“And you are making yourself at home in advance!” suggested he dryly.
“Well, sir, you needn’t see more of me than you feel inclined to,” retorted Bram.
And, with a curt salutation, he turned on his heel and went out of the house by the back way, through the kitchen and the still open outer door.
He went up the hill towards the row of cottages on the summit, and made inquiries which resulted in his finding the two modest rooms he wanted in the end house of all, within a stone’s throw of a ruin so strange-looking that Bram made a tour of inspection of the ramshackle old building before returning to the town.
This ruin had once been a country mansion of fair size and of some importance, but the traces of its architectural beauties were now few and far apart. Of the main building only one side wall retained enough of its old characteristics to claim attention; at the top of the massive stonework a Tudor chimney, of handsome proportions, rose in incongruous stateliness above the decaying roof which had been placed over a row of cottages, which, built up within the old wall, had grown ruinous in their turn, and were now shut up and deserted.
At the back of this heterogeneous pile and a little distance away from it, another long and massive stone wall, with a Tudor window out of which once Wolsey had looked, had now become the chief prop and mainstay of another row of buildings, one of which was a school, another a chapel, while a third was a now disused stable.
And in the shelter of these ruins and remains of greatness a tall chimney, a cluster of sheds, and a pile of grass-grown trucks marked the spot where a now disused coal mine added a touch of fantastic desolation to the scene.
Bram went all round the pit-mouth and surveyed the town of Sheffield, with its dead yellow lights and its patches of blackness, like an inky sea bearing a fleet of ill-lighted boats on its breast in a Stygian mist. He thought he should like this evening walk out of the smoke and the lick of the fiery tongues, even without the occasional peeps he should get at Miss Biron.
But he hardly knew, perhaps, how much the thought of her, of her dancing eyes, her rapid movements like the sweep of a bird’s wing, had to do with his feeling.
He went back round the pit’s mouth, making his way with some difficulty in the darkness over the rough stones with which the place was thickly strewn.