ble that Mrs. Orgreave
doesn't guess what has happened to me? Is it possible she can't see that
I'm different from what I used to be? If she knew... if they knew...
here!"

She left the room like a criminal. When she was going down the stairs,
she discovered that she held the _Signal_ in her hand. She had no
recollection of picking it up, and there was no object in taking it to
the breakfast-room! She thought: "What a state I must be in!"

CHAPTER II
A RENDEZVOUS

I

"I suppose you've never thought about me once since I've left!"

She was sitting on the sofa in the small, shelved breakfast-room, and
she shot these words at Edwin Clayhanger, who was standing near her. The
singular words were certainly uttered out of bravado: they were a
challenge to adventure. She thought: "It is madness for me to say such a
thing." But such a thing had, nevertheless, come quite glibly out of her
mouth, and she knew not why. If Edwin Clayhanger was startled, so was
she startled.

"Oh yes, I have!" he stammered--of course, she had put him out of
countenance.

She smiled, and said persuasively: "But you've never inquired after me."

"Yes, I have," he answered, with a hint of defiance, after a pause.

"Only once." She continued to smile.

"How do you know?" he demanded.

Then she told him very calmly, extinguishing the smile, that her source
of information was Janet.

"That's nothing to go by!" he exclaimed, with sudden roughness. "That's
nothing to go by--the number of _times_ I've inquired!"

II

She was silenced. She thought: "If I am thus intimate with him, it must
be because of the talk we had in the garden that night." And it seemed
to her that the scene in the garden had somehow bound them together for
ever in intimacy, that, even if they pretended to be only acquaintances,
they would constantly be breaking through the thin shell of formality
into some unguessed deep of intimacy. She regarded--surreptitiously--his
face, with a keen sense of pleasure. It was romantic, melancholy,
wistful, enigmatic--and, above all, honest. She knew that he had desired
to be an architect, and that his father had thwarted his desire, and
this fact endowed him for her with the charm of a victim. The idea that
all his life had been embittered and shadowed by the caprice of an old
man was beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague
bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had
ann