She suggested they should study the hoardings as they went along, and both undertook to keep a look-out. But they were absorbed again in each other, having only a vague pleasurable sense of the crowded roads into which their steps now took them. Eventually they were in a main thoroughfare, with bustling shops brilliantly alight, and endless lines of stalls a-blazing; the roadway full of traffic and tram-cars and amazingly gigantic hay-carts, the pavements thick with a working population pressing forward and forward in multitudes. It was night now, absolutely; but it had stolen on them so gradually, they were astonished it was so definitely manifest. The hours of light were fresh and vivid in their minds, they could almost hear and feel the unending clatter of the omnibus that had carried them across the town, and the riverside picture was still before them. The change that had come over the world, this transition to absolute darkness illumined by street-lamps and flaring naphtha, seemed mystic and amazing. And a subtle warmth from all this illumination and from all this press and bustle, from all these close-packed moving vans and cars and hay-carts, pervaded the wintry air; a sense of exhilaration, too; a sense of life in all its unrefined, joyous reality, intense and vigorous, accepting itself unquestioningly, too sure of the worth of the gift ever to doubt it—even as the hungry ploughboy does not speculate metaphysically about the fat pork on his plate, but simply falls thereon and devours it.
"Book-stalls!" cried Lady Betty, "and piled up ever and ever so high. And look, rusty Wellington boots on the one hand, and rusty tools and bits of iron on the other."
They stayed a few minutes, and turned over some of the books, as interesting and varied as those in any more pretentious bookman's paradise. They both grew selfishly absorbed, each striking out an individual path, though remembering the other's existence at moments of extraordinary interest. In the end each became the possessor of a volume. Wyndham's was a facsimile of the first edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," a fattish octavo with the loveliest of wide margins, and the exact reproduction of the original engravings. Lady Betty's treasure was an old copy of the Dramatic Poems of Browning. Each paid the same one-and-sixpence, and as they bore away their prizes they discovered that each had been inspired by the same motive—of giving the other a memento of this wonderful day. Laughingly they exchanged their volumes, and the presentations thus formally carried out, Wyndham took possession of the Bunyan again in the mere capacity of carrier.
At last a hoarding with a great glare of light on it.
Wyndham let his eye roam over the posters. "The very thing," he cried. "A fine old-fashioned melodrama!"
"Splendid!" echoed Lady Betty, gazing at the many-coloured scenes that promised a generous measure of thrills and emotions.
"We shall have a box to ourselves," said Wyndham. "As you see, it is not so very extravagant. Only there is the problem of dining."
"What healthy little children we are!" she laughed.
"Oh, we must dine," he protested.
"I have faith," she declared. "Our good star has served us till now, it is not going to desert us. We shall light upon some quaint place presently."