right."

"Shut the door, dear," said Hilda.

"Hooray!" George ran off and banged the glass door.

Hilda, glancing by habit at the unsightly details of the deteriorating room, walked round the desk. With apprehension Edwin saw resolve and perturbation in her face. He was about to say: "Look here, infant, I'm supposed to be busy." But he refrained.

Holding out a letter which she nervously snatched from her bag, Hilda said:

"I've just had this--by the afternoon post. Read it."

He recognised at once the sloping handwriting; but the paper was different; it was a mere torn half-sheet of very cheap notepaper. He read: "Dear Mrs. Clayhanger. Just a line to say that my husband is at last discharged. It has been weary waiting. We are together, and I am looking after him. With renewed thanks for your sympathy and help. Believe me, Sincerely yours, Charlotte M. Cannon." The signature was scarcely legible. There was no address, no date.

Edwin's first flitting despicable masculine thought was: "She doesn't say anything about that ten pounds!" It fled. He was happy in an intense relief that affected all his being. He said to himself: "Now that's over, we can begin again."

"Well," he murmured. "That's all right. Didn't I always tell you it would take some time? ... That's all right."

He gazed at the paper, waving it in his hand as he held it by one corner. He perceived that it was the letter of a jealous woman, who had got what she wanted and meant to hold it, and entirely to herself; and his mood became somewhat sardonic.

"Very curt, isn't it?" said Hilda strangely. "And after all this time, too!"

He looked up at her, turning his head sideways to catch her eyes.

"That letter," he said in a voice as strange as Hilda's, "that letter is exactly what it ought to be. It could not possibly have been better turned.... You don't want to keep it, I suppose, do you?"

"No," she muttered.

He tore it into very small pieces, and dropped them into the waste-paper-basket beneath the desk.

"And burn all the others," he said, in a low tone.

"Edwin," after a pause.

"Yes?"

"Don't you think George ought to know? Don't you think one of us ought to tell him,--either you or me? You might tell him?"

"Tell him what?" Edwin demanded sharply, pushing back his chair.

"Well, everything!"

He glowered. He could feel himself glowering. He could feel the justifiable anger animating him.

"Certainly not!" he enunciated resentfully, masterfully, overpoweringly. "Certainly not!"

"But supposing he hears from outsiders?"

"You needn't begin supposing."

"But he's bound to have to know sometime."

"Possibly. But he isn't going to know now, any road! Not with my consent. The thing's absolute madness."

Hilda almost whispered:

"Very well, dear. If you think so."

"I do think so."

He suddenly felt very sorry for her. He was ready to excuse her astounding morbidity as a consequence of extreme spiritual tribulation. He added with brusque good-nature:

"And so will you, in the morning, my child."

"Shall you be long?"

"No. I told you I should be late. If you'll run off, my chuck, I'll undertake to be after you in half an hour."

"Is your headache better?"

"No. On the other hand, it isn't worse."

He gazed fiercely at the wages-book.

She bent down.

"Kiss me," she murmured tearfully.

As he kissed her, and as she pressed against him, he absorbed and understood all the emotions through which she had passed and was passing, and from him to her was transmitted an unimaginable tenderness that shamed and atoned for the inclemency of his refusals. He was very happy. He knew that he would not do another stroke of work that night, but still he must pretend to do some. Playfully, without rising, he drew down her veil, smacked her gently on the back, and indicated the door.

"I have to call at Clara's about that wool for Maggie," she said, with courage. His fingering of her veil had given her extreme pleasure.

"I'll bring the kid up," he said.

"Will you?"

She departed, leaving the door unlatched.

II

A draught from the outer door swung wide-open the unlatched door of Edwin's room.

"What are doors for?" he muttered, pleasantly impatient; then he called aloud:

"Simpson. Shut the outer door--and this one, too."

There was no answer. He arose and went to the outer office. Hilda had passed through it like an arrow. Simpson was not there. But a man stood leaning against the mantelpiece; he held at full spread a copy of the Signal, which concealed all the upper part of him except his fingers and the crown of his head. Though the gas had been lighted in the middle of the room, it must have been impossible for him to read by it, since it shone through the paper. He lowered the newspaper with a rustle and looked at Edwin. He was a big, well-dressed man, wearing a dark grey suit, a blue Melton overcoat, and a quite new glossy "boiler-end" felt hat. He had a straight, prominent nose, and dark, restless eyes, set back; his short hair was getting grey, but not his short black moustache.

"Were you waiting to see me?" Edwin said, in a defensive, half-hostile tone. The man might be a belated commercial traveller of a big house--some of those fellows considered themselves above all laws; on the other hand he might be a new; customer in a hurry.

"Yes," was the reply, in a deep, full and yet uncertain voice. "The clerk said you couldn't be disturbed, and asked me to wait. Then he went out."

"What can I do for you? It's really after hours, but some of us are working a bit late."

The man glanced at the outer door, which Edwin was shutting, and then at the inner door, which exposed Edwin's room.

"I'm George Cannon," he said, advancing a step, as it were defiantly.

For an instant Edwin was frightened by the sudden melodrama of the situation. Then he thought:

"I am up against this man. This is a crisis."

