She shivered. “The Blood Tub?”
“Yes. Melodrama and murder and gore—you know.”
“How horrible!” she exclaimed. “Why are people like that in the Five Towns?”
“It’s our form of poetry, I suppose,” he muttered, smiling at the pavement, which was surprisingly dry and clean in the feeble sunshine.
“I suppose it is!” she agreed heartily, after a pause.
“But you belong to the Five Towns, don’t you?” he asked.
“Oh yes! I used to.”
At the station the name of Bradshaw appeared to be quite unknown. But Hilda’s urgency impelled them upwards from the head porter to the ticket clerk, and from the ticket clerk to the stationmaster; and at length they discovered, in a stuffy stove-heated room with a fine view of a shawd-ruck and a pithead, that on Thursday evenings there was a train from Victoria to Brighton at eleven-thirty. Hilda seemed to sigh relief, and her demeanour changed. But Edwin’s uneasiness was only intensified. Brighton, which he had never seen, was in another hemisphere for him. It was mysterious, like her. It was part of her mystery. What could he do? His curse was that he had no initiative. Without her relentless force, he would never have penetrated even as far as the stuffy room where the unique Bradshaw lay. It was she who had taken him to the station, not he her. How could he hold her back from Brighton?