Rachel walked away.  Before she reached the end of the frowsy street, whose meanness and monotony of tiny-bow-windows exemplified intensely the most deplorable characteristics of a district where brutish licence is decreasing, she was overtaken by a lanky girl in a pinafore.

“If ye please, miss, Mester Maldon’s gone to live at 29 Birches Street, ’anbridge.”

Having made this announcement, the girl ran off, with a short giggle.

Rachel, had to walk half a mile to reach the tram-route.  This re-visiting of her native town, which she had quitted only a few weeks earlier, seemed to her like the sad resumption of an existence long forgotten.  She was self-conscious and hoped that she would not encounter the curiosity of any of her Knype acquaintances.  She felt easier when she was within the sheltering car and rumbling and jerking through the gloomy carnival of Easter Saturday afternoon in Knype and Cauldon on the way to Hanbridge.

After leaving the car in Crown Square, she had to climb through all the western quarter of Hanbridge to the very edge of the town, on the hummock that separates it from the Axe Moorlands.  Birches Street, as she had guessed, was in the suburb known as Birches Pike.  It ran right to the top of the hill, and the upper portion consisted of new cottage-houses in groups of two or three, with vacant lots between.  Why should Julian have chosen Birches Street for residence, seeing that his business was in Knype?  It was a repellent street; it was out even of the little world where sordidness is at any rate dignified by tradition and anaemic ideals can support each other in close companionship.  It had neither a past nor a future.  The steep end of it was an horizon of cloud.  The April east wind blew the smoke of Hanbridge right across it.

In this east wind men in shirt-sleeves, and women with aprons over their heads, stood nonchalantly at cottage gates contemplating the vacuum of leisure.  On two different parcels of land teams of shrieking boys were playing football, with piles of caps and jackets to serve as goal-posts.  To the left, in a clough, was an enormous yellow marlpit, with pools of water in its depths, and gangways of planks along them, and a few overturned wheelbarrows lying here and there.  A group of men drove at full speed up the street in a dogcart behind a sweating cob, stopped violently at the summit, and, taking watches from pockets, began to let pigeons out of baskets.  The pigeons rose in wide circles and were lost in the vast dome of melancholy that hung over the district.

II

No. 29 was the second house from the top, new, and already in decay.  It and its attached twin were named “Prospect Villas” in vermilion tiles on the yellowish-red bricks of the facade.  Hot, and yet chilled by the wind, Rachel hesitated a moment at the gate, suddenly realizing the perils of her mission.  And then she saw Julian Maldon standing in the bay-window of the ground floor; he was eating.  Simultaneously he recognized her.