garden.

"By Jove!" said Edwin Clayhanger. "It's beginning to rain, I do
believe."

The wind blew, and she felt rain on her cheek. Clayhanger advised her to
stand against the other wall of the porch for better protection. She
obeyed. He re-entered the porch, but was still exposed to the rain. She
called him to her side. Already he was so close that she could have
touched his shoulder by outstretching her arm.

"Oh! I'm all right!" he said lightly, and did not move.

"You needn't be afraid of me!" She was hurt that he had refused her
invitation to approach her. The next instant she would have given her
tongue not to have uttered those words. But she was in such a tingling
state of extreme sensitiveness as rendered it impossible for her to
exercise a normal self-control.

Scarcely conscious of what she did, she asked him the time. He struck a
match to look at his watch. The wind blew the match out, but she saw his
wistful face, with his disordered hair under the hat. It had the quality
of a vision.

He offered to get a light in the house, but abruptly she said good
night.

Then they were shaking hands--she knew not how or why. She could not
loose his hand. She thought: "Never have I held a hand so honest as this
hand." At last she dropped it. They stood silent while a trap rattled up
Trafalgar Road. It was as if she was bound to remain moveless until the
sounds of the trap had died away.

She walked proudly out into the rain. He called to her: "I say, Miss
Lessways!" But she did not stop.

In a minute she was back again in Lane End House.

"That you?" Tom's voice from the breakfast-room!

"Yes," she answered clearly. "I've put the chain on. Good night."

"Good night. Thanks."

She ascended the stairs, smiling to herself, with the raindrops fresh on
her cheek. In her mind were no distinct thoughts, either concerning the
non-virtue of belief, or the new epoch, or Edwin Clayhanger, or even the
strangeness of her behaviour. But all her being vibrated to the
mysterious and beautiful romance of existence.

CHAPTER VII
THE NEXT MEETING

I

For several days the town of Bursley was to Hilda simply a place made
perilous and redoubtable by the apprehension of meeting Edwin Clayhanger
accidentally in the streets thereof. And the burden of her meditations
was: "What can he have thought of me?" She had said nothing to anybody
of the deliberately-sought adventure in the garden. And with the
strangest inge