Louis was at the door ... he was beyond the door ... she was lost.

“Louis!” she cried.

He put his face in at the door.

“Will you just pass me my hand-mirror.  It’s on the dressing-table.”

Louis was thrilled by this simple request.  The hand-mirror had arrived in the house as a wedding-present.  It was backed with tortoise-shell, and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell.  She had “made out” that a hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of a serious Five Towns woman.  She had always referred to it as “the” hand-mirror—­as though disdaining special ownership.  She had derided it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic foolish graces of an empty-headed doll.  And now she was asking for it because she wanted it; and she had said “my” hand-mirror!

This revelation of the odalisque in his Rachel enchanted Louis, and incidentally it also enchanted Rachel.  She had employed a desperate remedy, and the result on both of them filled her with a most surprising gladness.  Louis judged it to be deliciously right that Rachel should be anxious to know whether her weeping had indeed made her into an object improper for the beholding of the male eye, and Rachel to her astonishment shared his opinion.  She was “vain,” and they were both well content.  In taking it she touched his hand.  He bent and kissed her.  Each of them was ravaged by formidable fears for the future, tremendously disturbed in secret by the mysterious word from Julian; and yet that kiss stood unique among their kisses, and in their simplicity they knew not why.  And as they kissed they hated Julian, and the past, and the whole world, for thus coming between them and deranging their love.  They would, had it been possible, have sold all the future for tranquillity in that moment.

VII

Going downstairs, Louis found Mrs. Tarns standing in the back part of the lobby between the parlour door and the kitchen; obviously she had stationed herself there in order to keep watch on the messenger from the “Three Tuns.”  As the master of the house approached with dignity the foot of the stairs, the messenger stirred, and in the classic manner of messengers fingered uneasily his hat.  The fingers were dirty.  The hat was dirty and shabby.  It had been somebody else’s hat before coming into the possession of the messenger.  The same applied to his jacket and trousers.  The jacket was well cut, but green; the trousers, with their ragged, muddy edges, yet betrayed a pattern of distinction.  Round his neck the messenger wore a thin muffler, and on his feet an exhausted pair of tennis-shoes.  These noiseless shoes accentuated and confirmed the stealthy glance of his eyes.  Except for an unshaven chin, and the confidence-destroying