Another procession—that of the Old Church Sunday school—came up, with standards floating and drums beating, out of the steepness of Woodisun Bank, and turned into Wedgwood Street, which thenceforward was loosely by procession and sightseers. The importance of the festival was now quite manifest, for at the end of the street could be seen Saint Luke’s Square, massed with human beings in movement. Osmond Orgreave and his daughter were lost to view in the brave crowd; but after a little, Edwin distinctly saw Janet’s sunshade leave Wedgwood Street at the corner of the Wedgwood Institution and bob slowly into the Cock Yard, which was a narrow thoroughfare leading to the market-place and the Town Hall, and so to the top of Saint Luke’s Square. He said nothing, and kept straight on along Wedgwood Street past the Covered Market.  
“I hope you didn’t catch cold in the rain the other night,” he remarked—grimly, as he thought.
 
“I should have thought it would have been you who were more likely to catch cold,” Hilda replied, in her manner. She looked in front of her. The words seem to him to carry a double meaning. Suddenly she moved her head, glanced full at him for an instant, and glanced behind her. “Where are they?” she inquired.
 
“The others? Aren’t they in front? They must be some where about.”
 
Unless she also had marked their into the Cock Yard, why had she glanced behind her in asking where they were? She knew as well as he that they had started in front. He could only deduce that she had been as willing as himself to lose Mr Orgreave and Janet. Just then an acquaintance raised his hat to Edwin in acknowledgement of the lady’s presence, and he responded with pride. Whatever his private attitude to Hilda, he was undeniably proud to be seen in the streets with a disdainful, girl unknown to the town. It was an experience new to him, and it flattered him. He desired to look long at her face, to examine her expression, to make up his mind about her; but he could not, because they were walking side by side. The sole of her that he could judge was her voice. It was a voice, rather deep, with a sort of . The of it fell on the ear softly and yet ruthlessly, and when she had finished speaking you became aware of silence, as after a solemn of destiny. What she happened to have been saying seemed to be immaterial to the effect, which was physical, vibratory.
 
Two.
At the border of Saint Luke’s Square, of eight streets, true centre of the town’s traffic, and the sole rectangular open space enclosed completely by shops, they found a line of which yielded only to processions and to the bearers of special rosettes. ‘The Square,’ as it was called by those who inhabited it, had been chosen for the historic scene of the day because of its pre-eminent claim and suitability; the least of its advantages—its slope, from the top of which it could be easily dominated by a speaker on a platform—would alone have secured for it the honours of the Centenary.
 
As the police closed on the procession from the Old Church, definitely dividing the spectators from the spectacle, it grew clear that the spectators were in the main a shabby lot; persons without any social : unkempt idlers, good-for-nothings, , clay-whitened pot-girls who had to work even on that day, and who had run out for a few moments in their to stare, and a few score ragamuffins, whose parents were too poor or too careless to make them superficially presentable enough to figure in a procession. Nearly the whole respectability of the town was either marshalling processions or gazing down at them in comfort from the multitudinous open windows of the Square. The ‘leads’ over the projecting windows of Baines’s, the chief draper’s, were crowded with members of the ruling caste.
 
And even within the Square, it could be seen, between the towering backs of constables, that the spectacle itself was chiefly made up of bedecked. The thousands of children, penned like sheep, and driven to a............