"'Unaccountably,'" said Tom. "Had you anything on it?"
"No," Fearns admitted. "I've caught a cold this week, it seems."
Albert Benbow stared at him. Here was another competitor--and as acute a man of business as you would find in the Five Towns!
"Me, too!" said Edwin, smiling like a culprit.
Hilda sprang up gleefully, and pointed at him a finger of delicious censure.
"Oh! You wicked sinner! You never told me you'd gone in! You deceitful old thing!"
"Well, it was a man at the shop who would have me try," Edwin boyishly excused himself.
III
Hilda's vivacity enchanted Edwin. The charm of her reproof was simply exquisite in its good-nature and in the elegance of its gesture. The lingering taste of the feverish kiss she had given him a few minutes earlier bemused him and he flushed. To conceal his inconvenient happiness in the thought of his wife he turned to open the new enlarged window that gave on the garden. (He had done away with the old garden-entrance of the house, and thrown the side corridor into the drawing-room.) Then he moved towards Janet Orgreave, who was still seated at the closed piano.
"Your father isn't coming, I suppose?" he asked her.