"The Post Office people obligingly stamp every envelope with the name of the place it comes from. I don't think we want to leave a trail behind us."
Ingleby stood still a moment longer with a flush in his face. "Nothing would stop that woman's talking—not even a gag. It's horribly unfortunate."
"It usually is," and Leger looked at him with a curious little smile. "The worst of having a propaganda is that the people who haven't any get indignant when one doesn't live up to it. They naturally lay part of the blame on the fallacies he believes in."
Ingleby swung round. "I'd sooner face a battery—but I'm going down."
He disappeared down the basement steps, and in another minute a harsh voice apparently vituperating him rose up, and when he rejoined his comrade his face was redder than ever.
"Now," he said, "we'll go; the sooner the better. Everybody in the neighbourhood will know what she thinks of me inside of ten minutes."
They slipped out into the street, and Ingleby stopped a moment at the end of it and looked back with a curious expression in his face. The sunlight that lay bright upon one side of it emphasized its unattractiveness. Tall houses, grim in their squalid ugliness, shut it in, and the hot air that scarcely stirred between them was heavy with the sour odours from a neighbouring tanyard. A hoarse clamour and a woman's voice, high-pitched and shrill with fear or anger, came out of a shadowy alley where unkempt children played in the gutter. The uproar did not concern them. They were apparently used to it.
"I've lived five years in the midst of—this—and now I'm almost sorry to leave it," he said. "There's no reason in us."
Then he turned again with a little resolute shake of his shoulders. "Well, we have done with it at last, and if half what one hears is true there is a chance for such as us in the country we are going to."
Leger said nothing, and it was silently they threaded their way deviously in and out of alleys and archways towards the station. Their life had been a hard one in that squalid town, but the place had, after all, been home, and they could not tell what awaited them in the unknown. They had in them the steadfastness which is born of struggle, but the unthinking courage of youth that has felt no care is quite a different thing.