And he became almost agreeably aware of his own being. The man stood close to him, under the gas, with all the enigmatic quality of another being. He could perceive now--at any rate he could believe--that it was George Cannon. Forgetful of what the man had suffered, Edwin felt for him nothing but the instinctive inimical distrust of the individual who has never got at loggerheads with society for the individual who once and for always has. To this feeling was added a powerful resentment of the man's act in coming--especially unannounced--to just him, the husband of the woman he had dishonoured. It was a monstrous act--and doubtless an act characteristic of the man. It was what might have been expected. The man might have been innocent of a particular crime, might have been falsely imprisoned; but what had he originally been doing, with what rascals had he been consorting, that he should be even suspected of crime? George Cannon's astonishing presence, so suddenly after his release, at the works of Edwin Clayhanger, was unforgiveable. Edwin felt an impulse to say savagely:

"Look here. You clear out. You understand English, don't you? Hook it."

But he had not the brutality to say it. Moreover, the clerk returned, carrying, full to the brim, the tin water-receptacle used for wetting the damping-brush of the copying-press.

"Will you come in, please?" said Edwin curtly. "Simpson, I'm engaged."

The two men went into the inner room.

"Sit down," said Edwin grimly.

George Cannon, with a firm gesture, planted his hat on the flat desk between them. He looked round behind him at the shut glazed door.

"You needn't be afraid," said Edwin. "Nobody can hear--unless you shout."

He gazed curiously but somewhat surreptitiously at George Cannon, trying to decide whether it was possible to see in him a released convict. He decided that it was not possible. George Cannon had a shifty, but not a beaten, look; many men had a shifty look. His hair was somewhat short, but so was the hair of many men, if not of most. He was apparently in fair health; assuredly his constitution had not been ruined. And if his large, coarse features were worn, marked with tiny black spots, and seamed and generally ravaged, they were not more ravaged than the features of numerous citizens of Bursley aged about fifty who saved money, earned honours, and incurred the envy of presumably intelligent persons. And as he realised all this, Edwin's retrospective painful alarm as to what might have happened if Hilda had noticed George Cannon in the outer office lessened until he could dismiss it entirely. By chance she had ignored Cannon, perhaps scarcely seeing him in her preoccupied passage, perhaps taking him vaguely for a customer; but supposing she had recognised him, what then? There would have been an awkward scene--nothing more. Awkward scenes do not kill; their effect is transient. Hilda would have had to behave, and would have behaved, with severe commonsense. He, Edwin himself, would have handled the affair. A demeanour matter-of-fact and impassible was what was needed. After all, a man recently out of prison was not a wild beast, nor yet a freak. Hundreds of men were coming out of prisons every day.... He should know how to deal with this man--not pharisaically, not cruelly, not unkindly, but still with a clear indication to the man of his reprehensible indiscretion in being where he then was.

"Did she recognise me--down there--Dartmoor?" asked George Cannon, without any preparing of the ground, in a deep, trembling voice; and as he spoke a flush spread slowly over his dark features.

"Er--yes!" answered Edwin, and his voice also trembled.

"I wasn't sure," said George Cannon. "We were halted before I could see. And I daren't look round--I should ha' been punished. I've been punished before now for looking up at the sky at exercise." He spoke more quickly and then brought himself up with a snort. "However, I've not come all the way here to talk prison, so you needn't be afraid. I'm not one of your reformers."

In his weak but ungoverned nervous excitement, from which a faint trace of hysteria was not absent, he now seemed rather more like an ex-convict, despite his good clothes. He had become, to Edwin's superior self-control, suddenly wistful. And at the same time, the strange opening question, and its accent, had stirred Edwin, and he saw with remorse how much finer had been Hilda's morbid and violent pity than his own harsh commonsense and anxiety to avoid emotion. The man in good clothes moved him more than the convict had moved him. He seemed to have received vision, and he saw not merely the unbearable pathos of George Cannon, but the high and heavenly charitableness of Hilda, which he had constantly douched, and his own common earthliness. He was exceedingly humbled. And he also thought, sadly: "This chap's still attached to her. Poor devil!"

"What have you come for?" he enquired.

George Cannon cleared his throat. Edwin waited, in fear, for the avowal. He could make nothing out of the visitor's face; its expression was anxious and drew sympathy, but there was something in it which chilled the sympathy it invoked and which seemed to say: "I shall look after myself." It yielded naught. You could be sorry for the heart within, and yet could neither like nor esteem it. "Punished for looking up at the sky." ... Glimpses of prison life presented themselves to Edwin's imagination. He saw George Cannon again halted and turning like a serf to the wall of the corridor. And this man opposite to him, close to him in the familiar room, was the same man as the serf! Was he the same man? ... Inscrutable, the enigma of that existence whose breathing was faintly audible across the desk.

"You know all about it--about my affair, of course?"

"Well," said Edwin. "I expect you know how much I know."

"I'm an honest man--you know that. I needn't begin by explaining that to you."

Edwin nerved himself:

"You weren't honest towards Hilda, if it comes to that."

He used his wife's Christian name, to this man with whom he had never before spoken, naturally, inevitably. He would not say "my wife." To have said "my wife" would somehow have brought some muddiness upon that wife, and by contact upon her husband.

"When I say 'honest' I mean--you know what I mean. About Hilda--I don't defend that. Only I couldn't help myself.... I daresay I should do it again." Edwin could feel his eyes smarting and he blinked, and yet he was angry with the man, who went on: "It's no use talking about that. That's over. And I couldn't help it. I had to do it. She's come out of it all right. She's not harmed, and I thank God for it! If there'd been a child living ... well, it would ha' been different."

