."

"Who'st been running after?"

"Well, I can't rightly say there's anything--what you may call settled.
In fact, nothing was to be said about it at all at present. But it's
Miss Lessways, father--Hilda Lessways, you know."

"Her as came in the shop the other day?"

"Yes."

"How long's this been going on?"

Edwin thought of what Hilda had said. "Oh! Over a year." He could not
possibly have said "four days." "Mind you this is strictly q.t! Nobody
knows a word about it, nobody! But of course I thought I'd better tell
you. You'll say nothing." He tried wistfully to appeal as one loyal
man to another. But he failed. There was no ray of response on his
father's gloomy features, and he slipped back insensibly into the boy
whose right to an individual existence had never been formally admitted.

Something base in him--something of that baseness which occasionally
actuates the oppressed--made him add: "She's got an income of her own.
Her father left money." He conceived that this would placate Darius.

"I know all about her father," Darius sneered, with a short laugh. "And
her father's father! ... Well, lad, ye'll go your own road." He
appeared to have no further interest in the affair. Edwin was not
surprised, for Darius was seemingly never interested in anything except
his business; but he thought how strange, how nigh to the incredible,
the old man's demeanour was.

"But about money, I was thinking," he said, uneasily shifting his pose.

"What about money?"

"Well," said Edwin, endeavouring, and failing, to find courage to put a
little sharpness into his tone, "I couldn't marry on seventeen-and-six a
week, could I?"

At the age of twenty-five, at the end of nine years' experience in the
management and the accountancy of a general printing and stationery
business, Edwin was receiving seventeen shillings and sixpence for a
sixty-five-hour week's work, the explanation being that on his father's
death the whole enterprise would be his, and that all money saved was
saved for him. Out of this sum he had to pay ten shillings a week to
Maggie towards the cost of board and lodging, so that three half-crowns
remained for his person and his soul. Thus he could expect no
independence of any kind until his father's death, and he had a direct
and powerful interest in his father's death. Moreover, all his future,
and all unpaid reward of his labours in the past, hung hazardous on his
father's goodwill. I