f my husband, but he's no more my husband than
you are, ma. And never will be. But oh, Lor! He's going to be the worry
of my life! Ma, did Pa chase you all over the place when you was
married? I mean, chase you all about trying to kiss you and fuss you?"

"No, dear," said Mrs. Minto. "He was drunk. He didn't know what he was
doing."

"Hn," Sally grunted. Then she stood up again. "I'm going now," she
announced. "I'm going back to Gaga. He's ill. I expect he's being sick."

And before her mother could make startled enquiries, Sally had kissed
her and gone to the door. She ran in high spirits down the stairs and
out of the front door not laughing, but in a curious way moved by this
conversation and the strange turn which it had taken. She slammed the
door after her, and met with a sudden squall of wind. And as she went
away from the house she was conscious of a feeling of relief. She had
escaped from it, and her heart was beating rather fast. All the time,
under her speech and her thoughts, she had unconsciously been listening
for Toby's step upon the stair. Even now, she knew that her shoulders
were contracted with apprehensiveness.

She hurried along in the direction of Holloway Road, still flinching,
with her nerves uncommonly strained. It was such an odd feeling that she
had in thus revisiting her ugly old home. She had noticed it all
afresh--the tired linoleum, and the oil stove and the tiny fire made
from coal blocks, and the stupid old bed and the browned wallpaper--and
she felt that it all belonged to a time when she had been a different
girl altogether. She had never before been away from home, without her
mother, for so long. She had never once been away from this room for a
night, until her marriage. And to come thus into the dark street, in a
wind, with the door slamming behind her, took Sally's memories
uncontrollably back to the days which followed their first arrival, the
days when she had met Toby and talked to him and walked with him about
the streets. She recalled her visit to Mrs. Perce, and the sight of that
grim figure relentlessly waiting for her outside the Stores; and the
struggle with Toby, and her resultant happiness; and the night when he
had first come to the room while her mother lay in the hospital. Heigho!
She had been young in those days; now she felt an old woman, with all
the sense of ageless age which the young feel after a transition from
one kind of life to another. She was in a sens