Edwin started. This man didn't know he was a father--and his son was within a few yards of him--might come running in at any moment! (No! Young George would not come in. Nothing but positive orders would get the boy out of the engine-house so long as the engine-man remained there.) Was it possible that Hilda had concealed the existence of her child, or had announced the child's death? If so, she had never done a wiser thing, and such sagacity struck him as heroic. But if Mrs. Cannon knew as to the child, then it was Mrs. Cannon who, with equal prudence and for a different end, had concealed its existence from George Cannon or lied to him as to its death. Certainly the man was sincere. As he said "Thank God!" his full voice had vibrated like the voice of an ardent religionist at a prayer-meeting.

George Cannon began again:

"All I mean is I'm an honest man. I've been damnably treated. Not that I want to go into that. No! I'm a fatalist. That's over. That's done with. I'm not whining. All I'm insisting on is that I'm not a thief, and I'm not a forger, and I've nothing to hide. Perhaps I brought my difficulties about that bank-note business on myself. But when you've once been in prison, you don't choose your friends--you can't. Perhaps I might have ended by being a thief or a forger, only on this occasion it just happens that I've had a good six years for being innocent. I never did anything wrong, or even silly, except let myself get too fond of somebody. That might happen to anyone. It did happen to me. But there's nothing else. You understand? I never--"

"Yes, yes, certainly!" said Edwin, stopping him as he was about to repeat all the argument afresh. It was a convincing argument.

"No one's got the right to look down on me, I mean," George Cannon insisted, bringing his face forward over the desk. "On the contrary this country owes me an apology. However, I don't want to go into that. That's done with. Spilt milk's spilt. I know what the world is."

"I agree. I agree!" said Edwin.

He did. The honesty of his intelligence admitted almost too eagerly and completely the force of the pleading.

"Well," said George Cannon, "to cut it short, I want help. And I've come to you for it."

"Me!" Edwin feebly exclaimed.

"You, Mr. Clayhanger! I've come straight here from London. I haven't a friend in the whole world, not one. It's not everybody can say that. There was a fellow named Dayson at Turnhill--used to work for me--he'd have done something if he could. But he was too big a fool to be able to; and besides, he's gone, no address. I wrote to him."

"Oh, that chap!" murmured Edwin, trying to find relief in even a momentary turn of the conversation. "I know who you mean. Shorthand-writer. He died in the Isle of Man on his holiday two years ago. It was in the papers."

"That's his address, is it? Good old Dead Letter Office! Well, he is crossed off the list, then; no mistake!" Cannon snarled bitterly. "I'm aware you're not a friend of mine. I've no claim on you. You don't know me; but you know about me. When I saw you in Dartmoor I guessed who you were, and I said to myself you looked the sort of man who might help another man.... Why did you come into the prison? Why did you bring her there? You must have known I was there." He spoke with a sudden change to reproachfulness.

"I didn't bring her there." Edwin blushed. "It was---- However, we needn't go into that, if you don't mind."

"Was she upset?"

"Of course."

Cannon sighed.

"What do you want me to do?" asked Edwin gloomily. In secret he was rather pleased that George Cannon should have deemed him of the sort likely to help. Was it the flattery of a mendicant? No, he did not think it was. He believed implicitly everything the man was saying.

"Money!" said Cannon sharply. "Money! You won't feel it, but it will save me. After all, Mr. Clayhanger, there's a bond between us, if it comes to that. There's a bond between us. And you've had all the luck of it."

Again Edwin blushed.

"But surely your wife--" he stammered. "Surely Mrs. Cannon isn't without funds. Of course I know she was temporarily rather short a while back, but surely--"

"How do you know she was short?" Cannon grimly interrupted.

"My wife sent her ten pounds--I fancy it was ten pounds--towards expenses, you know."

Cannon ejaculated, half to himself, savagely:

"Never told me!"

He remained silent.

"But I've always understood she's a woman of property," Edwin finished.

Cannon put both elbows on the desk, leaned further forward, and opened his mouth several seconds before speaking.

"Mr. Clayhanger, I've left my wife--as you call her. If I'd stayed with her I should have killed her. I've run off. Yes, I know all she's done for me. I know without her I might have been in prison to-day and for a couple o' years to come. But I'd sooner be in prison or in hell or anywhere you like than with Mrs. Cannon. She's an old woman. She always was an old woman. She was nearly forty when she hooked me, and I was twenty-two. And I'm young yet. I'm not middle-aged yet. She's got a clear conscience, Mrs. Cannon has. She always does her duty. She'd let me walk over her, she'd never complain, if only she could keep me. She'd just play and smile. Oh yes, she'd turn the other cheek--and keep on turning it. But she isn't going to have me. And for all she's done I'm not grateful. Hag. That's what she is!" He spoke loudly, excitedly, under considerable emotion.

"Hsh!" Edwin, alarmed, endeavoured gently to soothe him.

"All right! All right!" Cannon proceeded in a lower but still impassioned voice. "But look here! You're a man. You know what's what. You'll understand what I mean. Believe me when I say that I wouldn't live with that woman for eternal salvation. I couldn't. I couldn't do it. I've taken some of her money, only a little, and run off..." He paused, and went on with conscious persuasiveness now: "I've just got here. I had to ask your whereabouts. I might have been recognised in the streets, but I haven't been. I didn't expect to find you here at this time. I might have had to sleep in the town to-night. I wouldn't have come to your private house. Now I've seen you I shall get along to Crewe to-night. I shall be safer there. And it's on the way to Liverpool and America. I want to go to America. With a bit o' capital I shall be all right in America. It's my one chance; but it's a good one. But I must have some capital. No use landing in New York with empty pockets."

