“Ready?”

She nodded.

“Shall I?” Louis questioned, indicating the gas.

She nodded again, and, stretching to his full height, he managed to turn the gas down without employing a footstool as Rachel was compelled to do.

“Wait a moment,” she whispered in the hall, when he had opened the front door.  These were the first words she had been able to utter.  She went to the kitchen for a latch-key.  Inserting this latch-key in the keyhole on the outside, and letting Louis pass in front of her, she closed the front door with very careful precautions against noise, and withdrew the key.

“I’ll take charge of that if you like,” said Louis, noticing that she was hesitating where to bestow it.

She gave it up to him with a violent thrill.  She was intensely happy and intensely fearful.  She was only going out to do some shopping; but the door was shut behind her, and at her side was this magic, mysterious being, and the nocturnal universe lay around.  Only twenty-four hours earlier she had shut the door behind her and gone forth to find Louis.  And now, having found him, he and she were going forth together like close friends.  So much had happened in twenty-four hours that the previous night seemed to be months away.

II

Instead of turning down Friendly Street, they kept straight along the lane till, becoming suddenly urban, it led them across tram-lines and Turnhill Road, and so through a gulf or inlet of the market-place behind the Shambles, the Police Office, and the Town Hall, into the market-place itself, which in these latter years was recovering a little of the commercial prestige snatched from it half a century earlier by St. Luke’s Square.  Rats now marauded in the empty shops of St. Luke’s Square, while the market-place glittered with custom, and the electric decoy of its facades lit up strangely the lower walls of the black and monstrous Town Hall.

Innumerable organized activities were going forward at that moment in the serried buildings of the endless confused streets that stretched up hill and down dale from one end of the Five Towns to the other—­theatres, Empire music-halls, Hippodrome music-halls, picture-palaces in dozens, concerts, singsongs, spiritualistic propaganda, democratic propaganda, skating-rinks, Wild West exhibitions, Dutch auctions, and the private seances in dubious quarters of “psychologists,” “clair-voyants,” “scientific palmists,” and other rascals who sold a foreknowledge of the future for eighteenpence or even a shilling.  Viewed under certain aspects, it seemed indeed that the Five Towns, in the week-end desertion of its sordid factories, was reaching out after the higher life, the subtler life, the more elegant life of greater communities; but the little crowds and the little shops of Bursley market-place were nevertheless a proof that a tolerable number of people were still mainly interested in the primitive