nderness that caused her to wonder at herself.

II

The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town.
The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a
watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to
which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this
crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a
large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and
almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the
bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns,
and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within
recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station--rail-head of
a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those
parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find
yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal
villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation
which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the
Market Square not even the late edition of the _Staffordshire Signal_
was cried, though it was discreetly on sale with its excellent sporting
news in a few shops. In the hot and malodorous candle-lit factories,
where the real strenuous life of the town would remain cooped up for
another half-hour of the evening, men and women had yet scarcely taken
to horse-racing; they would gamble upon rabbits, cocks, pigeons, and
their own fists, without the mediation of the _Signal_. The one noise in
the Market Square was the bell of a hawker selling warm pikelets at a
penny each for the high tea of the tradesmen. The hawker was a deathless
institution, a living proof that withdrawn Turnhill would continue
always to be exactly what it always had been. Still, to the east of the
Square, across the High Street, a vast space was being cleared of hovels
for the erection of a new town hall daringly magnificent.

Hilda crossed the Square, scorning it.

She said to herself: "I'd better get the thing over before I buy the
thread. I should never be able to stand Miss Dayson's finicking! I
should scream out!" But the next instant, with her passion for proving
to herself how strong she could be, she added: "Well, I just _will_ buy
the thread first!" And she went straight into Dayson's little fancy
shop, which was full of counter and cardboard boxes and Miss Day