Lois stirred faintly. Hasn t he?she said.
No.There was silence for a time. Lois was frightened. Had something happened also to her brother? This fear was closer and more irksome.
Selby s was cleaned out, gutted. We had a near shave of it?a
You have no loss, Dadda?
Nothing to mention. After another silence, her father said:
I d rather be myself than William Selby. Of course it may merely be bad luck?ayou don t know. But whatever it was, I wouldn t like to add one to the the list of fires just now. Selby was at the ??George when it broke out?aI don t know where the lad was?a!
Father, broke in Lois, why do you talk like that? Why do you talk as if Will had done it?She ended suddenly. Her father looked at her pale, mute face.
I don t talk as if Will had done it,he said. I don t even think it.
Feeling she was going to cry, Lois rose and left her room. Her father sighed, and leaning his elbows on his knees, whistled faintly into the fire. He was no thinking about her.
Lois went down to the kitchen and asked Lucy, the parlourmaid, to go out with her. She somehow shrank from going alone, lest people should stare at her overmuch: and she felt an overpowering impulse to go to the scene of the tragedy, to judge for herself.
The churches were chiming half-past eight when the young lady and the maid set off down the street. Nearer the fair, swarthy, thin-legged men were pushing barrels of water towards the market-place, and the gipsy women, with hard brows, and dressed in tight velvet bodices, hurried along the pavement with jugs of milk, and great brass water-ewers and loaves and breakfast parcels. People were just getting up, and in the poorer streets was a continual splash of tea-leaves, flung out on to the cobble-stones. A teapot came crashing down from an upper storey just behind Lois, and she, starting round and looking up, thought that the trembling, drink-bleared man at the upper window, who was stupidly staring after his pot, had had designs on her life; and she went on her way shuddering at the grim tragedy of life.
In the dull October morning the ruined factory was black and ghastly. The window-frames were all jagged, and the walls stood gAunt. Inside was a tangle of twisted debris, the iron, in parts red with bright rust, looking still hot; the charred wood was black and satiny; from dishevelled heaps, sodden with water, a faint smoke rose dimly. Lois stood and looked. If he had done that! He might even be dead here, burned to ash and lost for ever. It was almost soothing to feel so. He would be safe in the eternity which now she must hope in.
At her side the pretty, sympathetic maid chatted plaintively. Suddenly, from one of her lapses into silences, she exclaimed:
Why if there isn t Mr. Jack!
