But the stern truth of the matter was that in such a matter as this, and indeed in most of the concerns of his daily life, he resembled a spy working his way through the enemy’s camp, surrounded on every side by foes, compelled to consider every movement, doomed to death and dishonour if he were caught. It had come to it now that there was in practical fact nothing that he desired to do that he was not forbidden to do, and because his school life had given him rules and standards that did not belong to his home life, he criticized at every turn. There was, for instance, this affair of walking in the town by himself. He could understand that Helen and Mary should not go by themselves because there was apparently something mysterious and precious in girls that was destroyed were they left alone for a single moment. But a boy! a boy who had travelled by himself all those miles to a distant county; a boy who, in all probability would be the half-back for the school next term, a boy who in another two years would be at a public school!
What it came to, of course, was that he was continually giving his elders the slip; was, indeed, like the spy in the enemy’s country, because every move had to be considered and, at the end, all the excuses ranged in a long row and the most serviceable carefully chosen. And threadbare by now they were becoming!
On this particular afternoon—the first of the last three days of the holidays—he gave Miss Jones and Helen the slip in the market-place. This was to-day easy to do, because it was market day; he knew that Helen was too deeply concerned with herself and her appearance to care whether he were there or no, and that Miss Jones, delighted as she always was with the shops (knowing them by heart and yet never tired of them), would optimistically trust that he would very soon reappear, and at any rate he knew his way home.
He was always delighted with the market on market days. Never, although so constantly repeated, did it lose its savour for him. He adored everything—the cattle and the sheep in their pens, the farmers with their thick broad backs and thick broad sticks talking in such solemn and serious clusters, the avenue down the middle of the market-place where you walked past stall after stall—stalls of vegetables, stalls of meat, stalls of cups and saucers, stalls of china ornaments, stalls of pots and pans, and, best—far best of all—the flower-stalls with their pots of beautiful flowers, their seeds and their tiny plants growing in rows in wooden boxes. But it was not the outside market that was the most truly entrancing. On the right of the market-place there were strange mysterious passages—known to the irreverent as the Catacombs—and here, in a dusk that would, you would have supposed, have precluded any real buying or selling altogether—the true business of the market went on.
