“There’s a trunk at the back,” she said in her bright voice. But she was not feeling bright. The twin black cones of the iron foundry blasted their sky-high fires into the night. The whole scene was lurid. The train waited cheerfully. It would wait another ten minutes. She knew it. It was all so deadly familiar.
Let us confess it at once. She was a lady’s maid, thirty years old, come back to marry her first-love, a foundry worker: after having kept him dangling, off and on, for a dozen years. Why had she come back? Did she love him? No. She didn’t pretend to. She had loved her brilliant and ambitious cousin, who had jilted her, and who had died. She had had other affairs which had come to nothing. So here she was, come back suddenly to marry her first-love, who had waited—or remained single—all these years.
“Won’t a porter carry those?” she said, as Harry strode with his workman’s stride down the platform towards the guard’s van.
“I can manage,” he said.
And with her umbrella, her chatelaine, and her little leather case, she followed him.
The trunk was there.
“We’ll get Heather’s greengrocer’s cart to fetch it up,” he said.
“Isn’t there a cab?” said Fanny, knowing dismally enough that there wasn’t.
“I’ll just put it aside o’ the penny-in-the-slot, and Heather’s greengrocers’ll fetch it about half past eight,” he said.
He seized the box by its two handles and staggered with it across the level-crossing, bumping his legs against it as he waddled. Then he dropped it by the red sweet-meats machine.