After glancing at sundry minor workshops in delicious propinquity and
solitude, they mounted to the first floor, where there was an
account-book ruling and binding shop: the site of the old sitting-room
and the girls' bedroom. In each chamber Edwin had to light a gas, and
the corridors and stairways were traversed by the ray of matches. It
was excitingly intricate. Then they went to the attics, because Edwin
was determined that she should see all. There he found a forgotten
candle.
"I used to work here," he said, holding high the candle. "There was no
other place for me to work in."
They were in his old work attic, now piled with stocks of paper wrapped
up in posters.
"Work? What sort of work?"
"Well--reading, drawing, you know... At that very table." To be sure,
there the very table was, thick with dust! It had been too rickety to
deserve removal to the heights of Bleakridge. He was touched by the
sight of the table now, though he saw it at least once every week. His
existence at the corner of Duck Square seemed now to have been beautiful
and sad, seemed to be far off and historic. And the attic seemed
unhappy in its present humiliation.
"But there's no fireplace," murmured Hilda.
"I know," said Edwin.
"But how did you do in winter?"
"I did without."
He had in fact been less of a martyr than those three telling words
would indicate. Nevertheless it appeared to him that he really had been
a martyr; and he was glad. He could feel her sympathy and her quiet
admiration vibrating through the air towards him. Had she not said that
she had never met anybody like him? He turned and looked at her. Her
eyes glittered in the candle-light with tears too proud to fall. Solemn
and exquisite bliss! Profound anxiety and apprehension! He was an
arena where all the sensations of which a human being is capable
struggled in blind confusion.
Afterwards, he could recall her visit only in fragments. The next
fragment that he recollected was the last. She stood outside the door
in her mackintosh. The rain had ceased. She was going. Behind them he
could feel his father in the cubicle, and Stifford arranging the
toilette of the shop for the night.
"Please don't come out here," she enjoined, half in entreaty, half in
command. Her solicitude thrilled him. He was on the step, she was on
the pavement: so that he looked down at her, with the sodden,
light-reflecting slope of Duck Square for a background to her.
"Oh! I'm all right. Well, you'll come to-morrow afternoon?"
"No, you aren't all right. You've got a cold and you'll make it worse,
and this isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning; I think you're
very liable to colds."
"N-no!" he said, enchanted, beside himself in an ecstasy of pleasure.
"I shall expect you to-morrow about three."
"Thank you," she said simply. "I'll come."
They shook hands.
"Now do go in!"
She vanished round the corner.
All the evening he neither read nor spoke.