They were in an attic which was used for the storage of reams upon reams of paper. By the light of a candle in a tin candlestick, they had passed alone together through corridors and up flights of stairs at the back of the shop. She had seen everything that was connected with the enterprise of steam-printing, and now they were at the top of the old house and at the end of the excursion. "I used to work here," said Edwin Clayhanger. She inquired about the work. "Well," he drawled, "reading and writing, you know--at that very table." In the aperture of the window, amid piles of paper, stood a rickety old table, covered with dust. "But there's no fireplace," she said, glancing round the room, and then directly at him. "I know." "But how did you do in winter?" she eagerly appealed. And he replied shortly, and with a slight charming affectation of pride: "I did without." Her throat tightened, and she could feel the tears suddenly swim in her eyes. She was not touched by the vision of his hardships. It was the thought of all his youth that exquisitely saddened her--or all the years which were and would be for ever hidden from her. She knew that she alone of all human beings was gifted with the power to understand and fully sympathize with him. And so she grieved over the long wilderness of time during which he had been uncomprehended. She wanted, by some immense effort of tenderness, to recompense him for all that he had suffered. And she had a divine curiosity concerning the whole of his past life. She had never had this curiosity in relation to George Cannon--she had only wondered about his affairs with other women. Nor had George Cannon ever evoked the tenderness which sprang up in her from some secret and inexhaustible source at the mere sight of Edwin Clayhanger's wistful smile. Still, in that moment, standing close to Edwin in the high solitude of the shadowed attic, the souvenir of George Cannon gripped her painfully. She thought: "He loves me, and he is ruined, and he will never see me again! And I am here, bursting with hope renewed, and dizzy with joy!" And she pictured Janet, too, wearying herself at a committee meeting. And she thought, "And here am I...!" Her bliss was tragic. "I think I ought to be going," she said softly. They re-threaded the corridors, and in each lower room, as they passed, Edwin Clayhanger extinguished the gas which he had lit there on the way up, and Hilda waited for him. And then they were back in the crude glare of the shop. The fat, untidy old man was not visible. Edwin helped her with the mackintosh, and she liked him for the awkwardness of his efforts in doing so. At the door, she urged him not to come out, and referred to his cold. "This isn't the end of winter, it's the beginning," she warned him. Nobody else, she knew, would watch over him. But he insisted on coming out. They arranged a rendezvous for three o'clock on the morrow, and then they shook hands.