Said Edwin, still shying at the main issues:

"I was under the impression you had been to America once."

"Yes, that's why I know. I hadn't any money. And what's more," he added with peculiar emphasis, "I was brought back."

Edwin thought:

"I shall yield to this man."

At that instant he saw the shadow of Hilda's head and shoulders on the glass of the door.

"Excuse me a second," he murmured, bounded with astonishing velocity out of the room, and pulled the door to after him with a bang.

III

Hilda, having observed the strange, excited gesture, paused a moment, in an equally strange tranquillity, before speaking. Edwin fronted her at the very door. Then she said, clearly and deliberately, through her veil:

"Auntie Hamps has had an attack--heart. The doctor says she can't possibly live through the night. It was at Clara's."

This was the first of Mrs. Hamps's fatal heart-attacks.

"Ah!" breathed Edwin, with apparently a purely artistic interest in the affair. "So that's it, is it? Then she's at Clara's."

"Yes."

"What doctor?"

"I forget his name. Lives in Acre Lane. They sent for the nearest. She can't get her breath--has to fight for it. She jumped out of bed, struggling to breathe."

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes. They made me."

"Albert there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, I suppose I'd better go round. You go back. I'll follow you."

He was conscious of not the slightest feeling of sorrow at the imminent death of Auntie Hamps. Even the image of the old lady fighting to fetch her breath scarcely moved him, though the deathbed of his father had been harrowing enough. He and Hilda had the same thought: "At last something has happened to Auntie Hamps!" And it gave zest.

"I must speak to you," said Hilda, low, and moved towards the inner door.

The clerk Simpson was behind them at his ink-stained desk, stamping letters, and politely pretending to be deaf.

"No," Edwin stopped her. "There's someone in there. We can't talk there."

"A customer?"

"Yes ... I say, Simpson. Have you done those letters?"

"Yes, sir," answered Simpson, smiling. He had been recommended as a "very superior" youth, and had not disappointed, despite a constitutional nervousness.

"Take them to the pillar, and call at Mr. Benbow's and tell them that I'll be round in about a quarter of an hour. I don't know as you need come back. Hurry up."

"Yes, sir."

Edwin and Hilda watched Simpson go.

"Whatever's the matter?" Hilda demanded in a low, harsh voice, as soon as the outer door had clicked. It was as if something sinister in her had been suddenly released.

"Matter? Nothing. Why?"

"You look so queer."

"Well--you come along with these shocks." He gave a short, awkward laugh. He felt and looked guilty, and he knew that he looked guilty.

"You looked queer when you came out."

"You've upset yourself, my child, that's all." He now realised the high degree of excitement which he himself, without previously being aware of it, had reached.

"Edwin, who is it in there?"

"Don't I tell you--it's a customer."

He could see her nostrils twitching through, the veil.

"It's George Cannon in there!" she exclaimed.

He laughed again. "What makes you feel that?" he asked, feeling all the while the complete absurdity of such fencing.

"When I ran out I noticed somebody. He was reading a newspaper and I couldn't see him. But he just moved it a bit, and I seemed to catch sight of the top of his head. And when I got into the street I said to myself, 'It looked like George Cannon,' and then I said, 'Of course it couldn't be.' And then with this business about Auntie Hamps the idea went right out of my head."

"Well, it is, if you want to know."

Her mysterious body and face seemed to radiate a disastrous emotion that filled the whole office.

"Did you know he was coming?"

"I did not. Hadn't the least notion!" The sensation of criminality began to leave Edwin. As Hilda seemed to move and waver, he added:

"Now you aren't going to see him!"

And his voice menacingly challenged her, and defied her to stir a step. The most important thing in the world, then, was that Hilda should not see George Cannon. He would stop her by force. He would let himself get angry and brutal. He would show her that he was the stronger. He had quite abandoned his earlier attitude of unsentimental callousness which argued that after all it wouldn't ultimately matter whether they encountered each other or not. Far from that, he was, so it appeared to him, standing between them, desperate and determined, and acting instinctively and conventionally. Their separate pasts, each full of grief and tragedy, converged terribly upon him in an effort to meet in just that moment, and he was ferociously resisting.

"What does he want?"

"He wants me to help him to go to America."

"You!"

"He says he hasn't a friend."

"But what about his wife?"

"That's just what I said.... He's left her. Says he can't live with her."

There was a silence, in which the tension appreciably lessened.

"Can't live with her! Well, I'm not surprised. But I do think it's strange, him coming to you."

"So do I," said Edwin drily, taking the upper hand; for the change in Hilda's tone--her almost childlike satisfaction in the news that Cannon would not live with his wife--seemed to endow him with superiority. "But there's a lot of strange things in this world. Now listen here. I'm not going to keep him waiting; I can't."

He then spoke very gravely, authoritatively and ominously: "Find George and take him home at once."

Hilda, impressed, gave a frown.

"I think it's very wrong that you should be asked to help him." Her voice shook and nearly broke. "Shall you help him, Edwin?"

"I shall get him out of this town at once, and out of the country. Do as I say. As things are he doesn't know there is any George, and it's just as well he shouldn't. But if he stays anywhere about, he's bound to know."

All Hilda's demeanour admitted that George Cannon had never been allowed to know that he had a son; and the simple candour of the admission frightened Edwin by its very simplicity.

"Now! Off you go! George is in the engine-house."

Hilda moved reluctantly towards the outer-door, like a reproved and rebellious schoolgirl. Suddenly she burst into tears, sprang at Edwin, and, putting her arms round his neck, kissed him through the veil.

