elemental enterprise of keeping stomachs filled and skins warm, and had no thought beyond it.  In Bursley market-place the week’s labour was being translated into food and drink and clothing by experts who could distinguish infallibly between elevenpence-halfpenny and a shilling.  Rachel was such an expert.  She forced her thoughts down to the familiar, sane, safe subject of shopping, though to-night her errands were of the simplest description, requiring no brains.  But she could not hold her thoughts.  A voice was continually whispering to her—­not Louis Fores’ voice, but a voice within herself, that she had never clearly heard before.  Alternatively she scorned it and trembled at it.

She stopped in front of the huge window of Wason’s Provision Emporium.

“Is this the first house of call?” asked Louis airily, swinging the reticule and his stick together.

“Well—­” she hesitated.  “Mrs. Tams told me they were selling Singapore pineapple at sevenpence-halfpenny.  Mas.  Maldon fancies pineapple.  I’ve known her fancy a bit of pineapple when she wouldn’t touch anything else....  Yes, there it is!”

In fact, the whole of the upper half of Wason’s window was yellow with tins of preserved pineapple.  And great tickets said:  “Delicious chunks, 7 1/2d. per large tin.  Chunks, 6 1/2d. per large tin.”

Customers in ones and twos kept entering and leaving the shop.  Rachel moved on towards the door, which was at the corner of the Cock yard, and looked within.  The long double counters were being assailed by a surging multitude who fought for the attention of prestidigitatory salesmen.

“Hm!” murmured Rachel.  “That may be all very well for Mrs. Tams....”

A moment later she said—­

“It’s always like that with Wason’s shops for the first week or two!”

And her faintly sarcastic tone of a shrewd housewife immediately set Wason in his place—­Wason with his two hundred and sixty-five shops, and his racing-cars, and his visits to kings and princes.  Wason had emporia all over the kingdom, and in particular at Knype, Hanbridge, and Longshaw.  And now he had penetrated to Bursley, sleepiest of the Five.  His method was to storm a place by means of electricity, full-page advertisements in news-papers, the power of his mere name, and a leading line or so.  At Bursley his leading line was apparently “Singapore delicious chunks at 7-1/2d. per large tin.”  Rachel knew Wason; she had known him at Knype.  And she was well aware that his speciality was second-rate.  She despised him.  She despised that multitude of simpletons who, full of the ancient illusion that somewhere something can regularly be had for nothing, imagined that Wason’s bacon and cheese were cheap because he sold preserved pineapple at a penny less than anybody else in the town.  And she despised the roaring, vulgar success of advertising and electricity.  She had in her some tincture of the old nineteenth