So all morning they stayed together, even though they did not speak of him again, because while they were together the glamour persisted and the dream remained. Just as one name had robbed them that day, though they did not know it, so another name sweetened everything for them, and for a little space made them rich. Things might so easily have been as they wished that it seemed as if even now just a little determination might twist them into shape. In the ordinary course of events, and with ever such an ordinary share of luck, Geordie and May should have been married long ago, with a home of their own to offer the old folk at the last. Even now, so it seemed, Geordie might be somewhere in the street, in the midst of that crowd of healthy youth, sturdy manhood and wiry age. Instinctively, as they came out of each shop, they looked to find him the centre of some chaffing group, the laughing, handsome, witty centre, as he had always been. He would break away when he saw them to ask his old mother how she did, and suddenly the greatest and best of all happenings would have happened, and they would have heard the miracle of his speech.... This was the spell they wove for each other, making the day brighter and the world kinder, and helping them to laugh at things which otherwise would have been too light to stir their hearts. Sarah’s shopping was dull and soon finished, but May had an exciting list, and seemed constantly in need of help. The old woman actually enjoyed herself as she peered at stockings and linen buttons, and nipped longcloth and serge between her finger and thumb. It might have been wedding-gear they were after, she told May, with a grim chuckle, and May laughed and sighed, thinking of a bottom drawer at home that had been locked for many years. The salesman laughed, too, and asked Sarah which of them it was that was thinking of getting wed, and Sarah, with all her arduous married life behind her, was yet as pleased as a young girl. She was a shrewd marketer, even now, in spite of her sight, especially in the food-shops, where one nose can often be quite as useful as a pair of eyes; while, as for pots and pans, she knew them as a hen knows her chickens and a shepherd his sheep.