Flame- his face as he turned among the of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting , like a piece of floating fire. And the , the of homecoming went through her like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, the , industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.  
Of course he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same, with his meeting , his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.
 
She opened the door of her grimy, branch-line carriage, and began to get down her bags. The porter was nowhere, of course, but there was , obscure, on the outer edge of the little crowd, missing her, of course.
 
“Here! Harry!” she called, waving her umbrella in the . He hurried forward.
 
“Tha’s come, has ter?” he said, in a sort of cheerful welcome. She got down, rather , and gave him a peck of a kiss.
 
“Two suit-cases!” she said.
 
Her soul within her, as he clambered into the carriage after her bags. Up shot the fire in the twilight sky, from the great furnace behind the station. She felt the red flame go across her face. She had come back, she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned . She doubted if she could bear it.
 
There, on the little station under the furnaces, she stood, tall and , in her well-made coat and skirt and her broad grey velour hat. She held her umbrella, her chatelaine, and a little leather case in her grey-gloved hands, while Harry staggered out of the ugly little train with her bags.
 
“There’s a trunk at the back,” she said in her bright voice. But she was not feeling bright. The twin black of the iron foundry blasted their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid. The train waited cheerfully. It would wait another ten minutes. She knew it. It was all so deadly familiar.
 
Let us confess it at once. She was a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him , off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she love him? No. She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited—or remained single—all these years.
 
“Won’t a porter carry those?” she said, as Harry strode with his workman’s stride down the platform towards the guard’s van.
 
“I can manage,” he said.
 
And with her umbrella, her chatelaine, and her little leather case, she followed him.
 
The trunk was there.
 
“We’ll get Heather’s greengrocer’s cart to fetch it up,” he said.
 
“Isn’t there a cab?” said Fanny, knowing dismally enough that there wasn’t.
 
“I’ll just put it aside o’ the penny-in-the-slot, and Heather’s greengrocers’ll fetch it about half past eight,” he said.
 
He seized the box by its two handles and staggered with it across the level-crossing, bumping his legs against it as he . Then he dropped it by the red sweet-meats machine.
 
“Will it be safe there?” she said.
 
“Ay—safe as houses,” he answered. He returned for the two bags. Thus , they started to up the hill, under the great long black building of the foundry. She walked beside him—workman of workmen he was, with that luggage. The red lights over the deepening darkness. From the foundry came the horrible, slow clang, clang, clang of iron, a great noise, with an just long enough to make it unendurable.
 
Compare this with the arrival at Gloucester: the carriage for her mistress, the dog-cart for herself with the luggage; the drive out past the river, the pleasant trees of the carriage-approach; and herself sitting beside Arthur, everybody so polite to her.
 
She had come home—for good! Her heart nearly stopped beating as she up that and interminable hill, beside the laden figure. What a come-down! What a come-down! She could not take it with her usual bright cheerfulness. She knew it all too well. It is easy to bear up against the unusual, but the deadly familiarity of an old stale past!
 
He dumped the bags down under a lamp-post, for a rest. There they stood, the two of them, in the lamplight. Passers-by stared at her, and gave good-night to Harry. Her they hardly knew, she had become a stranger.
 
“They’re too heavy for you, let me carry one,” she said.
 
“They begin to weigh a bit by the time you’ve gone a mile,” he answered.
 
“Let me carry the little one,” she insisted.
 
“Tha can ha’e it for a minute, if ter’s a mind,” he said, handing over the valise.
 
And thus they arrived in the streets of shops of the little ugly town on top of the hill. How everybody stared at her; my word, how they stared! And the cinema was just going in, and the queues were tailing down the road to the corner. And everybody took full stock of her. “Night, Harry!” shouted the fellows, in an interested voice.
 
However, they arrived at her aunt’s—a little sweet-shop in a side street. They “pinged” the door-bell, and her aunt came running forward out of the kitchen.
 
“There you are, child! Dying for a cup of tea, I’m sure. How are you?”
 
Fanny’s aunt kissed her, and it was all Fanny could do to refrain from bursting into tears, she felt so low. Perhaps it was her tea she wanted.
 
“You’ve had a drag with that luggage,” said Fanny’s aunt to Harry.
 
“Ay—I’m not sorry to put it down,” he said, looking at his hand which was crushed and by the bag handle.
 
Then he departed to see about Heather’s greengrocery cart.
 
