, brooding
bitterly; "but they might refrain from glorying in them, and making me
feel more out of it than ever. It is--it is almost unbearable."

Paul thought for a few minutes. He was much perturbed.

"I will tell you what it's all about," he said, pale and nervous. "It's
my birthday, and they've bought me a fine lot of paints, all the
girls. They're jealous of you"--he felt her stiffen coldly at the word
'jealous'--"merely because I sometimes bring you a book," he added
slowly. "But, you see, it's only a trifle. Don't bother about it, will
you--because"--he laughed quickly--"well, what would they say if they
saw us here now, in spite of their victory?"

She was angry with him for his clumsy reference to their present
intimacy. It was almost insolent of him. Yet he was so quiet, she
forgave him, although it cost her an effort.

Their two hands lay on the rough stone parapet of the Castle wall. He
had inherited from his mother a fineness of mould, so that his hands
were small and vigorous. Hers were large, to match her large limbs, but
white and powerful looking. As Paul looked at them he knew her. "She is
wanting somebody to take her hands--for all she is so contemptuous of
us," he said to himself. And she saw nothing but his two hands, so warm
and alive, which seemed to live for her. He was brooding now, staring
out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting
diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a
vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses
and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen
differently. And now that the forms seemed to have melted away, there
remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass
of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the
large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one
atmosphere--dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.

"Is that two o'clock striking?" Mrs. Dawes said in surprise.

Paul started, and everything sprang into form, regained its
individuality, its forgetfulness, and its cheerfulness.

They hurried back to work.

When he was in the rush of preparing for the night's post, examining the
work up from Fanny's room, which smelt of ironing, the evening postman
came in.

"'Mr. Paul Morel,'" he said, smiling, handing Paul a package. "A lady's
handwriting! Don't let the girls see it."

The postman, himself a favouri