“Now, Mr. Ollerenshaw!” the captain called out; and his tone implied, gently:  “Don’t you think you’ve kept me waiting long enough?  Women are women; but a bowling-match is a bowling-match.”

James turned his back on the captain, moved off, and then—­how can one explain it?  He realised that in the last six words of Helen’s speech there had been a note, a hint, a mere nothing, of softness, of regret for pain caused.  He realised, further, the great universal natural law that under any circumstances—­no matter what they may be—­when any man—­no matter who he may be—­differs from any pretty and well-dressed woman—­no matter who she may be—­he is in the wrong.  He saw that it was useless for serious, logical, high-minded persons to inveigh against the absurdity of this law, and to call it bad names.  The law of gravity is absurd and indefensible when you fall downstairs; but you obey it.

He returned to Helen, who bravely met his eyes.  “I’m off home,” he said, hoarsely.  “It’s my tea-time.”

“Good-afternoon,” she replied, with amiability.

“Happen you’ll come along with me, like?”

The use of that word “like” at the end of an interrogative sentence, in the Five Towns, is a subject upon which a book ought to be written; but not this history.  The essential point to observe is that Helen got up from the bench and said, with adorable sweetness: 

“Why, I shall be charmed to come!”

("What a perfect old darling he is!” she said to herself.)

CHAPTER V

A SALUTATION

As they walked down Moorthorne-road towards the town they certainly made a couple piquant enough, by reason of the excessive violence of the contrast between them, to amuse the eye of the beholder.  A young and pretty woman who spends seventy pounds a year on her ornamentations, walking by the side of a little old man (she had the better of him by an inch) who had probably not spent seventy pounds on clothes in sixty years—­such a spectacle must have drawn attention even in the least attentive of towns.  And Bursley is far from the least attentive of towns.  James and his great-stepniece had not got as far as the new Independent Chapel when it was known in St. Luke’s-square, a long way farther on, that they were together; a tramcar had flown forward with the interesting fact.  From that moment, of course, the news, which really was great news, spread itself over the town with the rapidity of a perfume; no corner could escape it.  All James’s innumerable tenants seemed to sniff it simultaneously.  And that evening in the mouth of the entire town (I am licensing myself to a little poetical exaggeration) there was no word but the word “Jimmy.”