"Nobody but you would have helped him--in your place!" she murmured passionately, half admiring, half protesting. And with a backward look as she hurried off, her face stern and yet soft seemed to appeal: "Help him."

Edwin was at once deeply happy and impregnated with a sense of the frightful sadness that lurks in the hollows of the world. He stood alone with the flaring gas, overcome.

IV

He went back to the private room, self-conscious and rather tongue-tied, with a clear feeling of relief that Hilda was disposed of, removed from the equation--and not unsuccessfully. After the woman, to deal with the man, in the plain language of men, seemed simple and easy. He was astounded, equally, by the grudging tardiness of Mrs. Cannon's information to Hilda as to the release, and by the baffling, inflexible detraction of Hilda's words: "Well, I'm not surprised." And the flitting image of Auntie Hamps fighting for life still left him untouched. He looked at George Cannon, and George Cannon, with his unreliable eyes, looked at him. He almost expected Cannon to say: "Was that Hilda you were talking to out there?" But Cannon seemed to have no suspicion that, in either the inner or the outer room, he had been so close to her. No doubt, when he was waiting by the mantel-piece in the outer room, he had lifted the paper as soon as he heard the door unlatched, expressly in order to screen himself from observation. Probably he had not even guessed that the passer was a woman. Had Simpson been there, the polite young man would doubtless have said: "Good night, Mrs. Clayhanger," but Simpson had happened not to be there.

"Are you going to help me?" asked George Cannon, after a moment, and his heavy voice was so beseeching, so humble, so surprisingly sycophantic, so fearful, that Edwin could scarcely bear to hear it. He hated to hear that one man could be so slavishly dependent on another. Indeed, he much preferred Cannon's defiant, half-bullying tone.

"Yes," said he. "I shall do what I can. What do you want?"

"A hundred pounds," said George Cannon, and, as he named the sum, his glance was hard and steady.

Edwin was startled. But immediately he began to readjust his ideas, persuading himself that after all the man could not prudently have asked for less.

"I can't give it you all now."

Cannon's face lighted up in relief and joy. His black eyes sparkled feverishly with the impatience of an almost hopeless desire about to be satisfied. Although he did not move, his self-control had for the moment gone completely, and the secrets of his soul were exposed.

"Can you send it me--in notes? I can give you an address in Liverpool." His voice could hardly utter the words.

"Wait a second," said Edwin.

He went to the safe let into the wall, of which he was still so naïvely proud, and unlocked it with the owner's gesture. The perfect fitting of the bright key, the ease with which it turned, the silent, heavy swing of the massive door on its hinges--these things gave him physical as well as moral pleasure. He savoured the security of his position and his ability to rescue people from destruction. From the cavern of the safe he took out a bag of gold, part of the money required for wages on the morrow,--he would have to send to the Bank again in the morning. He knew that the bag contained exactly twenty pounds in half-sovereigns, but he shed the lovely twinkling coins on the desk and counted them.

"Here," he said. "Here's twenty pounds. Take the bag, too--it'll be handier," and he put the money into the bag. Then a foolish, grand idea struck him. "Write down the address on this envelope, will you, and I'll send you a hundred to-morrow. You can rely on it."

"Eighty, you mean," muttered George Cannon.

"No," said Edwin, with affected nonchalance, blushing, "a hundred. The twenty will get you over and you'll have a hundred clear when you arrive on the other side."

"Ye're very kind," said Cannon weakly. "I--"

"Here. Here's the envelope. Here's a bit of pencil." Edwin stopped him hastily. His fear of being thanked made him harsh.

While Cannon was nervously writing the address, he noticed that the man's clumsy fingers were those of a day-labourer.

"You'll get it all back. You'll see," said Cannon, as he stood up to leave, holding his glossy felt hat in his left hand.

"Don't worry about that. I don't want it. You owe me nothing."

"You'll have every penny back, and before long, too."

Edwin smiled, deprecating the idea.

"Well, good luck!" he said. "You'll get to Crewe all right. There's a train at Shawport at eight seven."

They shook hands, and quitted the inner office. As he traversed the outer office on his way forth, in front of Edwin, Cannon turned his head, as if to say something, but, confused, he said nothing and went on, and at once he disappeared into the darkness outside. And Edwin was left with a memory of his dubious eyes, hard rather than confident, profoundly relieved rather than profoundly grateful.

"By Jove!" Edwin murmured by himself. "Who'd have thought it? ... They say those chaps always turn up again like bad pennies, but I bet he won't." Simultaneously he reflected upon the case of Mrs. Cannon, deserted; but it did not excite his pity. He fastened the safe, extinguished the lights, shut the office, and prepared his mind for the visit to Auntie Hamps.

V

Hilda and her son were in the dining-room, in which the table, set for a special meal--half-tea, half-supper--made a glittering oblong of white. On the table, among blue-and-white plates, and knives and forks, lay some of George's shabby school-books. In most branches of knowledge George privately knew that he could instruct his parents--especially his mother. Nevertheless that beloved outgrown creature was still occasionally useful at home-lessons, as for instance in "poetry." George, disdainful, had to learn some verses each week, and now his mother held a book entitled "The Poetry Reciter," while George mumbled with imperfect verbal accuracy the apparently immortal lines:

Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase,

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace.

