its hook in the
kitchen passage. Then she went back to the parlour and stood in the
doorway, speechless, putting on her gloves rapidly.

"Ready?"

She nodded.

"Shall I?" Louis questioned, indicating the gas.

She nodded again, and, stretching to his full height, he managed
to turn the gas down without employing a footstool as Rachel was
compelled to do.

"Wait a moment," she whispered in the hall, when he had opened the
front door. These were the first words she had been able to utter. She
went to the kitchen for a latch-key. Inserting this latch-key in the
keyhole on the outside, and letting Louis pass in front of her, she
closed the front door with very careful precautions against noise, and
withdrew the key.

"I'll take charge of that if you like," said Louis, noticing that she
was hesitating where to bestow it.

She gave it up to him with a violent thrill. She was intensely happy
and intensely fearful. She was only going out to do some shopping;
but the door was shut behind her, and at her side was this magic,
mysterious being, and the nocturnal universe lay around. Only
twenty-four hours earlier she had shut the door behind her and gone
forth to find Louis. And now, having found him, he and she were going
forth together like close friends. So much had happened in twenty-four
hours that the previous night seemed to be months away.

II

Instead of turning down Friendly Street, they kept straight along the
lane till, becoming suddenly urban, it led them across tram-lines
and Turnhill Road, and so through a gulf or inlet of the market-place
behind the Shambles, the Police Office, and the Town Hall, into the
market-place itself, which in these latter years was recovering a
little of the commercial prestige snatched from it half a century
earlier by St. Luke's Square. Rats now marauded in the empty shops of
St. Luke's Square, while the market-place glittered with custom, and
the electric decoy of its facades lit up strangely the lower walls of
the black and monstrous Town Hall.

Innumerable organized activities were going forward at that moment in
the serried buildings of the endless confused streets that stretched
up hill and down dale from one end of the Five Towns to the
other--theatres, Empire music-halls, Hippodrome music-halls,
picture-palaces in dozens, concerts, singsongs, spiritualistic
propaganda, democratic propaganda, skating-rinks, Wild West
exhibitions, Dutch auctions, and the private se