She held her umbrella, her bead chatelaine, and a little
leather case in her grey-gloved hands, while Harry staggered out of the
ugly little train with her bags.
'There's a trunk at the back,' she said in her bright voice. But she was
not feeling bright. The twin black cones of the iron foundry blasted
their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid. The train
waited cheerfully. It would wait another ten minutes. She knew it. It was
all so deadly familiar.
Let us confess it at once. She was a lady's maid, thirty years old, come
back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him
dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she
love him? No. She didn't pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and
ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other
affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to
marry her first-love, who had waited--or remained single--all these
years.
'Won't a porter carry those?' she said, as Harry strode with his
workman's stride down the platform towards the guard's van.
'I can manage,' he said.
And with her umbrella, her chatelaine, and her little leather case, she
followed him.
The trunk was there.
'We'll get Heather's greengrocer's cart to fetch it up,' he said.
'Isn't there a cab?' said Fanny, knowing dismally enough that there
wasn't.
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