His mother, however, scarcely regarded the book. She knew the poem by heart, and had indeed recited it to George, who, though he was much impressed by her fire, could not by any means have been persuaded to imitate the freedom of her delivery. His elocution to-night was unusually bad, for the reason that he had been pleasurably excited by the immense news of Auntie Hamps's illness. Not that he had any grudge against Auntie Hamps! His pleasure would have been as keen in the grave illness of any other important family connection, save his mother and Edwin. Such notable events gave a sensational interest to domestic life which domestic life as a rule lacked.

Then, through the half-open door of the dining-room came the sound of Edwin's latch-key in the front-door.

"There's uncle!" exclaimed George, and jumped up.

Hilda stopped him.

"Put your books together," said she. "You know uncle likes to go up to the bathroom before he does anything!"

It was a fact that the precisian hated even to be greeted, on his return home in the evening, until he came downstairs from the bathroom.

Hilda herself collected the books and put them on the sideboard.

"Shall I tell Ada?" George suggested, champing the bit.

"No. Ada knows."

With deliberation Hilda tended the fire. Her mind was in a state of emotional flux. Memories and comparisons mournfully and yet agreeably animated it. She thought of the days when she used to recite amid enthusiasm in the old drawing-room of the Orgreaves; and of the days when she was a wanderer, had no home, no support, little security; and of the brief, uncertain days with George Cannon; and of the eternal days when her only assurance was the assurance of disaster. She glanced at George, and saw in him reminders of his tragic secret father now hidden away, forced into the background, like something obscene. Nearly every development of the present out of the past seemed to her, now, to be tragic. Johnnie Orgreave had of course not come back from his idyll with the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson; their seclusion was not positively known; but the whole district knew that the husband had begun proceedings and that the Orgreave business was being damaged by the incompetence of Jimmie Orgreave, whose deplorable wife had a few days earlier been seen notoriously drunk in the dress-circle of the Hanbridge Theatre Royal. Janet was still at Tavy Mansion because there was no place for her in the Five Towns. Janet had written to Hilda, sadly, and the letter breathed her sense of her own futility and superfluousness in the social scheme. In one curt phrase, that very afternoon, the taciturn Maggie, who very seldom complained, had disclosed something of what it was to live day and night with Auntie Hamps. Even Clara, the self-sufficient, protected by an almost impermeable armour of conceit, showed signs of the anxiety due to obscure chronic disease and a husband who financially never knew where he was. Finally, the last glories of Auntie Hamps were sinking to ashes. Only Hilda herself was, from nearly every point of view, in a satisfactory and promising situation. She possessed love, health, money, stability. When danger threatened, a quiet and unfailingly sagacious husband was there to meet and destroy it. Surely nothing whatever worth mentioning, save the fact that she was distantly approaching forty, troubled the existence of Hilda now; and her age certainly did not trouble her.

Ada entered with the hot dishes, and went out.

At length Hilda heard the bathroom door. She left the dining-room, shutting the door on George, who could take a hint very well--considering his years. Edwin, brushed and spruce, was coming downstairs, rubbing his clean hands with physical satisfaction. He nodded amiably, but without smiling.

"Has he gone?" said Hilda, in a low voice.

Edwin nodded. He was at the foot of the stairs.

She did not offer to kiss him, having a notion that he would prefer not to be kissed just then.

"How much did you give him?" She knew he would not care for the question, but she could not help putting it.

He smiled, and touched her shoulder. She liked him to touch her shoulder.

"That's all right," he said, with a faint condescension. "Don't you worry about that."

She did not press the point. He could be free enough with information--except when it was demanded. Some time later he would begin of his own accord to talk.

"How was Auntie Hamps?"

"Well, if anything, she's a bit easier. I don't mind betting she gets over it."

They went into the dining-room almost side by side, and she enquired again about his headache.

The meal was tranquil. After a few moments Edwin opened the subject of Auntie Hamps's illness with some sardonic remarks upon the demeanour of Albert Benbow.

"Is Auntie dying?" asked George with gusto.

Edwin replied:

"What are those schoolbooks doing there on the sideboard? I thought it was clearly understood that you were to do your lessons in your mother's boudoir."

He spoke without annoyance, but coldly. He was aware that neither Hilda nor her son could comprehend that to a bookman schoolbooks were not books, but merely an eyesore. He did not blame them for their incapacity, but he considered that an arrangement was an arrangement.

"Mother put them there," said the base George.

"Well, you can take them away," said Edwin firmly. "Run along now."

George rose from his place between Hilda and Edwin, and from his luscious plate, and removed the books. Hilda watched him meekly go. His father, too, had gone. Edwin was in the right; his position could not be assailed. He had not been unpleasant, but he had spoken as one sublimely confident that his order would not be challenged. Within her heart Hilda rebelled. If Edwin had been responsible for some act contrary to one of her decrees, she would never in his presence have used the tone that he used to enforce obedience. She would have laughed or she would have frowned, but she would never have been the polite autocrat. Nor would he have expected her to play the rôle; he would probably have resented it.

Why? Were they not equals? No, they were not equals. The fundamental unuttered assumption upon which the household life rested was that they were not equals. She might cross him, she might momentarily defy him, she might torture him, she might drive him to fury, and still be safe from any effective reprisals, because his love for her made her necessary to his being; but in spite of all that his will remained the seat of government, and she and George were only the Opposition. In the end, she had to incline. She was the complement of his existence, but he was not the complement of hers. She was just a parasite, though an essential parasite. Why? ... The reason, she judged, was economic, and solely economic. She rebelled. Was she not as individual, as original, as he? Had she not a powerful mind of her own, experience of her own, ideals of her own? Was she not of a nature profoundly and exceptionally independent?...