When Fanny sat at tea, her aunt, a grey-haired, fair-faced little woman, looked at her with an admiring heart, feeling bitterly sore for her. For Fanny was beautiful: tall, , finely coloured, with her delicately arched nose, her rich brown hair, her large grey eyes. A woman—a woman to be afraid of. So proud, so inwardly violent! She came of a violent race.
 
It needed a woman to sympathise with her. Men had not the courage. Poor Fanny! She was such a lady, and so straight and magnificent. And yet everything seemed to do her down. Every time she seemed to be to and disappointment, this handsome, brilliantly sensitive woman, with her nervous, overwrought laugh.
 
“So you’ve really come back, child?” said her aunt.
 
“I really have, Aunt,” said Fanny.
 
“Poor Harry! I’m not sure, you know, Fanny, that you’re not taking a bit of an advantage of him.”
 
“Oh, Aunt, he’s waited so long, he may as well have what he’s waited for.” Fanny laughed grimly.
 
“Yes, child, he’s waited so long, that I’m not sure it isn’t a bit hard on him. You know, I like him, Fanny—though as you know quite well, I don’t think he’s good enough for you. And I think he thinks so himself, poor fellow.”
 
“Don’t you be so sure of that, Aunt. Harry is common, but he’s not . He wouldn’t think the Queen was any too good for him, if he’d a mind to her.”
 
“Well—It’s as well if he has a proper opinion of himself.”
 
“It depends what you call proper,” said Fanny. “But he’s got his good points—”
 
“Oh, he’s a nice fellow, and I like him, I do like him. Only, as I tell you, he’s not good enough for you.”
 
“I’ve made up my mind, Aunt,” said Fanny, grimly.
 
“Yes,” the aunt. “They say all things come to him who waits—”
 
“More than he’s bargained for, eh, Aunt?” laughed Fanny rather bitterly.
 
The poor aunt, this bitterness grieved her for her niece.
 
They were interrupted by the ping of the shop-bell, and Harry’s call of “Right!” But as he did not come in at once, Fanny, feeling for him presumably at the moment, rose and went into the shop. She saw a cart outside, and went to the door.
 
And the moment she stood in the , she heard a woman’s common voice crying from the darkness of the opposite side of the road:
 
“Tha’rt theer, ar ter? I’ll shame thee, Mester. I’ll shame thee, see if I dunna.”
 
Startled, Fanny stared across the darkness, and saw a woman in a black go under one of the lamps up the side street.
 
Harry and Bill Heather had dragged the trunk off the little dray, and she retreated before them as they came up the shop step with it.
 
“Wheer shalt ha’e it?” asked Harry.
 
“Best take it upstairs,” said Fanny.
 
She went up first to light the gas.
 
When Heather had gone, and Harry was sitting down having tea and pork pie, Fanny asked:
 
“Who was that woman shouting?”
 
“Nay, I canna tell thee. To somebody, I’s’d think,” replied Harry. Fanny looked at him, but asked no more.
 
He was a fair-haired fellow of thirty-two, with a fair moustache. He was broad in his speech, and looked like a foundry-hand, which he was. But women always liked him. There was something of a mother’s lad about him—something warm and playful and really sensitive.
 
He had his attractions even for Fanny. What she rebelled against so bitterly was that he had no sort of ambition. He was a , but of very commonplace skill. He was thirty-two years old, and hadn’t saved twenty pounds. She would have to provide the money for the home. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care. He had no initiative at all. He had no vices—no obvious ones. But he was just indifferent, spending as he went, and not caring. Yet he did not look happy. She remembered his face in the fire-glow: something haunted, abstracted about it. As he sat there eating his pork pie, his cheek out, she felt he was like a doom to her. And she raged against the doom of him. It wasn’t that he was gross. His way was common, almost on purpose. But he himself wasn’t really common. For instance, his food was not particularly important to him, he was not greedy. He had a charm, too, particularly for women, with his blondness and his sensitiveness and his way of making a woman feel that she was a higher being. But Fanny knew him, knew the limitedness of him, that would nearly send her mad.
 
He stayed till about half past nine. She went to the door with him.
 
“When are you coming up?” he said, jerking his head in the direction, presumably, of his own home.
 
“I’ll come tomorrow afternoon,” she said brightly. Between Fanny and Mrs. Goodall, his mother, there was naturally no love lost.
 
