Then Brindley came up.  Brindley, too, was going to London.  And Nellie’s saccharine assurances to Brindley that Edward Henry really needed a change just about completed Edward Henry’s desperation.  Not even the uproarious advent of two jolly wholesale grocers, Messieurs Garvin & Quorrall, also going to London, could effectually lighten his pessimism.

When the train steamed in, Edward Henry, in fear, postponed the ultimate kiss as long as possible.  He allowed Brindley to climb before him into the second-class compartment, and purposely tarried in finding change for the porter; and then he turned to Nellie and stooped.  She raised her white veil and raised the angelic face.  They kissed—­the same false kiss—­and she was withdrawing her lips ...  But suddenly she put them again to his for one second, with a hysterical, clinging pressure.  It was nothing.  Nobody could have noticed it.  She herself pretended that she had not done it.  Edward Henry had to pretend not to notice it.  But to him it was everything.  She had relented.  She had surrendered.  The sign had come from her.  She wished him to enjoy his visit to London.

He said to himself: 

“Dashed if I don’t write to her every day!”

He leaned out of the window as the train rolled away and waved and smiled to her, not concealing his sentiments now; nor did she conceal hers as she replied with exquisite pantomime to his signals.  But if the train had not been rapidly and infallibly separating them the reconciliation could scarcely have been thus open.  If for some reason the train had backed into the station and ejected its passengers, those two would have covered up their feelings again in an instant.  Such is human nature in the Five Towns.

When Edward Henry withdrew his head into the compartment Brindley and Mr. Garvin, the latter standing at the corridor door, observed that his spirits had shot up in the most astonishing manner, and in their blindness they attributed the phenomenon to Edward Henry’s delight in a temporary freedom from domesticity.

Mr. Garvin had come from the neighbouring compartment, which was first-class, to suggest a game at bridge.  Messieurs Garvin & Quorrall journeyed to London once a week and sometimes oftener, and, being traders, they had special season-tickets.  They travelled first-class because their special season-tickets were first-class, Brindley said that he didn’t mind a game, but that he had not the slightest intention of paying excess fare for the privilege.  Mr. Garvin told him to come along and trust in Messieurs Garvin & Quorrall.  Edward Henry, not nowadays an enthusiastic card-player, enthusiastically agreed to join the hand, and announced that he did not care if he paid forty excess fares.  Whereupon Robert Brindley grumbled enviously that it was “all very well for millionaires"!...  They followed Mr. Garvin into the first-class compartment, and it soon appeared that Messrs Garvin & Quorrall did, in fact, own the train, and that the London and North Western Railway was no more than their washpot.