“Yes,” she murmured.

“I’m talking to ye because I’ve taken a fancy to ye,” said the councillor.  “I knew what you were the first time I set eyes on ye.  Oh, I don’t mind telling ye now—­what harm is there in it?  I’d a sort of a fancy as one day you and John’s Ernest might ha’ hit it off.  I had it in my mind like.”

A crude compliment, possibly in bad taste, possibly offensive; but Rachel was singularly moved by the revelation thus made.  Before she could find a reply John’s Ernest came into the shop, followed by an aproned assistant.

III

Then she was sitting by John’s Ernest’s side in the big motor-car, with her possessions at her feet.  The enthronement had happened in a few moments.  John’s Ernest was going to Hanbridge.

“Ye can run Mrs. Fores up home on yer way,” Thomas Batchgrew had suggested.

“But Bycars Lane is miles out of your way!” Rachel had cried.

Both men had smiled.  “Won’t make a couple of minutes’ difference in the car,” John’s Ernest had modestly murmured.

She had been afraid to get into the automobile—­afraid with a sort of stage-fright; afraid, as she might have been had she been called upon to sing at a concert in the Town Hall.  She had imagined that all Bursley was gazing at her as she climbed into the car.  Over the face of England automobiles are far more common than cuckoos, and yet for the majority, even of the proud and solvent middle class, they still remain as unattainable, as glitteringly wondrous, as a title.  Rachel had never been in an automobile before; she had never hoped to be in an automobile.  A few days earlier, and she had been regarding a bicycle as rather romantic!  Louis had once mentioned a motor-cycle and side-carriage for herself, but she had rebuffed the idea with a shudder.

The whole town slid away behind her.  The car was out of the market-place and crossing the top of Duck Bank, the scene of Louis’ accident, before she had settled her skirts.  She understood why the men had smiled at her; it was no more trouble for the car to go to Bycars than it would be for her to run upstairs.  The swift movement of the car, silent and arrogant, and the occasional deep bass mysterious menace of its horn, and the grace of John’s Ernest’s gestures on the wheel as he curved the huge vehicle like a phantom round lumbering obstacles—­these things fascinated and exalted her.

In spite of the horrible secret she carried all the time in her heart, she was somehow filled with an instinctive joy.  And she began to perceive changes in her own perspective.  The fine Louis, whom she had regarded as the summit of mankind, could never offer her an automobile; he existed entirely in a humbler world; he was, after all, a young man in a very small way of affairs.  Batchgrew’s automobile would swallow up, week by week, more than the whole of Louis’ income.  And further, John’s Ernest by her side was invested with the mighty charm of one who easily and skilfully governs a vast and dangerous organism.  All the glory of the inventors and perfecters of automobiles, and of manufacturing engineers, and of capitalists who could pay for their luxurious caprices, was centred in John’s Ernest, merely because he directed and subjugated the energy of the miraculous machine.