‘Who shall go first!’ he explained.

Robert had a queer sensation in his spine as his elder brother spoke to him for the first time in ten years.  He wanted to reply vocally.  He had a most imperious desire to reply vocally.  But he could not.  Something stronger even than the desire prevented his tongue from moving.

John tossed the coin—­it was a sovereign—­and covered it with his hands.

‘Tail!’ Robert murmured, somewhat hoarsely.

But it was head.

Then they went to bed.

II

The side door of Miss Emery’s shop was in Brick Passage, and not in the main street, so that a man, even a man of commanding stature and formidable appearance, might by insinuating himself into Brick Street, off King Street, and then taking the passage from the quieter end, arrive at it without attracting too much attention.  This course was adopted by John Hessian.  From the moment when he quitted his own house that Friday evening in June he had been subject to the delusion that the collective eye of Bursley was upon him.  As a matter of fact, the collective eye of Bursley is much too large and important to occupy itself exclusively with a single individual.  Bursley is not a village, and let no one think it.  Nevertheless, John was subject to the delusion.

The shop was shut, as he knew it would be.  But the curtained window of the parlour, between the side-door and the small shuttered side-window of the shop, gave a strange suggestion of interesting virgin spotless domesticity within.  John cast a fearful eye on the main thoroughfare.  Nobody seemed to be passing.  The chapel-keeper of the Wesleyan Chapel on the opposite side of Trafalgar Road was refreshing the massive Corinthian portico of that fane, and paying no regard whatever to the temple of Eros which Miss Emery’s shop had suddenly become.

So John knocked.

‘I am a fool!’ his thought ran as he knocked.

Because he did not know what he was about.  He had won the toss, and with it the right to approach Annie Emery before his brother.  But what then?  Well, he did desire to marry her, quite as much for herself as for his sister’s fortune.  But what then?  How was he going to explain the tepidity, the desertion, the long sin against love of ten years?  In short, how was he going to explain the inexplicable?  He could decidedly do nothing that evening except make a blundering ass of himself.  And how soon would Robert have the right to come along and say his say?  That point had not been settled.  Points so extremely delicate cannot be settled on a slate, and he had not dared to broach it viva voce to his younger brother.  He had been too afraid of a rebuff.

He then hoped that Annie’s servant would tell him that Annie was out.

Annie, however, took him at a disadvantage by opening the door herself.

‘Well, Mr Hessian!’ she exclaimed, her face bursting into a swift and welcoming smile.