her off her pivot, and made her
feel she was not herself. She felt she didn't know, she couldn't
feel, she was just scattered and decentralized. And she was rather
afraid of the Witham brothers. She might be their victim. She
intended to avoid them.

The following days she saw Albert, in his Norfolk jacket and flannel
trousers and his straw hat, strolling past several times and looking
in through the shop door and up at the upper windows. But she hid
herself thoroughly. When she went out, it was by the back way. So
she avoided him.

But on Sunday evening, there he sat, rather stiff and brittle in the
old Withams' pew, his head pressed a little back, so that his face
and neck seemed slightly flattened. He wore very low, turn-down
starched collars that showed all his neck. And he kept looking up at
her during the service--she sat in the choir-loft--gazing up at her
with apparently love-lorn eyes and a faint, intimate smile--the sort
of _je-sais-tout_ look of a private swain. Arthur also occasionally
cast a judicious eye on her, as if she were a chimney that needed
repairing, and he must estimate the cost, and whether it was worth
it.

Sure enough, as she came out through the narrow choir gate into
Knarborough Road, there was Albert stepping forward like a
policeman, and saluting her and smiling down on her.

"I don't know if I'm presuming--" he said, in a mock deferential
way that showed he didn't imagine he _could_ presume.

"Oh, not at all," said Alvina airily. He smiled with assurance.

"You haven't got any engagement, then, for this evening?" he said.

"No," she replied simply.

"We might take a walk. What do you think?" he said, glancing down
the road in either direction.

What, after all, was she to think? All the girls were pairing off
with the boys for the after-chapel stroll and spoon.

"I don't mind," she said. "But I can't go far. I've got to be in at
nine."

"Which way shall we go?" he said.

He steered off, turned downhill through the common gardens, and
proposed to take her the not-very-original walk up Flint's Lane, and
along the railway line--the colliery railway, that is--then back up
the Marlpool Road: a sort of circle. She agreed.

They did not find a great deal to talk about. She questioned him
about his plans, and about the Cape. But save for bare outlines,
which he gave readily enough, he was rather close.

"What do you do on Sunday nights as a rule?" he asked her.

"Oh, I have a