The quarter of an hour that followed went agreeably enough.  Wharton sat among the little group, far too clever to patronise a cat, let alone a Venturist, but none the less master and conscious master of the occasion, because it suited him to take the airs of equality.  Craven said little, but as he lounged in Marcella’s long cane chair with his arms behind his head, his serene and hazy air showed him contented; and Marcella talked and laughed with the animation that belongs to one whose plots for improving the universe have at least temporarily succeeded.  Or did it betray, perhaps, a woman’s secret consciousness of some presence beside her, more troubling and magnetic to her than others?

“Well then, Friday,” said Wharton at last, when his time was more than spent.—­“You must be there early, for there will be a crush.  Miss Craven comes too?  Excellent!  I will tell the doorkeeper to look out for you.  Good-bye!—­good-bye!”

And with a hasty shake of the hand to the Cravens, and one more keen glance, first at Marcella and then round the little workman’s room in which they had been sitting, he went.

He had hardly departed before Anthony Craven, the lame elder brother, who must have passed him on the stairs, appeared.

“Well—­any news?” he said, as Marcella found him a chair.

“All right!” said Louis, whose manner had entirely changed since Wharton had left the room.  “I am to go down on Monday to report the Damesley strike that is to be.  A month’s trial, and then a salary—­two hundred a year.  Oh! it’ll do.”

He fidgeted and looked away from his brother, as though trying to hide his pleasure.  But in spite of him it transformed every line of the pinched and worn face.

“And you and Anna will walk to the Registry Office next week?” said Anthony, sourly, as he took his tea.

“It can’t be next week,” said Edith Craven’s quiet voice, interposing.  “Anna’s got to work out her shirt-making time.  She only left the tailoresses and began this new business ten days ago.  And she was to have a month at each.”

Marcella’s lifted eyebrows asked for explanations.  She had not yet seen Louis’s betrothed, but she was understood to be a character, and a better authority on many Labour questions than he.

Louis explained that Anna was exploring various sweated trades for the benefit of an East End newspaper.  She had earned fourteen shillings her last week at tailoring, but the feat had exhausted her so much that he had been obliged to insist on two or three days respite before moving on to shirts.  Shirts were now brisk, and the hours appallingly long in this heat.