e this announcement, the girl ran off, with a short giggle.

Rachel, had to walk half a mile to reach the tram-route. This
re-visiting of her native town, which she had quitted only a few weeks
earlier, seemed to her like the sad resumption of an existence
long forgotten. She was self-conscious and hoped that she would not
encounter the curiosity of any of her Knype acquaintances. She felt
easier when she was within the sheltering car and rumbling and jerking
through the gloomy carnival of Easter Saturday afternoon in Knype and
Cauldon on the way to Hanbridge.

After leaving the car in Crown Square, she had to climb through all
the western quarter of Hanbridge to the very edge of the town, on the
hummock that separates it from the Axe Moorlands. Birches Street, as
she had guessed, was in the suburb known as Birches Pike. It ran
right to the top of the hill, and the upper portion consisted of new
cottage-houses in groups of two or three, with vacant lots between.
Why should Julian have chosen Birches Street for residence, seeing
that his business was in Knype? It was a repellent street; it was out
even of the little world where sordidness is at any rate dignified
by tradition and anaemic ideals can support each other in close
companionship. It had neither a past nor a future. The steep end of
it was an horizon of cloud. The April east wind blew the smoke of
Hanbridge right across it.

In this east wind men in shirt-sleeves, and women with aprons over
their heads, stood nonchalantly at cottage gates contemplating the
vacuum of leisure. On two different parcels of land teams of shrieking
boys were playing football, with piles of caps and jackets to serve as
goal-posts. To the left, in a clough, was an enormous yellow marlpit,
with pools of water in its depths, and gangways of planks along them,
and a few overturned wheelbarrows lying here and there. A group of men
drove at full speed up the street in a dogcart behind a sweating cob,
stopped violently at the summit, and, taking watches from pockets,
began to let pigeons out of baskets. The pigeons rose in wide circles
and were lost in the vast dome of melancholy that hung over the
district.

II

No. 29 was the second house from the top, new, and already in decay.
It and its attached twin were named "Prospect Villas" in vermilion
tiles on the yellowish-red bricks of the facade. Hot, and yet chilled
by the wind, Rachel hesitated a moment at the gate, suddenly realiz