ow deserted, whose heavy key was in the traveller's satchel....
But would they?

At the station there was a quarter of an hour to wait. Hilda dismissed
Florrie, with final injunctions, and followed her trunk to the bleak
platform. The old porter was very kind. She went to the little yellow
bookstall. There, under her hand, was a low pile of _The Five Towns
Chronicle._ Miracle! Miraculous George Cannon! She flushed with pride,
with a sense of ownership, as she took a penny from her purse to pay for
a copy.

"It's th' new peeper," drawled the bookstall lad, with a most foolish
condescension towards the new paper.

"Lout!" she addressed him in her heart. "If you knew whom you were
talking to--!"

With what pride, masked by careful indifference, she would hand the copy
of the _Chronicle_ to her mother! Her mother would exclaim "Bless us!"
and spend a day or two in conning the thing, making singular discoveries
in it at short intervals.

IV

It was not until she had reached Euston, and driven through a tumultuous
and shabby thoroughfare to King's Cross, and taken another ticket, and
installed herself in another train, that Hilda began to feel suddenly,
like an abyss opening beneath her strength, the lack of food. Meticulous
in her clerical duties, and in many minor mechanical details of her
personal daily existence, she was capable of singular negligences
concerning matters which the heroic part of her despised and which did
not immediately bear on a great purpose in hand. Thus, in her
carelessness, she found herself with less than two shillings in her
pocket after paying for the ticket to Hornsey. She thought, grimly
resigned: "Never heed! I shall manage. In half an hour I shall be there,
and my anxiety will be at an end."

The train, almost empty, waited forlornly in a forlorn and empty part of
the huge, resounding ochreish station. Then, without warning or signal,
it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often
it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses--
houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And
always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the
walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this
tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches,
through the chimneypots, and losing itself in a dim horizon of gloom. At
intervals a large, lifeless station brought the train to a halt for