lties and
savour the new sensations. But he could not. Within him all was
incoherent, wild, and distracting. Five minutes earlier, and he could
not have conceived the bliss of walking with her to the station. Now he
was walking with her to the station; and assuredly it was bliss, and yet
he did not fully taste it. Though he would not have loosed her for a
million pounds, her presence gave an even crueller edge to his anxiety
and apprehension. London! Brighton! Would she be that night in
Brighton? He felt helpless, and desperate. And beneath all this was
the throbbing of a strange, bitter joy. She asked about his cold and
about his father's indisposition. She said nothing of her failure to
appear on the previous day, and he knew not how to introduce it neatly:
he was not in control of his intelligence.

They passed Snaggs' Theatre, and from its green, wooden walls came the
obscure sound of humanity in emotion. Before the mean and shabby
portals stood a small crowd of ragged urchins. Posters printed by
Darius Clayhanger made white squares on the front.

"It's a meeting of the men," said Edwin.

"They're losing, aren't they?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I expect they are."

She asked what the building was, and he explained.

"They used to call it the Blood Tub," he said.

She shivered. "The Blood Tub?"

"Yes. Melodrama and murder and gore--you know."

"How horrible!" she exclaimed. "Why are people like that in the Five
Towns?"

"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," he muttered, smiling at the
pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.

"I suppose it is!" she agreed heartily, after a pause.

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

"Oh yes! I used to."

At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown. But
Hilda's urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket
clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length
they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a
shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train
from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty. Hilda seemed to sigh
relief, and her demeanour changed. But Edwin's uneasiness was only
intensified. Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another
hemisphere for him. It was mysterious, like her. It was part of her
mystery. What could he do? His curse was that he had no initiative.
Without her