secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably
though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her
daughter aged twenty: "I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own
lawyer next!" Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.

And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on
her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the
intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of
its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had
inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a
curious tenderness that caused her to wonder at herself.


II

The Market Square of Turnhill was very large for the size of the town.
The diminutive town hall, which in reality was nothing but a
watch-house, seemed to be a mere incident on its irregular expanse, to
which the two-storey shops and dwellings made a low border. Behind this
crimson, blue-slated border rose the loftier forms of a church and a
large chapel, situate in adjacent streets. The square was calm and
almost deserted in the gloom. It typified the slow tranquillity of the
bailiwick, which was removed from the central life of the Five Towns,
and unconnected therewith by even a tram or an omnibus. Only within
recent years had Turnhill got so much as a railway station--rail-head of
a branch line. Turnhill was the extremity of civilization in those
parts. Go northwards out of this Market Square, and you would soon find
yourself amid the wild and hilly moorlands, sprinkled with iron-and-coal
villages whose red-flaming furnaces illustrated the eternal damnation
which was the chief article of their devout religious belief. And in the