s. It was the
thought of all his youth that exquisitely saddened her--or all the years
which were and would be for ever hidden from her. She knew that she
alone of all human beings was gifted with the power to understand and
fully sympathize with him. And so she grieved over the long wilderness
of time during which he had been uncomprehended. She wanted, by some
immense effort of tenderness, to recompense him for all that he had
suffered. And she had a divine curiosity concerning the whole of his
past life. She had never had this curiosity in relation to George
Cannon--she had only wondered about his affairs with other women. Nor
had George Cannon ever evoked the tenderness which sprang up in her from
some secret and inexhaustible source at the mere sight of Edwin
Clayhanger's wistful smile. Still, in that moment, standing close to
Edwin in the high solitude of the shadowed attic, the souvenir of George
Cannon gripped her painfully. She thought: "He loves me, and he is
ruined, and he will never see me again! And I am here, bursting with
hope renewed, and dizzy with joy!" And she pictured Janet, too, wearying
herself at a committee meeting. And she thought, "And here am I...!" Her
bliss was tragic.

"I think I ought to be going," she said softly.

They re-threaded the corridors, and in each lower room, as they passed,
Edwin Clayhanger extinguished the gas which he had lit there on the way
up, and Hilda waited for him. And then they were back in the crude glare
of the shop. The fat, untidy old man was not visible. Edwin helped her
with the mackintosh, and she liked him for the awkwardness of his
efforts in doing so.

At the door, she urged him not to come out, and referred to his cold.

"This isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning," she warned him.
Nobody else, she knew, would watch over him.

But he insisted on coming out.

They arranged a rendezvous for three o'clock on the morrow, and then
they shook hands.

"Now, do go in," she entreated, as she hurried away. The rain had
ceased. She fled triumphantly up Trafalgar Road, with her secret,
guarding it. "He's in love with me!" If a scientific truth is a
statement of which the contrary is inconceivable, then it was a
scientific truth for her that she and Edwin must come together. She
simply would not and could not conceive the future without him.... And
this so soon, so precipitately soon, after her misfortune! But it was
her very misfortune which pushed her