to look over the place."

"How-d'ye-do, miss?"

She shook hands with the tyrannic father, who was, however, despite his
reputation, apparently just as nervous as the son. There followed a most
sinister moment of silence. And, at last, the shop door opened, and the
father turned to greet a customer. Hilda thought: "Suppose this fat old
man is one day my father-in-law? Is it possible to imagine him as a
father-in-law?" And she had a transient gleam of curiosity concerning
the characters of the two Clayhanger sisters, and recalled with
satisfaction that Janet liked the elder one.

Edwin Clayhanger, muttering, pointed to an aperture in the counter, and
immediately she was going through it with him, and through a door at the
back of the shop. They were alone, facing a rain-soaked yard. Edwin
Clayhanger sneezed violently.

"It keeps on raining," Edwin murmured. "Better to have kept umbrella!
However--"

He glanced at her inquiringly and invitingly. They ran side by side
across the yard to a roofed flight of steps that led to the printing-
office. For a couple of seconds, the rain wet them, and then they were
under cover again. It seemed to Hilda that they had escaped from the
shop like fox-terriers--like two friendly dogs from the surveillance of
an incalculable and dangerous old man. She felt a comfortable, friendly
confidence in Edwin Clayhanger--a tranquil sentiment such as she had
never experienced for George Cannon. After more than a year--and what a
period of unforeseen happenings!--she thought again: "I _like him_." Not
love, she thought, but liking! She liked being with him. She liked the
sensation of putting confidence in him. She liked his youth, and her
own. She was sorry because he had a cold and was not taking care of
it.... Now they were climbing a sombre creaking staircase towards a new
and remote world that was separated from the common world just quitted
by the adventurous passage of the rainy yard.... And now they were amid
oily odours in a large raftered workshop, full of machines.... The
printing-works!... An enormous but very deferential man saluted them
with majestic solemnity. He was the foreman, and labelled by his white
apron as an artisan, but his gigantic bulk--he would have outweighed the
pair of them--and his age set him somehow over them, so that they were a
couple of striplings in his vasty presence. When Edwin Clayhanger
employed, as it were, daringly, the accents of a master to this
inti