It was while he was glancing along the untidy and crowded shelves with
sophisticated eye that the door brusquely opened. He looked up mildly,
expecting a face familiar, and saw one that startled him, and heard a
voice that aroused disconcerting vibrations in himself. It was Hilda
Lessways. She had in her hand a copy of the "Signal." Over fifteen
months had gone since their last meeting, but not since he had last
thought of her. Her features seemed strange. His memory of them had
not been reliable. He had formed an image of her in his mind, and had
often looked at it, and he now saw that it did not correspond with the
reality. The souvenir of their brief intimacy swept back upon him.
Incredible that she should be there, in front of him; and yet there she
was! More than once, after reflecting on her, he had laughed, and said
lightly to himself: "Well, the chances are I shall never see _her_ again!
Funny girl!" But the recollection of her gesture with Mr Shushions
prevented him from dismissing her out of his head with quite that
lightness...
"I'm ordered to tell you that Mr Orgreave will be down in a few
minutes," she said.
"_Hello!_" he exclaimed. "I'd no idea you were in Bursley!"
"Came to-day!" she replied.
"How odd," he thought, "that I should call like this on the very day she
comes!" But he pushed away that instinctive thought with the rational
thought that such a coincidence could not be regarded as in any way
significant.
They shook hands in the middle of the room, and she pressed his hand,
while looking downwards with a smile. And his mind was suddenly filled
with the idea that during all those months she had been existing
somewhere, under the eye of some one, intimate with some one, and
constantly conducting herself with a familiar freedom that doubtless she
would not use to him. And so she was invested, for him, with
mysteriousness. His interest in her was renewed in a moment, and in a
form much more acute than its first form. Moreover, she presented
herself to his judgement in a different aspect. He could scarcely
comprehend how he had ever deemed her habitual expression to be
forbidding. In fact, he could persuade himself now that she was
beautiful, and even nobly beautiful. From one extreme he flew to the
other. She sat down on an old sofa; he remained standing. And in the
midst of a little conversation about Mrs Orgreave's indisposition, and
the absence of the members of the family (she said she had refused an
invitation to go with Janet and Alicia to Hillport), she broke the
thread, and remarked--
"You would have known I was coming if you'd been calling here recently."
She pushed her feet near the fender, and gazed into the fire.
"Ah! But you see I haven't been calling recently."
She raised her eyes to his. "I suppose you've never thought about me
once since I left!" she fired at him. An audacious and discomposing
girl!
"Oh yes, I have," he said weakly. What could you reply to such
speeches? Nevertheless he was flattered.
"Really? But you've never inquired about me."
"Yes, I have."
"Only once."
"How do you know?"
"I asked Janet."
"Damn her!" he said to himself, but pleased with her. And aloud, in a
tone suddenly firm, "That's nothing to go by."
"What isn't?"
"The number of _times_ I've inquired." He was blushing.
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