He followed her on high, martyrised. The front wall of the house rose nearly to the top of the attic windows, screening and darkening them.

"Cheerful view!" Edwin growled.

He heard Ingpen saying that the place could be had on a repairing lease for sixty-five pounds a year, and that perhaps 1,200 would buy it.

Dirt cheap.

"Ah!" Edwin murmured. "I know those repairing leases. 1,000 wouldn't make this barn fit to live in."

He knew that Ingpen and Hilda exchanged glances.

"It's larger than Tavy Mansion," said Hilda.

Tavy Mansion! There was the secret! Tavy Mansion was at the bottom of her scheme. Alicia Hesketh had a fine house, and Hilda must have a finer. She, Hilda, of all people, was a sn.o.b. He had long suspected it.

He rejoined sharply: "Of course it isn't larger than Tavy Mansion! It isn't as large."

"Oh! Edwin. How can you say such things!"

In the portico, as Ingpen was re-locking the door, the husband said negligently, superiorly, cheerfully:

"It's not so bad. I expect there's hundreds of places like this up and down the country--going cheap."

The walk back to the "Live and Let Live" was irked by constraint, against which everyone fought n.o.bly, smiling, laughing, making remarks about c.o.c.krobins, the sky, the Christmas dinner.

"So I hear it's settled you're going to London when you leave school, kiddie," said Tertius Ingpen, to bridge over a fearful hiatus in the prittle-prattle.

George, so big now and so mannishly dressed as to be amused and not a bit hurt by the appellation "kiddie," confirmed the statement in his deepening voice.

Edwin thought:

"It's more than _I_ hear, anyway!"

Hilda had told him that during the visit to London the project for articling George to Johnnie Orgreave had been revived, but she had not said that a decision had been taken. Though Edwin from careful pride had not spoken freely--George being Hilda's affair and not his--he had shown no enthusiasm. Johnnie Orgreave had sunk permanently in his esteem--scarcely less so than Jimmie, whose conjugal eccentricities had scandalised the Five Towns and were achieving the ruin of the Orgreave practice; or than Tom, who was developing into a miser. Moreover, he did not at all care for George going to London. Why should it be thought necessary for George to go to London? The sagacious and successful provincial in Edwin was darkly jealous of London, as a rival superficial and brilliant. And now he learnt from Ingpen that George's destiny was fixed.... A matter of small importance, however!

Did "they" seriously expect him to travel from Ladderedge Hall to his works, and from his works to Ladderedge Hall every week-day of his life?

He laughed sardonically to himself.

Out came the sun, which George greeted with a cheer. And Edwin, to his own surprise, began to feel hungry.

III

"I shan't take that house, you know," said Edwin, casually and yet confidentially, in a pause which followed a long a.n.a.lysis, by Ingpen, of Ingpen's sensations in hospital before he was out of danger.

They sat on opposite sides of a splendid extravagant fire in Ingpen's dining-room.

Ingpen, sprawling in a shabby, uncomfortable easychair, and flushed with the activity of digestion, raised his eyebrows, squinted down at the cigarette between his lips, and answered impartially:

"No. So I gather. Of course you must understand it was Hilda's plan to go up there. I merely fell in with it,--simplest thing to do in these cases!"

"Certainly."

Thus they both condescended to the feather-headed capricious woman, dismissed her, and felt a marked access of sincere intimacy on a plane of civilisation exclusively masculine.

In the succeeding silence of satisfaction and relief could be heard George, in the drawing-room above, practising again the piano part of a Haydn violin sonata which he had very nervously tried over with Ingpen while they were awaiting dinner.

Ingpen said suddenly:

"I say, old chap! Why have you never mentioned that you happened to meet a certain person in my room at Hanbridge that night you went over there for me?" He frowned.

Edwin had a thrill, pleasurable and apprehensive, at the prospect of a supreme confidence.

"It was no earthly business of mine," he answered lightly. But his tone conveyed: "You surely ought to be aware that my loyalty and my discretion are complete."

And Ingpen, replying to Edwin's tone, said with a simple directness that flattered Edwin to the heart:

"Naturally I knew I was quite safe in your hands.... I've rea.s.sured the lady." Ingpen smiled slightly.

Edwin was too proud to tell Ingpen that he had not said a word to Hilda, and Ingpen was too proud to tell Edwin that he a.s.sumed as much.

At that moment Hilda came into the room, murmuring a carol that some children of Stockbrook had sung on the doorstep during dinner.

"Don't be afraid--I'm not going to interrupt. I know you're in the thick of it," said she archly, not guessing how exactly truthful she was.

Ingpen, keeping his presence of mind in the most admirable manner, rejoined with irony:

"You don't mean to say you've finished already explaining to Mrs. Dummer how she ought to run my house for me!"

"How soon do you mean to have this table cleared?" asked Hilda.

The Christmas dinner, served by a raw girl in a large bluish-white pinafore, temporarily hired to a.s.sist Mrs. Dummer the housekeeper, had been a good one. Its only real fault was that it had had a little too much the air of being a special and mighty effort; and although it owed something to Hilda's parcels, Ingpen was justified in the self-satisfaction which he did not quite conceal as a bachelor host.

But now, under Hilda's quizzing gaze, not merely the table but the room and the house sank to the tenth-rate. The coa.r.s.e imperfections of the linen and the cutlery grew very apparent; the disorder of bottles and gla.s.ses and cups recalled the refectory of an inferior club. And the untidiness of the room, heaped with acc.u.mulations of newspapers, magazines, doc.u.ments, books, boxes and musical-instrument cases, loudly accused the solitary despot whose daily caprices of arrangement were perpetuated and rendered sacred by the ukase that nothing was to be disturbed. Hilda's glinting eyes seemed to challenge each corner and dark place to confess its shameful dirt, and the malicious poise of her head mysteriously communicated the fact that in the past fortnight she had spied out every sinister secret in the whole graceless, primitive wigwam.

"This table," retorted Ingpen bravely, "is going to be cleared when it won't disturb me to have it cleared."

"All right," said Hilda. "But Mrs. Dummer does want to get on with her washing-up."

"Look here, madam," Ingpen replied. "You're a little ray of sunshine, and all that, and I'm the first to say so; but I'm not your husband."

He made a warning gesture. "Now don't say you'd be sorry for any woman I was the husband of. Think of something more original." He burst out laughing.

Hilda went to the window and looked out at the fading day.

"Please, I only popped in to say it's nearly a quarter to three, and George and I will go down to the inn and bring the dog-cart up here. I want a little walk. We shan't get home till dark as it is."

"Oh! Chance it and stop for tea, and all will be forgiven."