“Oh, I know that,” said Aunt Laura, “but on a day like this it would have been rather a delicate compliment. I must speak to the rector about it.” “I don’t think I should do that,” said Uncle Albert, with some alarm. She laughed gently. “Don’t be an old juggins,” she said. All down the High Street, in the moving crowd, Edwin could smell the savour of roast beef and baked potatoes and cabbage water wafted from innumerable kitchen windows. . . . IV In the afternoon they left Aunt Laura and Uncle Albert asleep in two arm-chairs on opposite sides of the drawing-room fireplace, and Edwin and his father went for a walk by the old abbey fish-ponds. It was the first time for many years that Edwin had been for a walk with his father, and the experience promised a new and exciting intimacy to which he looked forward with eagerness. Even at this hour of the day the Sabbath atmosphere imposed itself on the countryside. The road that they followed was long and straight with an open frontage above the reedy pools, and along the cinder path at the side of it a great number of men were lounging: a strange and foreign population of miners from the Mawne pits, who only emerged from their cavernous occupation on this day of the week, and other industrial workers from the great steel rolling mills that lay in the Stour Valley to westward. None of them took any notice of Edwin and his father. It was even doubtful if they knew who they were; for these men passed a curiously separate existence, and Mr. Ingleby would only be familiar to their wives who did the family shopping on Saturday nights while their masters were waiting for the football results in their favourite pubs. On this day the miner’s passion for sport of all kinds asserted itself in the presence of a great number of slim, jacketed whippets, each warranted to beat anything on four legs for speed, slinking tenderly at their masters’ heels. It seemed strange to Edwin that his father should know none of these men. It showed him again how remote and solitary the man’s life must have been in this ultimate corner of the Black Country. “We don’t really belong here,” he thought. “We’re foreigners. . . .” And the reflection pleased him, though he remembered, with a tinge of regret, that by this denial he dissociated himself from his old idol the poet of the Pastoral Ballad. Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk. “It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we are going to-morrow. . . .”