Time passed, like a ship across a distant horizon, which moves but which does not seem to move. One Monday evening Edwin said that he was going round to Lane End House. He had been saying so for weeks, and hesitating. He enjoyed going to Lane End House; there was no reason why he should not go frequently and regularly, and there were several reasons why he should. Yet his visitings were capricious because his nature was . That night he went, sticking a hat carelessly on his head, and his hands deep into his pockets. Down the slope of Trafalgar Road, in the biting November mist, between the two rows of gas-lamps that feebly into the pale gloom, came a long straggling band of men who also, to for the absence of overcoats, stuck hands deep into pockets, and strode quickly. With they divided for the passage of the steam-car, and closed together again on its rear. The potters were on strike, and a Bursley was returning in silence from a mass meeting at Hanbridge. When the sound of the steam-car , as the car dipped over the hill-top on its descent towards Hanbridge, nothing could be heard but the tramp-tramp of the procession on the road.  
Edwin hurried down the side street, and in a moment rang at the front door of the Orgreaves’. He nodded familiarly to the servant who opened, stepped on to the mat, and began contorting his legs in order to wipe the edge of his boot-soles.
 
“Quite a stranger, sir!” said Martha, , and respectfully aware of her attractiveness for this friend of the house.
 
“Yes,” he laughed. “Anybody in?”
 
“Well, sir, I’m afraid Miss Janet and Miss Alicia are out.”
 
“And Mr Tom?”
 
“Mr Tom’s out, sir. He pretty nearly always is now, sir.” The fact was that Tom was engaged to be married, and the servant indicated, by a scarcely perceptible motion of the chin, that fiancés were and ever would be all the same. “And Mr John and Mr James are out too, sir.” They also were usually out. They were both assisting their father in business, and sought relief from his gigantic conception of a day’s work by evening diversions at Hanbridge. These two former noisy Liberals had joined the Hanbridge Conservative Club because it was a club, and had a billiard-table that could only be equalled at the Five Towns Hotel at Knype.
 
“And Mr Orgreave?”
 
“He’s working upstairs, sir. Mrs Orgreave’s got her , and so he’s working upstairs.”
 
“Well, tell them I’ve called.” Edwin turned to depart.
 
“I’m sure Mr Orgreave would like to know you’re here, sir,” said the maid firmly. “If you’ll just step into the breakfast-room.” That maid did as she chose with visitors for whom she had a fancy.
 
Two.
She conducted him to the so-called breakfast-room and shut the door on him. It was a small behind the drawing-room, and shabbier than the drawing-room. In earlier days the children had used it for their lessons and hobbies. And now it was used as a when was demanded by a decimated family. Edwin stooped down and mended the fire. Then he went to the wall and examined a framed water-colour of the old Sytch , which was signed with his initials. He had done it, aided by a photograph, and by Johnnie Orgreave in details of perspective, and by of preprandial frequentings of the Sytch, as a gift for Mrs Orgreave. It always seemed to him to be rather good.
 
Then he to examine bookshelves. Like the hall, the drawing-room, and the dining-room, this apartment too was plenteously full of everything, and littered over with the of various . Only from habit did Edwin glance at the books. He knew their backs by heart. And books in quantity no longer him. Despite his grave defects as a keeper of resolves, despite his trick of picking up a newspaper or periodical and reading it all through, out of sheer and mental , before starting serious perusals, despite the human disinclination which he had to himself, and keeping up the tension, in a manner necessary for the reading of long and difficult works, and despite backslidings into original sluggishness—still he had certain literary adventures. He could not enjoy “Don Juan.” Expecting from it a and daring , he had found in it nothing whatever that even roughly fitted into his idea of what poetry was. But he had had a passion for “Childe Harold,” many of which thrilled him again and again, bringing back to his mind what Hilda Lessways had said about poetry. And further, he had a passion for Voltaire. In Voltaire, also, he had been deceived, as in Byron. He had expected something violent, , closely argumentative; and he found gaiety, grace, and really the funniest jokes. He could read “Candide” almost without a dictionary, and he had intense pride in doing so, and for some time afterwards “Candide” and “La Princesse de Babylone,” and a few similar trifles, were the greatest stories in the world for him. Only a faint reserve in Tom Orgreave’s responsive enthusiasm made him cautiously reflect.
 
