"Good evening, Mrs. Thompson."—He took off his hat, and bowed very respectfully.
"Oh! Good evening, Mr. Marsden."
"You don't often come this way?"
"Oh, yes, I do," said Mrs. Thompson rather stiffly. "It is a favourite walk of mine."
"I venture to applaud your taste." And he pointed in the direction of the town. "Old Mallingbridge looks quite romantic from along here.... But the gas-works spoil the picture, don't they?"
The town looked pretty enough in the mellow evening glow. Beyond the railway embankment, where signal lamps began to show as spots of faint red and green, the clustered roofs mingled into solid sharp-edged masses, and the two church towers appeared strangely high and ponderous against the infinitely pure depths of a cloudless sky. Soon a soft greyness would rise from the horizon; indistinctness, vagueness, mystery would creep over the town and the fields, blotting out the ugly gas-works, hiding the common works of men, giving the world back to nature; but there would be no real night. In these, the longest days of the year, the light never quite died.
The colour of her blue dress and of the pink roses in her toque was clearly visible, as Mrs. Thompson and the young man walked on side by side. For a minute she politely made conversation.
"I have often wondered," she said, with brisk business-like tones, "what use the railway company will eventually make of all this land."
"Ah! I wonder."
"They would not have bought it unless they had some remote object in view; and they would not have held it if the object had vanished. Sensible people don't keep two hundred acres of land lying idle unless they have a purpose."