Her lot was unalterable. She had of course, not the slightest desire to leave him; she was devoted to him; what irked her was that, even had she had the desire, she could not have fulfilled it, for she was too old now, and too enamoured of comfort and security, to risk such an enterprise. She was a captive, and she recalled with a gentle pang, less than regret, the days when she was unhappy and free as a man, when she could say, "I will go to London," "I will leave London," "I am deceived and ruined, but I am my own mistress."

These thoughts in the idyllic tranquillity of the meal, mingled, below her smiling preoccupations of an honoured house-mistress, with the thoughts of her love for her husband and son and of their excellences, of the masculine love which enveloped and shielded her, of her security, of the tragedy of the bribed and dismissed victim and villain, George Cannon, of the sorrows of some of her friends, and of the dead. In her heart was the unquiet whispering: "I submit, and yet I shall never submit."

BOOK III

EQUILIBRIUM

CHAPTER XVII

GEORGE'S EYES

I

Hilda sat alone in the boudoir, before the fire. She had just come out of the kitchen, and she was wearing the white uniform of the kitchen, unsuited for a boudoir; but she wore it with piquancy. The November afternoon had passed into dusk, and through the window, over the roofs of Hulton Street, stars could be seen in a darkening clear sky. After a very sharp fall and rise of the barometer, accounting for heavy rainstorms, the first frosts were announced, and winter was on the doorstep. The hardy inhabitants of the Five Towns, Hilda among them, were bracing themselves to the discipline of winter, with its mud, increased smuts, sleet, and damp, piercing chills; and they were taking pleasure in the tonic prospect of discomfort. The visitation had threatened ever since September. Now it had positively come. Let it come! Build up the fire, stamp the feet, and defy it! Hilda was exhilarated, having been reawakened to the zest and the romance of life, not merely by the onset of winter, but by dramatic events in the kitchen.

A little over three years had elapsed since the closing of the episode of George Cannon, and for two of those years Hilda had had peace in the kitchen. She had been the firm mistress who knows what she wants, and, knowing also how to handle the peculiar inmates of the kitchen, gets it; she had been the mistress who "won't put up with" all sorts of things, including middle-age and ugliness in servants, and whom heaven has spoilt by too much favour. Then the cook, with the ingratitude of a cherished domestic, had fallen in love and carried her passion into a cottage miles away at Longshaw. And from that moment Hilda had ceased to be the mistress who by firmness commands fate; she had become as other mistresses. In a year she had had five cooks, giving varying degrees of intense dissatisfaction. She had even dismissed the slim and constant Ada once, but, yielding to an outburst of penitent affection, had withdrawn the notice. The last cook, far removed from youthfulness or prettiness, had left suddenly that day, after insolence, after the discovery of secret beer and other vileness in the attic-bedroom, after a scene in which Hilda had absolutely silenced her, reducing ribaldry to sobs. Cook and trunk expelled, Hilda had gone about the house like a fumigation, and into the kitchen like the embodiment of calm and gay efficiency. She would do the cooking herself. She would show the kitchen that she was dependent upon nobody. She had quickened the speed of Ada, accused her "tartly," but not without dry good-humour, of a disloyal secretiveness, and counselled her to mind what she was about if she wanted to get on in the world.

Edwin knew nothing, for all had happened since his departure to the works after midday dinner. He would be back in due course, and George would be back, and Tertius Ingpen (long ago reconciled) was coming for the evening. She would show them all three what a meal was, and incidentally Ada would learn what a meal was. There was nothing like demonstrating to servants that you could beat them easily at their own game.

She had just lived through her thirty-ninth birthday. "Forty!" she had murmured to herself with a shiver of apprehension, meaning that the next would be the fortieth. It was an unpleasant experience. She had told Edwin not to mention her birthday abroad. Clumsy George had enquired: "Mother, how old are you?" To which she had replied, "Lay-ours for meddlers!" a familiar phrase whose origin none of them understood, but George knew that it signified, "Mind your own business." No! She had not been happy on that birthday. She had gazed into the glass and decided that she looked old, that she did not look old, that she looked old, endlessly alternating. She was not stout, but her body was solid, too solid; it had no litheness, none whatever; it was absolutely set; the cleft under the chin was quite undeniable, and the olive complexion subtly ravaged. Still, not a hair of her dark head had changed colour. It was perhaps her soul that was greying. Her married life was fairly calm. It had grown monotonous in ease and tranquillity. The sharp, respectful admiration for her husband roused in her by his handling of the Cannon episode, had gradually been dulled. She had nothing against him. Yet she had everything against him, because apart from his grave abiding love for her he possessed an object and interest in life, and because she was a mere complement and he was not. She had asked herself the most dreadful of questions: "Why have I lived? Why do I go on living?" and had answered: "Because of them," meaning Edwin and her son. But it was not enough for her, who had once been violently enterprising, pugnacious, endangered, and independent. For after she had watched over them she had energy to spare, and such energy was not being employed and could not be employed. Reading--a diversion! Fancy work--a detestable device for killing time and energy! Social duties--ditto! Charity--hateful! She had slowly descended into marriage as into a lotus valley. And more than half her life was gone. She could never detect that any other married woman in the town felt as she felt. She could never explain herself to Edwin, and indeed had not tried to explain herself.

