nger, she could not explain it. Why did she
like him and like being with him? He was not brilliant, nor masterful,
nor handsome, nor well dressed, nor in any manner imposing. On the
contrary, he was awkward and apologetic, and not a bit spectacular. Only
the wistful gaze of his eyes, and his honest smile, and the appeal of
his gestures...! A puzzling affair, an affair perfectly incomprehensible
and enchanting.

They walked side by side in silence.

When they had turned into Moorthorne Road, half-way up whose slope lies
the station, she asked a question about a large wooden building from
whose interior came wild sounds of shouting and cheering, and learnt
that the potters on strike were holding a meeting in the town theatre.
At the open outer doors was a crowd of starving, shivering, dirty,
ragged children, who romped and cursed, or stood unnaturally meditative
in the rich mud, like fakirs fulfilling a vow. Hilda's throat was
constricted by the sight. Pain and joy ran together in her, burning
exquisitely; and she had a glimpse, obscure, of the mystical beauty of
the children's suffering.

"I'd no idea there was a theatre in Bursley," she remarked idly, driven
into a banality by the press of her sensations.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he replied. "Melodrama and murder
and gore--you know."

She exclaimed in horror. "Why are people like that in the Five Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," said he.

She started, sensitively. It seemed to her that she had never understood
the secret inner spirit of the Five Towns, and that by a single phrase
he had made her understand it.... 'Our form of poetry'! Who but he could
have said a thing at once so illuminating and so simple?

Apparently perplexed by the obvious effect on her of his remark, he
said:

"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?"

She answered quietly that she did. But her heart was saying: "I do
_now_. You have initiated me. I never felt the Five Towns before. You
have made me feel them."

II

At the station the head porter received their inquiry for a Bradshaw
with a dull stare and a shake of the head. No such thing had ever been
asked for at Bursley Station before, and the man's imagination could not
go beyond the soiled time-tables loosely pinned and pasted up on the
walls of the booking-office. Hilda suggested that the ticket-clerk
should be interrogated, but the aperture of communication with him was
shut. She saw Edwin