“You haven’t got any engagement, then, for this evening?” he said.
“No,” she replied simply.
“We might take a walk. What do you think?” he said, glancing down the road in either direction.
What, after all, was she to think? All the girls were pairing off with the boys for the after-chapel stroll and spoon.
“I don’t mind,” she said. “But I can’t go far. I’ve got to be in at nine.”
“Which way shall we go?” he said.
He steered off, turned downhill through the common gardens, and proposed to take her the not-very-original walk up Flint’s Lane, and along the railway line—the colliery railway, that is—then back up the Marlpool Road: a sort of circle. She agreed.
They did not find a great deal to talk about. She questioned him about his plans, and about the Cape. But save for bare outlines, which he gave readily enough, he was rather close.
“What do you do on Sunday nights as a rule?” he asked her.
“Oh, I have a walk with Lucy Grainger—or I go down to Hallam’s—or go home,” she answered.