She could not have said what her thoughts were. Probably she had no thoughts. Nothing but the steady throb, quiet and reiterated as the pulse of the machinery in the shops, of that conviction of fatality that she felt.
It seemed to run on in her head as the belting ran on the shaft: "He won't come back. He won't come back!"
It was in the middle of this monotonous inward muttering that the door of the office opened, and there came out a shortish figure, leather-jacketed and with enveloping overalls and wearing a cap with goggles, peak behind. It was young Mr. Ryan.
He raised his cap and would have passed Gwenna quickly, but she stopped him.
She didn't know why. Since her marriage she had (ungratefully enough) almost forgotten the red-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it was not so much himself as his cap and mufflings that caught her eye now.
"Why, are you going up?" she asked.
"Yes," said young Ryan gloomily.
He seemed to be in the worst of tempers as he went on, grumblingly. He was going up. Just his luck. Plenty of times he'd wanted to go and hadn't been allowed. Now he'd got to go, just when he didn't want to.
"You don't want to?" Gwenna repeated.
Mr. Ryan coloured a little. "Well, if I've got to, that doesn't matter."