fness. "To-morrow? I
should like you to come."

He had put an enchantment upon her by this marvellous return. And to
conceal from him what he had done, she frowned and kept silent.

"What time?" she asked suddenly.

"Any time." His eagerness was thrilling.

"Oh no! You must fix the time."

"Say between half-past six and a quarter to seven. That do?"

She nodded. Their hands met. He said adieu. He pulled open the heavy
door. She saw his back for an instant against the pale gloom of the
garden, in which vapour was curling. And then she had shut the door, and
was standing alone in the confined hall. A miracle had occurred, and it
intimidated her. And, amid her wondrous fears, she was steeped in the
unique sense of adventure. "This morning I was in Brighton," she
thought. "Half an hour ago I had no notion of seeing him. And now!...
And to-morrow?" The tragic sequel to one adventure had not impaired her
instinct for experience. On the contrary, it had strengthened it. The
very failure of the one excited her towards another. The zest of living
was reborn in her. The morrow beckoned her, golden and miraculous. The
faculty of men and women to create their own lives seemed divine, and
the conception of it enfevered her.

CHAPTER III
AT THE WORKS

I

That night, late, Hilda and Janet shut themselves up in the bedroom
together. The door clicked softly under Janet's gentle push, and they
were as safe from invasion as if the door had been of iron, and locked
and double-locked and barred with bars of iron. Alicia alone might have
disturbed them, but Alicia was asleep. Hilda had a sense of entire
security in this room such as she had never had since she drove away
from Lessways Street, Turnhill, early one morning, with Florrie Bagster
in a cab. It was not that there had been the least real fear of any room
of hers being attacked: it was that this room seemed to have been
rendered mystically inviolate by long years of Janet's occupation.
"Janet's bedroom!"--the phrase had a sanction which could not possibly
have attached itself to, for instance, "Hilda's bedroom!" Nor even to
"mother's bedroom"--mother's bedroom being indeed at the mercy of any
profane and marauding member of the family, a sort of market-place for
the transaction of affairs.

And, further, Janet's bedroom was distinguished and made delicious for
Hilda by its fire. It happened to be one of the very few bedrooms in the
Five Towns at that date with a