On the Thursday afternoon with which we began, Brunt's was deserted save for the housekeeper and Eva, who was writing letters in her room.
'I saw you from my window, coming up the street,' she said to Clive, 'and so I ran down to open the door. Will you come into father's room? He is in Manchester for the day, buying.
'I knew that,' said Timmis.
'How did you know?' She observed that his manner was somewhat nervous and constrained.
'You yourself told me last night—don't you remember?'
'So I did.'
'That's why I sent the note round this morning to say I'd call this afternoon. You got it, I suppose?'
She nodded thoughtfully.
'Well, what is this business you want to talk about?'
It was spoken with a brave carelessness, but he caught the tremor in her voice, and saw her little hand shake as it lay on the table amid her father's papers. Without knowing why he should do so, he stepped hastily forward and seized that hand. Her emotion unmanned him. He thought he was going to cry; he could not account for himself.
'Eva,' he said thickly, 'you know what the business is; you know, don't you?'
She smiled. That smile, the softness of her hand, the sparkle in her eye, the heave of her small bosom ... it was the divinest miracle! Clive, manufacturer of majolica, went hot and then cold, and then his wits were suddenly his own again.
'That's all right,' he murmured, and sighed, and placed on Eva's lips the first kiss that had ever lain there.
'Dear boy,' she said later, 'you should have come up to Pireford, not here, and when father was there.'
'Should I?' he answered happily. 'It just occurred to me all of a sudden this morning that you would be here, and that I couldn't wait.'
'You will come up to-night and see father?'
'I had meant to.'
'You had better go home now.'
'Had I?'
She nodded, putting her lips tightly together—a trick of hers.
'Come up about half-past eight.'
'Good! I will let myself out.'
He left her, and she gazed dreamily at the window, which looked on to a whitewashed yard. The next moment someone else entered the room with heavy footsteps. She turned round a little startled.
It was her father.
'Why! You are back early, father! How——' She stopped. Something in the old man's glance gave her a premonition of disaster. To this day she does not know what accident brought him from Manchester two hours sooner than usual, and to Machin Street instead of Pireford.
'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.
'Oh, Clive!' she said. 'Whatever are we to do?'
'Do?' he replied, enchanted by her instinctive feminine surrender and reliance upon him, which seemed the more precious in that creature so proud and reserved to all others. 'Do! Where is your father?'
'Reading the Signal in the dining-room.'
Every business man in the Five Towns reads the Staffordshire