ating deed. And his heart asserted itself again,
thunderously beating.

VOLUME FOUR, CHAPTER ELEVEN.

BEGINNING OF THE NIGHT.

The next day was full of strange suspense; it was coloured throughout
with that quality of strangeness which puts a new light on all quotidian
occupations and exposes their fundamental unimportance. Edwin arose to
the fact that a thick grey fog was wrapping the town. When he returned
home to breakfast at nine the fog was certainly more opaque than it had
been an hour earlier. The steam-cars passed like phantoms, with a
continuous clanging of bells. He breakfasted under gas--and alone.
Maggie was invisible, or only to be seen momentarily, flying across the
domestic horizon. She gave out that she was very busy in the attics,
cleaning those shockingly neglected rooms. "Please, sir," said the
servant, "Miss Clayhanger says she's been across to Mr Orgreave's, and
Master George is about the same." Maggie would not come and tell him
herself. On the previous evening he had not seen her after the
reception of the news about the Vicar. She had gone upstairs when he
came back from the post office. Beyond doubt, she was too disturbed,
emotionally, to be able to face him with her customary tranquillity.
She was getting over the shock with brush and duster up in the attics.
He was glad that she had not attempted to be as usual. The ordeal of
attempting to be as usual would have tried him perhaps as severely as
her.

He went forth again into the fog in a high state of agitation,
constricted with sympathetic distress on Maggie's account, apprehensive
for the boy, and painfully expectant of the end of the day. The whole
day slipped away so, hour after monotonous hour, while people talked
about influenza and about distinguished patients, and doctors hurried
from house to house, and the fog itself seemed to be the visible mantle
of the disease. And the end of the day brought nothing to Edwin save an
acuter expectancy. George varied; on the whole he was worse; not much
worse, but worse. Dr Stirling saw him twice. No message arrived from
Hilda, nor did she come in person. Maggie watched George for five hours
in the late afternoon and evening, while Janet rested.

At eight o'clock, when there was no further hope of a telegram from
Hilda, everybody pretended to concur in the view that Hilda, knowing her
boy better than anybody else, and having already seen him through an
attack of influenza