be for the look in his eyes."

"I'm all right, then," she said aloud, and smiled.

With hands nervously working within her muff, she suddenly missed the
handkerchief which she had placed there.

"I believe I must have dropped my handkerchief in your shop!" she was
about to say. The phrase was actually on her tongue; but by a strange
instinctive, defensive discretion she shut her mouth on it and kept
silence. She thought: "Perhaps I had better not go into his shop again
to-day."

III

They descended the hill from the station. Hilda was very ill at ease.
She kept saying to herself: "This adventure is over now. I cannot
prolong it. There is nothing to do but to go back to the Orgreaves, and
pack my things and depart to Brighton, and face whatever annoyance is
awaiting me at Brighton." The prospect desolated her. She could not bear
to leave Edwin Clayhanger without some definition of their relations,
and yet she knew that it was hopeless and absurd to expect to arrive
immediately at any such definition: she knew that the impetuosity of her
temperament could not be justified. Also, she feared horribly the risk
of being caught again in the net of Brighton. As they got lower and
lower down the hill, her wretchedness and disquiet became acute, to the
point of a wild despair. Merely to temporize, she said, as they drew
opposite the wooden theatre:

"Couldn't we just go and look in? I've got plenty of time."

A strange request--to penetrate into a meeting of artisans on strike!
She felt its strangeness: she felt that Edwin Clayhanger objected, but
she was driven to an extremity. She had to do something, and she did
what she could.

They crossed the road, and entered the huge shanty, and stood
apologetically near the door. The contrast between the open street and
the enclosed stuffiness of the dim and crowded interior was
overwhelming. Hundreds of ragged and shabby men sat in serried rows,
leaning forward with elbows out and heads protruding as they listened to
a speech from the gimcrack stage. They seemed to be waiting to spring,
like famished and ferocious tigers. Interrupting, they growled, snarled,
yapped, and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations burst forth in
volleys and in running fires. The arousing of the fundamental instincts
of these human beings had, indeed, enormously emphasized the animal in
them. They had swung back a hundred centuries towards original crude
life. The sophistication which embroid