Again she gave him an awkward little kiss, and said good-night.
 
“You can’t wonder, you know, child, if he doesn’t seem so very keen,” said her aunt. “It’s your own fault.”
 
“Oh, Aunt, I couldn’t stand him when he was keen. I can do with him a lot better as he is.”
 
The two women sat and talked far into the night. They understood each other. The aunt, too, had married as Fanny was marrying: a man who was no companion to her, a violent man, brother of Fanny’s father. He was dead, Fanny’s father was dead.
 
Poor Aunt Lizzie, she cried woefully over her bright niece, when she had gone to bed.
 
Fanny paid the promised visit to his people the next afternoon. Mrs. Goodall was a large woman with smooth-parted hair, a common, obstinate woman, who had spoiled her four lads and her one vixen of a married daughter. She was one of those old-fashioned powerful natures that couldn’t do with looks or education or any form of showing off. She fairly hated the sound of correct English. She thee’d and tha’d her daughter-in-law, and said:
 
“I’m none as ormin’ as I look, seest ta.”
 
Fanny did not think her prospective mother-in-law looked at all orming, so the speech was unnecessary.
 
“I towd him mysen,” said Mrs. Goodall, “’Er’s held back all this long, let ’er stop as ’er is. ’E’d none ha’ had thee for my tellin’—tha hears. No, ’e’s a fool, an’ I know it. I says to him, ‘Tha looks a man, doesn’t ter, at thy age, goin’ an’ openin’ to her when ter hears her scrat’ at th’ gate, after she’s done gallivantin’ round wherever she’d a mind. That looks rare an’ soft.’ But it’s no use o’ any talking: he answered that letter o’ thine and made his own bad bargain.”
 
But in spite of the old woman’s anger, she was also flattered at Fanny’s coming back to Harry. For Mrs. Goodall was impressed by Fanny—a woman of her own match. And more than this, everybody knew that Fanny’s Aunt Kate had left her two hundred pounds: this apart from the girl’s .
 
So there was high tea in Princes Street when Harry came home black from work, and a rather odour of cordiality, the vixen Jinny in to say vulgar things. Of course Jinny lived in a house whose garden end joined the garden. They were a who stuck together, these Goodalls.
 
It was arranged that Fanny should come to tea again on the Sunday, and the wedding was discussed. It should take place in a fortnight’s time at Morley . Morley was a hamlet on the edge of the real country, and in its little Congregational Chapel Fanny and Harry had first met.
 
What a creature of habit he was! He was still in the of Morley Chapel—not very regular. He belonged just because he had a voice, and enjoyed singing. Indeed his solos were only spoilt to local fame because when he sang he handled his aitches so hopelessly.
 
“And I saw ’eaven hopened
And be’old, a wite ’orse——”
 
This was one of Harry’s classics, only surpassed by the fine outburst of his heaving:
 
“Hangels—hever bright an’ fair——”
 
It was a pity, but it was inalterable. He had a good voice, and he sang with a certain lacerating fire, but his pronunciation made it all funny. And nothing could alter him.
 
So he was never heard save at cheap concerts and in the little, poorer . The others .
 
Now the month was September, and Sunday was Harvest Festival at Morley Chapel, and Harry was singing solos. So that Fanny was to go to afternoon service, and come home to a grand spread of Sunday tea with him. Poor Fanny! One of the most wonderful afternoons had been a Sunday afternoon service, with her cousin Luther at her side, Harvest Festival in Morley Chapel. Harry had sung solos then—ten years ago. She remembered his pale blue tie, and the purple asters and the great vegetable in which he was framed, and her cousin Luther at her side, young, clever, come down from London, where he was getting on well, learning his Latin and his French and German so brilliantly.
 
However, once again it was Harvest Festival at Morley Chapel, and once again, as ten years before, a soft, September day, with the last roses pink in the cottage gardens, the last dahlias , the last sunflowers yellow. And again the little old chapel was a , with its famous sheaves of corn and corn-plaited pillars, its great bunches of grapes, dangling like from the pulpit corners, its marrows and potatoes and pears and apples and damsons, its purple asters and yellow Japanese sunflowers. Just as before, the red dahlias round the pillars were dropping, weak-headed among the oats. The place was crowded and hot, the plates of tomatoes seemed balanced on the gallery front, the . Enderby was than ever to look at, so long and and hairless.
 
The Rev. Ende............