The total effect was as though Miss Malkin had suddenly clicked the shutters down on all the windows of her soul and was spying at Rachel and Louis Fores through a tiny concealed orifice in the region of her eye.  It was nothing to Miss Malkin that Rachel on that night of all nights had come in to buy Singapore Delicious Chunks at 8-1/2d.  It was nothing to her that Mrs. Maldon had had “an attack.”  Miss Malkin merely saw Rachel and Fores gadding about the town together of a Saturday night while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed.  And she regarded Ted’s benevolence as the benevolence of a simpleton.  Between Miss Malkin’s taciturnity and the voice within her Rachel had a terrible three minutes.  She was “sneaped”; which fortunately made her red hair angry, so that she could keep some of her dignity.  Louis Fores seemed to be quite unconscious that a fearful scene was enacting between Miss Malkin and Rachel, and he blandly insisted on taking the pineapple-tin and the cocoa-tin and slipping them into the reticule, as though he had been shopping with Rachel all his life and there was a perfect understanding between them.  The moral effect was very bad.  Rachel blushed again.

When she emerged from the shop she had the illusion of being breathless, and in the midst of a terrific adventure the end of which none could foresee.  She was furious against Miss Malkin and against herself.  Yet she indignantly justified herself.  Was not Louis Fores Mrs. Maiden’s nephew, and were not he and she doing the best thing they could together under the difficult circumstances of the old lady’s illness?  If she was not to co-operate with the old lady’s sole relative in Bursley, with whom was she to co-operate?  In vain such justifications!...  She murderously hated Miss Malkin.  She said to herself, without meaning it, that no power should induce her ever to enter the shop again.

And she thought:  “I can’t possibly go into another shop to-night—­I can’t possibly do it!  And yet I must.  Why am I such a silly baby?”

As they walked slowly along the pavement she was in the wild dream anew, and Louis Fores was her only hope and reliance.  She clung to him, though not with her arm.  She seemed to know him very intimately, and still he was more enigmatic to her than ever he had been.

As for Louis, beneath his tranquil mien of a man of experience and infinite tact, he was undergoing the most extraordinary and delightful sensations, keener even than those which had thrilled him in Rachel’s kitchen on the previous evening.  The social snob in him had somehow suddenly expired, and he felt intensely the strange charm of going shopping of a Saturday night with a young woman, and making a little purchase here and a little purchase there, and thinking about halfpennies.  And in his fancy he built a small house to which he and Rachel would shortly return, and all the brilliant diversions of bachelordom seemed tame and tedious compared to the wondrous existence of this small house.