“It will cost me the precentorship,” answered he slowly, “but I hadn’t given a thought to that.”

“It shall cost you nothing of the kind.  After all, father is juster to others than to me.  I will write—­we will both write:  I will tell him what you risked to save his daughter.  Or, stay:  any clergyman will do, will he not?  We need only the licence.  You shall risk nothing:  give me only the licence and I will run and find one.”

“Dear Miss Hetty, I made no promise.  I have no licence.  None has reached me, nor word of one.”

“Then he must have it!  He told me—­that is, I understood—­” She broke off with a laugh most pitiful in John’s ears, though it seemed to reassure her.  “But how foolish of me!  Of course he must have it.  And you will come with me, at once?  At the least you are willing to come?”

“Surely I will come.”  John’s face was gloomy.  “Where are the lodgings?”

“I cannot tell you the name of the street, but I can find them.  John, you are an angel!  And afterwards I will sit and tell you about Patty to your heart’s content.  We can be married in the parlour, I suppose?  Or must it be in church?  I had rather—­far rather—­it were in church if you could manage that for us:  but not to lose time.  Perhaps we can find a church later in the day and get permission to go through the service again.  I daresay, though, he has it all arranged—­he said I might leave it to him.  You won’t tell him, John, what a fright I have given myself?”

So her tongue ran on as they descended the hill together.  John Romley walked beside her stupidly, wondering if she were in truth reassured or chattering thus to keep up her hopes.  They might, after all, be justified:  but his forebodings weighed on his tongue.  Also the shock had stunned him and all his wits seemed to be buzzing loose in his head.

They did not notice, although they passed it close, a certain signboard over a low-browed shop half-way down the street.  Afterwards Hetty remembered passing the shop, and that its one window was caked with mud and grimed with dust on top of the mud.  She did not see a broad-shouldered man in a dirty baize apron seated at his work-bench behind the pane.  Nor after passing the shop did she turn her head:  but walked on unaware of an ill-shaven face thrust out of its doorway and staring after her.

William Wright sat at his bench that morning, fitting a leather washer in a leaky brass tap.  In the darkest corner at the back of the shop his father—­a peevish old man, well past seventy—­stooped over a desk, engaged as usual in calculating his book-debts, an occupation which brought him no comfort but merely ingrained his bad opinion of mankind.  Having drunk his trade into a decline, and being now superannuated, he nagged over his ledgers from morning to night and snatched a fearful joy in goading William to the last limit of forbearance.  William, who had made himself responsible for the old man’s debts, endured him on the whole very creditably.  “Here’s a bad ’un,” “Here’s a bad ’un,” piped the voice from time to time.