-no matter who he may be--differs from any pretty and well-dressed
woman--no matter who she may be--he is in the wrong. He saw that it was
useless for serious, logical, high-minded persons to inveigh against the
absurdity of this law, and to call it bad names. The law of gravity is
absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you obey it.

He returned to Helen, who bravely met his eyes. "I'm off home," he said,
hoarsely. "It's my tea-time."

"Good-afternoon," she replied, with amiability.

"Happen you'll come along with me, like?"

The use of that word "like" at the end of an interrogative sentence, in
the Five Towns, is a subject upon which a book ought to be written; but
not this history. The essential point to observe is that Helen got up
from the bench and said, with adorable sweetness:

"Why, I shall be charmed to come!"

("What a perfect old darling he is!" she said to herself.)

CHAPTER V

A SALUTATION

As they walked down Moorthorne-road towards the town they certainly made
a couple piquant enough, by reason of the excessive violence of the
contrast between them, to amuse the eye of the beholder. A young and
pretty woman who spends seventy pounds a year on her ornamentations,
walking by the side of a little old man (she had the better of him by an
inch) who had probably not spent seventy pounds on clothes in sixty
years--such a spectacle must have drawn attention even in the least
attentive of towns. And Bursley is far from the least attentive of
towns. James and his great-stepniece had not got as far as the new
Independent Chapel when it was known in St. Luke's-square, a long way
farther on, that they were together; a tramcar had flown forward with
the interesting fact. From that moment, of course, the news, which
really was great news, spread itself over the town with the rapidity of
a perfume; no corner could escape it. All James's innumerable tenants
seemed to sniff it simultaneously. And that evening in the mouth of the
entire town (I am licensing myself to a little poetical exaggeration)
there was no word but the word "Jimmy."

Their converse, as they descended into the town, was not effective. It
was, indeed, feeble. They had fought a brief but bitter duel, and James
Ollerenshaw had been severely wounded. His dignity bled freely; he made,
strange to say, scarcely any attempt to staunch the blood, which might
have continued to flow for a considerable time had not a diversion
oc