There was: a figure swathed in an ulster, a maud over the ulster, and a high hat on the top of all. It could not have been there very long, because it was only speckled with snow. Mr. Povey plunged forward.
“It’s Mr. Scales, of all people!” said Mr. Povey.
“Mr. Scales!” cried Mrs. Baines.
And, “Mr. Scales!” murmured Sophia, terribly afraid.
Perhaps she was afraid of miracles. Mr. Scales sitting on her mother’s doorstep in the middle of the snowy night had assuredly the air of a miracle, of something dreamed in a dream, of something pathetically and impossibly appropriate—‘pat,’ as they say in the Five Towns. But he was a tangible fact there. And years afterwards, in the light of further knowledge of Mr. Scales, Sophia came to regard his being on the doorstep as the most natural and characteristic thing in the world. Real miracles never seem to be miracles, and that which at the first blush resembles one usually proves to be an instance of the extremely prosaic.
III
“Is that you, Mrs. Baines?” asked Gerald Scales, in a half-witted voice, looking up, and then getting to his feet. “Is this your house? So it is! Well, I’d no idea I was sitting on your doorstep.”
He smiled timidly, nay, sheepishly, while the women and Mr. Povey surrounded him with their astonished faces under the light of the gas-lamp. Certainly he was very pale.
“But whatever is the matter, Mr. Scales?” Mrs. Baines demanded in an anxious tone. “Are you ill? Have you been suddenly—”
“Oh no,” said the young man lightly. “It’s nothing. Only I was set on just now, down there,”—he pointed to the depths of King Street.