As Rachel passed the negligible second-hand bookstall again, it was made visible to her by the fact that Councillor Thomas Batchgrew was just emerging from the shop behind it, with a large volume in his black-gloved hands.  Thomas Batchgrew came out of the dark bookshop as a famous old actor, accustomed to decades of crude public worship, comes out of a fashionable restaurant into a fashionable thoroughfare.  His satisfied and self-conscious countenance showed that he knew that nearly everybody in sight was or ought to be acquainted with his identity and his renown, and showed also that his pretence of being unaware of this tremendous and luscious fact was playful and not seriously meant to deceive a world of admirers.  He was wearing a light tweed suit, with a fancy waistcoat and a hard, pale-grey hat.  As he aged, his tendency to striking pale attire was becoming accentuated; at any rate, it had the advantage of harmonizing with his unique whiskers—­those whiskers which differentiated him from all the rest of the human race in the Five Towns.

Rachel blushed, partly because he was suddenly so close to her, partly because she disapproved of the cunning expression on his red, seamed face and was afraid he might divine her thoughts, and partly because she recalled the violent things she had said against him to Louis.  But as soon as Thomas Batchgrew caught sight of her the expression of his faced changed in an instant to one of benevolence and artless joy; the change in it was indeed dramatic.

And Rachel, pleased and flattered, said to herself, almost startled—­

“He really admires me.  And I do believe he always did.”

And since admiration is a sweet drug, whether offered by a rascal or by the pure in heart, she forgot momentarily the horror of her domestic dilemma.

II

“Eh, lass!” Thomas Batchgrew was saying familiarly, after he had inquired about Louis, “I’m rare glad for thy sake it was no worse.”  His frank implication that he was glad only for her sake gratified and did not wound her as a wife.

The next moment he had dismissed the case of Louis and was displaying to her the volume which he carried.  It was a folio Bible, printed by the Cornishman Tregorthy in the town of Bursley, within two hundred yards of where they were standing, in the earliest years of the nineteenth century—­a bibliographical curiosity, as Thomas Batchgrew vaguely knew, for he wet his gloved thumb and, resting the book on one raised knee, roughly turned over several pages till he came to the title-page containing the word “Bursley,” which he showed with pride to Rachel.  Rachel, however, not being in the slightest degree a bibliophile, discerned no interest whatever in the title-page.  She merely murmured with politeness, “Oh, yes!  Bursley,” while animadverting privately on the old man’s odious trick of wetting his gloved thumb and leaving marks on the pages.