He could never be intimate with Tom, because Tom somehow never came out from behind his spectacles. But he had learnt much from him, and in especial a familiarity with the less difficult of Bach’s and fugues, which Tom loved to play. Edwin knew not even the notes of music, and he was not sure that Bach gave him pleasure. Bach him strangely. He would ask for Bach out of a continually renewed curiosity, so that he could examine once more and yet again the sensations which the music produced; and the habit grew. As regards the fugues, there could be no doubt that, the fugue begun, a desire was set up in him for the resolution of the confusing problem created in the first few bars, and that he waited, with a pleasant and yet a trying anxiety, for the indications of that resolution, and that the final and tranquillising chords gave him deep joy. When he innocently said that he was ‘glad when the end came of a fugue,’ all the Orgreaves laughed , but after laughing, Tom said that he knew what Edwin meant and quite agreed.
 
Three.
It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened. He looked up mildly, expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a voice that aroused disconcerting in himself. It was Hilda Lessways. She had in her hand a copy of the “Signal.” Over fifteen months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last thought of her. Her features seemed strange. His memory of them had not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the reality. The souvenir of their brief swept back upon him. Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she was! More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said lightly to himself: “Well, the chances are I shall never see her again! Funny girl!” But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that lightness...
 
“I’m ordered to tell you that Mr Orgreave will be down in a few minutes,” she said.
 
“Hello!” he exclaimed. “I’d no idea you were in Bursley!”
 
“Came to-day!” she replied.
 
“How odd,” he thought, “that I should call like this on the very day she comes!” But he pushed away that thought with the rational thought that such a coincidence could not be regarded as in any way significant.
 
They shook hands in the middle of the room, and she pressed his hand, while looking with a smile. And his mind was suddenly filled with the idea that during all those months she had been existing somewhere, under the eye of some one, intimate with some one, and constantly conducting herself with a familiar freedom that doubtless she would not use to him. And so she was invested, for him, with mysteriousness. His interest in her was renewed in a moment, and in a form much more acute than its first form. Moreover, she presented herself to his judgement in a different aspect. He could scarcely comprehend how he had ever deemed her expression to be forbidding. In fact, he could persuade himself now that she was beautiful, and even nobly beautiful. From one extreme he flew to the other. She sat down on an old sofa; he remained . And in the midst of a little conversation about Mrs Orgreave’s indisposition, and the absence of the members of the family (she said she had refused an invitation to go with Janet and Alicia to Hillport), she broke the thread, and remarked—
 
“You would have known I was coming if you’d been calling here recently.” She pushed her feet near the fender, and gazed into the fire.
 
“Ah! But you see I haven’t been calling recently.”
 
She raised her eyes to his. “I suppose you’ve never thought about me once since I left!” she fired at him. An audacious and discomposing girl!
 
“Oh yes, I have,” he said weakly. What could you reply to such speeches? Nevertheless he was flattered.
 
“Really? But you’ve never inquired about me.”
 
“Yes, I have.”
 
“Only once.”
 
“How do you know?”
 
“I asked Janet.”
 
“Damn her!” he said to himself, but pleased with her. And aloud, in a tone suddenly firm, “That’s nothing to go by.”
 
“What isn’t?”
 
“The number of times I’ve inquired.” He was blushing.
 
Four.
In the smallness of the room, sitting as it were at his feet on the sofa, surrounded and encaged by a hundred domestic objects and by the glow of the fire and the radiance of the gas, she certainly did seem to Edwin to be an organism exceedingly mysterious. He could follow with his eye every fold of her black dress, he could trace the waving of her hair, and watch the play of light in her eyes. He might have hurt her, he might have killed her, she was beneath his hand—and yet she was most bafflingly , and the essence of her could not be touched nor got at. Why did she challenge him by her singular attitude? Why was she always saying such queer things to him? No other girl (he thought, in the of his inexperience) wo............