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‘Has young Timmis been here?’ he inquired curtly.

‘Yes.’

‘Ha!’ with subdued, sinister satisfaction, ‘I saw him going out. He didna see me.’ Ezra Brunt deposited his hat and sat down.

Intimate with all her father’s various moods, she saw instantly and with terrible certainty that a series of chances had fatally combined themselves against her. If only she had not happened to tell Clive that her father would be at Manchester this day! If only her father had adhered to his customary hour of return! If only Clive had had the sense to make his proposal openly at Pireford some evening! If only he had left a little earlier! If only her father had not caught him going out by the side-door on a Thursday afternoon when the place was empty! Here, she guessed, was the suggestion of furtiveness which had raised her father’s unreasoning anger, often fierce, and always incalculable.

‘Clive Timmis has asked me to marry him, father.’

‘Has he!’

‘Surely you must have known, father, that he and I were seeing each other a great deal.’

‘Not from your lips, my girl.’

‘Well, father—-‘ Again she stopped, this strong and capable woman, gifted with a fine brain to organize and a powerful will to command. She quailed, robbed of speech, before the causeless, vindictive, and infantile wrath of an old man who happened to be in a bad temper. She actually felt like a naughty schoolgirl before him. Such is the tremendous influence of lifelong habit, the irresistible power of the patria potestas when it has never been relaxed. Ezra Brunt saw in front of him only a cowering child. ‘Clive is coming up to see you to-night,’ she went on timidly, clearing her throat.

‘Humph! Is he?’

The rosy and tender dream of five minutes ago lay in fragments at Eva’s feet. She brooded with stricken apprehension upon the forms of obstruction which his despotism might choose.

* * * * *

The next morning Clive and his uncle breakfasted together as usual in the parlour behind, the chemist’s shop.

‘Uncle,’ said Clive brusquely, when the meal was nearly finished, ‘I’d better tell you that I’ve proposed to Eva Brunt.’

Old George Timmis lowered the Manchester Guardian and gazed at Clive over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘She is a good girl,’ he remarked; ‘she will make you a good wife. Have you spoken to her father?’

‘That’s the point. I saw him last night, and I’ll tell you what he said. These were his words: “You can marry my daughter, Mr. Timmis, when your uncle agrees to part with his shop!”‘

‘That I shall never do, nephew,’ said the aged patriarch quietly and deliberately.

‘Of course you won’t, uncle. I shouldn’t think of suggesting it. I’m merely telling you what he said.’ Clive laughed harshly. ‘Why,’ he added, ‘the man must be mad!’

‘What did the young woman say to that?’ his uncle inquired.

Clive frowned.

‘I didn’t see her last night,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask to see her. I was too angry.’

Just then the post arrived, and there was a letter for Clive, which he read and put carefully in his waistcoat pocket.

‘Eva writes asking me to go to Pireford to-night,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I’ll soon settle it, depend on that. If Ezra Brunt refuses his consent, so much the worse for him. I wonder whether he actually imagines that a grown man and a grown woman are to be…. Ah well, I can’t talk about it! It’s too silly. I’ll be off to the works.’

When Clive reached Pireford that night, Eva herself opened the door to him. She was wearing a gray frock, and over it a large white apron, perfectly plain.

‘My girls are both out to-night,’ she said, ‘and I was making some puffs for the sewing-meeting tea. Come into the breakfast-room…. This way,’ she added, guiding him. He had entered the house on the previous night for the first time. She spoke hurriedly, and, instead of stopping in the breakfast-room, wandered uncertainly through it into the greenhouse, to which it gave access by means of a French window. In the dark, confined space, amid the close-packed blossoms, they stood together. She bent down to smell at a musk-plant. He took her hand and drew her soft and yielding form towards him and kissed her warm face.