"Yes. Melodrama and murder and gore--you know."
"How horrible!" she exclaimed. "Why are people like that in the Five
Towns?"
"It's our form of poetry, I suppose," he muttered, smiling at the
pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.
"I suppose it _is!_" she agreed heartily, after a pause.
"But you belong to the Five Towns, don't you?" he asked.
"Oh yes! I used to."
At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown. But
Hilda's urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket
clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length
they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a
shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train
from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty. Hilda seemed to sigh
relief, and her demeanour changed. But Edwin's uneasiness was only
intensified. Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another
hemisphere for him. It was mysterious, like her. It was part of her
mystery. What could he do? His curse was that he had no initiative.
Without her relentless force, he would never have penetrated even as far
as the stuffy room where the unique Bradshaw lay. It was she who had
taken him to the station, not he her. How could he hold her back from
Brighton?
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