Now the affair of the alcoholic cook, aided by winter's first fillip, stimulated and brightened her. And while thinking with a glance at the clock of the precise moment when she must return to the kitchen and put a dish down to the fire, she also thought, rather hopefully and then quite hopefully, about the future of her marriage. Her brain seemed to straighten and correct itself, like the brain of one who, waking up in the morning, slowly perceives that the middle-of-the-night apprehensiveness about eventualities was all awry in its pessimism. She saw that everything could and must be improved, that the new life must begin. Edwin needed to be inspired; she must inspire him. He slouched more and more in his walk; he was more and more absorbed in his business, quieter in the evenings, more impatient in the mornings. Moreover, the household machine had been getting slack. A general tonic was required; she would administer it--and to herself also. They should all feel the invigorating ozone that very night. She would organise social distractions; on behalf of the home she would reclaim from the works those odd hours and half-hours of Edwin's which it had imperceptibly filched. She would have some new clothes, and she would send Edwin to the tailor's. She would make him buy a dog-cart and a horse. Oh! She could do it. She had the mastery of him in many things when she chose to be aroused. In a word, she would "branch out."

She was not sure that she would not prosecute a campaign for putting Edwin on the Town Council, where he certainly ought to be. It was his duty to take a share in public matters, and ultimately to dominate the town. Suggestions had already been made by wirepullers, and unreflectively repulsed by the too casual Edwin. She saw him mayor, and herself mayoress. Once, the prospect of any such formal honour, with all that it entailed of ceremoniousness and insincere civilities, would have annoyed if not frightened her. But now she thought, proudly and timidly and desirously, that she would make as good a mayoress as most mayoresses, and that she could set one or two of them an example in tact and dignity. Why not? Of late neither mayors nor mayoresses in the Five Towns had been what they used to be. The grand tradition was apparently in abeyance, the people who ought to carry it on seeming somehow to despise it. She could remember mayors, especially Chief Bailiffs at Turnhill, who imposed themselves upon the imagination of the town. But nowadays the name of a mayor was never a household word. She had even heard Ingpen ask Edwin: "See, who is the new mayor?" and Edwin start his halting answer: "Let me see--"

And she had still another and perhaps greater ambition--to possess a country house. In her fancy her country house was very like Alicia Hesketh's house, Tavy Mansion, which she had never ceased to envy. She felt that in a new home, spacious, with space around it, she could really commence the new life. She saw the place perfectly appointed and functioning perfectly--no bother about smuts on white curtains; no half-trained servants; none of the base, confined, promiscuity of filthy Trafalgar Road; and the Benbows and Auntie Hamps at least eight or ten miles off! She saw herself driving Edwin to the station in the morning, or perhaps right into Bursley if she wanted to shop.... No, she would of course shop at Oldcastle.... She would leave old Darius Clayhanger's miracle-house without one regret. And in the new life she would be always active, busy, dignified, elegant, influential, and kind. And to Edwin she would be absolutely indispensable.

In these imaginings their solid but tarnished love glittered and gleamed again. She saw naught but the charming side of Edwin and the romantic side of their union. She was persuaded that there really was nobody like Edwin, and that no marriage had ever had quite the mysterious, secretly exciting quality of hers. She yearned for him to come home at once, to appear magically in the dusk of the doorway. The mood was marvellous.

II

The door opened.

"Can I speak to you, m'm?"

It was the voice of Ada, somewhat perturbed. She advanced a little and stood darkly in front of the open doorway.

"What is it, Ada?" Hilda asked curtly, without turning to look at her.

"It's--" Ada began and stopped.

Hilda glanced round quickly, recognising now in the voice a peculiar note with which experience had familiarised her. It was a note between pertness and the beginning of a sob, and it always indicated that Ada was feeling more acutely than usual the vast injustice of the worldly scheme. It might develop into tears; on the other hand it might develop into mere insolence. Hilda discerned that Ada was wearing neither cap nor apron. She thought: "If this stupid girl wants trouble, she has come to me at exactly and precisely the right moment to get it. I'm not in the humour, after all I've gone through to-day, to stand any nonsense either from her or from anybody else."

"What is it, Ada?" she repeated, with restraint, and yet warningly. "And where's your apron and your cap?"

"In the kitchen, m'm."

"Well, go and put them on, and then come and say what you have to say," said Hilda, thinking: "I don't give any importance to her cap and apron, but she does."

"I was thinking I'd better give ye notice, m'm," said Ada, and she said it pertly, ignoring the command.

The two women were alone together in the house. Each felt it; each felt the large dark emptiness of the house behind them, and the solid front and back doors cutting them off from succour; each had to depend entirely upon herself.

Hilda asked quietly:

"What's the matter now?"

She knew that Ada's grievance would prove to be silly. The girl had practically no commonsense. Not one servant girl in a hundred had any appreciable commonsense. And when girls happened to be "upset"--as they were all liable to be, and as Ada by the violent departure of the cook no doubt was--even such minute traces of gumption as they possessed were apt to disappear.

"There's no pleasing you, m'm!" said Ada. "The way you talked to me in the kitchen, saying I was always a-hiding things from ye. I've felt it very much!"

She threw her head back, and the gesture signified: "I'm younger than you, and young men are always running after me. And I can get a new situation any time. And I've not gone back into my kitchen to put my cap and apron on."

"Ada," said Hilda. "Shall I tell you what's wrong with you? You're a little fool. You know you're talking rightdown nonsense. You know that as well as I do. And you know you'll never get a better place than you have here. But you've taken an idea into your head--and there you are! Now do be sensible. You say you think you'd better give notice. Think it over before you do anything ridiculous. Sleep on it. We'll see how you feel in the morning."