ghtly.

"Don't you?" she cried.

He gave a slight, laconic laugh.

"And I can hardly bear it that I love you so much," she said,
quavering, across the potatoes.

He glanced furtively round, to see if any one was listening, if any
one might hear. He would have hated it. But no one was near. Beneath
the tiny table, he took her two knees between his knees, and pressed
them with a slow, immensely powerful pressure. Helplessly she put
her hand across the table to him. He covered it for one moment with
his hand, then ignored it. But her knees were still between the
powerful, living vice of his knees.

"Eat!" he said to her, smiling, motioning to her plate. And he
relaxed her.

They decided to go out to Woodhouse on the tram-car, a long hour's
ride. Sitting on the top of the covered car, in the atmosphere of
strong tobacco smoke, he seemed self-conscious, withdrawn into his
own cover, so obviously a dark-skinned foreigner. And Alvina, as she
sat beside him, was reminded of the woman with the negro husband,
down in Lumley. She understood the woman's reserve. She herself
felt, in the same way, something of an outcast, because of the man
at her side. An outcast! And glad to be an outcast. She clung to
Ciccio's dark, despised foreign nature. She loved it, she
worshipped it, she defied all the other world. Dark, he sat beside
her, drawn in to himself, overcast by his presumed inferiority among
these northern industrial people. And she was with him, on his side,
outside the pale of her own people.

There were already acquaintances on the tram. She nodded in answer
to their salutation, but so obviously from a distance, that they
kept turning round to eye her and Ciccio. But they left her alone.
The breach between her and them was established for ever--and it was
her will which established it.

So up and down the weary hills of the hilly, industrial countryside,
till at last they drew near to Woodhouse. They passed the ruins of
Throttle-Ha'penny, and Alvina glanced at it indifferent. They ran
along the Knarborough Road. A fair number of Woodhouse young people
were strolling along the pavements in their Sunday clothes. She knew
them all. She knew Lizzie Bates's fox furs, and Fanny Clough's lilac
costume, and Mrs. Smitham's winged hat. She knew them all. And
almost inevitably the old Woodhouse feeling began to steal over her,
she was glad they could not see her, she was a little ashamed of
Ciccio. She wished, for the moment,