its merchandise mysteriously enveloped in pale sheets, and its
chairs wrong side up, and its deep-shadowed corners. Destiny might have
been lurking in one of those baffling corners. From above, through the
ceiling, came the vibration of some machine at work, and the machine
might have been the loom of time. Hilda was exquisitely apprehensive.
She thought: "I am here. The moment of my departure will come. When it
comes, shall I have told him my misfortune? What will have happened?"
She waited, nervous, restless, shaking like a victim who can do naught
but wait.

"Here's my handkerchief!" she cried, in a tone of unnatural childish
glee, that was one of the effects of her secret panic.

The handkerchief glimmered on the counter, more white than anything else
in that grey dusk. She guessed that the shop-assistant must have found
it, and placed it conspicuously on the counter.

They were alone: they were their own prisoners, secure from the street
and from all interruption. Hilda, once more and in a higher degree,
realized the miraculous human power to make experience out of nothing.
They had nothing but themselves, and they could, if they chose, create
all their future by a single gesture.

Suddenly, there came a tremendous shouting from Duck Square, in front of
the shop. The strikers had poured down from Moorthorne Road into Duck
Bank and Duck Square.

Edwin, who was in the middle of the shop, went to the glazed inner
doors, and, passing through into the porch, lifted the letter-flap in a
shutter, and, stooping, looked forth. He called to her, without moving
his face from the aperture, that a fight was in progress. Hilda gazed at
his back, through the glass, and then, coming round the end of the
counter, approached quietly, and stood immediately behind him, between
the glazed doors and the shutters. The two were in a space so small that
they could scarcely have moved without touching.

"Let me look," she stammered, unable any longer to tolerate the
inaction.

Edwin Clayhanger stepped aside, and held up the letter-flap for her with
his finger. She bent her head to the oblong glimpse of the street, and
saw the strikers engaged in the final internecine folly of strikers:
they had turned their exasperated wrath upon each other. Within a
public-house at the top of the little Square, other strikers were
drinking. One policeman regarded them.

"What a shame!" she cried angrily, dropping the flap, and then withdrew
quic