“In this house.  It would serve him right.”

Alice smiled humorously.  “Then the house wouldn’t get damp,” she said.  “And there would be a great saving of expense.  We could buy those two easy-chairs with what we saved.”

“Exactly,” said Herbert.  “And after all, seaside lodgings, you know....  And this house isn’t so bad either.”

“But if he came back and caught us?” Alice suggested.

“Well, he couldn’t eat us!” said Herbert.

The clear statement of this truth emboldened Alice.  “And he’d no right to turn you out!” she said in wifely indignation.

Without another word Herbert went into Bratt’s and got the keys.  Then the cab came up with Alice’s luggage lashed to the roof, and the driver, astounded, had to assist in carrying it into Si’s house.  He was then dismissed, and not with a bouncing tip either.  We are in the Five Towns.  He got a reasonable tip, no more.  The Bratts, vastly intrigued, looked inconspicuously on.

Herbert banged the door and faced Alice in the lobby across her chief trunk.  The honeymoon had commenced.

“We’d better get this out of the way at once,” said Alice the practical.

And between them they carried it upstairs, Alice, in the intervals of tugs, making favourable remarks about the cosiness of the abode.

“This is uncle’s bedroom,” said Herbert, showing the front bedroom, a really spacious and dignified chamber full of spacious and dignified furniture, and not a pin out of place in it.

“What a funny room!” Alice commented.  “But it’s very nice.”

“And this is mine,” said Herbert, showing the back bedroom, much inferior in every way.

When the trunk had been carried into the front bedroom, Herbert descended for the other things, including his own luggage; and Alice took off her hat and jacket and calmly laid them on Silas’s ample bed, gazed into all Silas’s cupboards and wardrobes that were not locked, patted her hair in front of Silas’s looking-glass, and dropped a hairpin on Silas’s floor.

She then kneeled down over her chief trunk, and the vision of her rummaging in the trunk in his uncle’s bedroom was the most beautiful thing that Herbert had ever seen.  Whether it was because the light caught her brown hair, or because she seemed so strange there and yet so deliciously at home, or because—­Anyhow, she fished a plain white apron out of the trunk and put it on over her grey dress.  And the quick, graceful, enchanting movements with which she put the apron on—­well, they made Herbert feel that he had only that moment begun to live.  He walked away wondering what was the matter with him.  If you imagine that he ran up to her and kissed her you imagine a vain thing; you do not understand that complex and capricious organism, the masculine heart.