e
convinced that she was unique. The thrill divine quickened in him
again, and he rose eagerly to her level of passion. The romance, the
secrecy, the mystery, the fever! He walked down Trafalgar Road with the
letter in his pocket, and once he pulled it out to read it in the
street. His discretion objected to this act, but Edwin was not his own
master. Stifford, hurrying in exactly at eight, was somewhat perturbed
to find his employer's son already installed in the cubicle, writing by
the light of gas, as the shutters were not removed. Edwin had finished
and stamped his first love-letter just as his father entered the
cubicle. Owing to dyspeptic accidents Darius had not set foot in the
cubicle since it had been sanctified by Hilda. Edwin, leaving it,
glanced at the old man's back and thought disdainfully: "Ah! You little
know, you rhinoceros, that less than two days ago, she and I, on that
very spot--"

As soon as his father had gone to pay the morning visit to the printing
shops, he ran out to post the letter himself. He could not be contented
until it was in the post. Now, when he saw men of about his own class
and age in the street, he would speculate upon their experiences in the
romance of women. And it did genuinely seem to him impossible that
anybody else in a town like Bursley could have passed through an episode
so exquisitely strange and beautiful as that through which he was
passing. Yet his reason told him that he must be wrong there. His
reason, however, left him tranquil in the assurance that no girl in
Bursley had ever written to her affianced: "I love you. Every bit of me
is absolutely yours."

Hilda's second letter did not arrive till the following Tuesday, by
which time he had become distracted by fears and doubts. Yes, doubts!
No rational being could have been more loyal than Edwin, but these
little doubts would keep shooting up and withering away. He could not
control them. The second letter was nearly as short as the first. It
told him nothing save her love and that she was very worried by her
friend's situation, and that his letters were a joy. She had had a
letter from him each day. In his reply to her second he gently implied,
between two lines, that her letters lacked quantity and frequency. She
answered: "I simply cannot write letters. It isn't in me. Can't you
tell that from my handwriting? Not even to you! You must take me as I
am." She wrote each day for three day