She was the one thing feminine that had come across his path. He had stared at it like a new Adam. His original Eden lay at the back of the houses, and was divided by a low wall. Here, first, he used to lean, in his shirt-sleeves, pipe in mouth, on the late summer evenings, and exchange remarks with her as she removed the washing from the clothes’ lines, or idly took the air. How he had drifted into his present relations he would have found it difficult to determine. It never occurred to him to do so, his mind being filled with other things.

By degrees he had familiarised himself with the fact of her existence. Then it seemed natural that he should marry her. In his social sphere a wife formed a necessary part of everyday existence. And then she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. When he kissed the pouting lips, all kinds of strange tinglings ran through him. That was proof positive of his being in love. So one day he called on her father, a retired captain of a Thames steamboat, and obtained his consent to the marriage. He was earning good wages, had even a little put by. The old man, whose tastes were not of a domestic order, and who found a daughter an expensive luxury, got solemnly drunk all by himself to celebrate the occasion. Goddard considered him an abandoned old ruffian, as soon as he came to know more about him, and conceiving a tender pity for Lizzie, longed to get her out of his clutches.

It was hard work to carry on his trade, his self-education, his political pursuits, and his lovemaking, all at the same time. The last was distinctly pleasant, but it was sadly lacking in advantages from a utilitarian point of view. Until he had fallen in love with her over that back-garden wall, he had scouted the idea of “messing about” with girls as a criminal waste of precious hours Even now he felt somewhat guilty. He longed to be married, to settle down, to have Lizzie’s pretty face at his fireside definitely assured to him for the rest of his days, and to see before him a peaceful, undisturbed stretch of years wherein to further with all his heart and energies the great movement in which he was absorbed.

Perhaps Lizzie was right. A little previous practice in the art of love would have been for his good; but in a widely different sense from that which came within Lizzie’s philosophy.

A few evenings after he had given the lecture at the Radical Club, he took her to the theatre. Some weeks previously he had treated her to the Lyceum, not doubting in the guilelessness of his heart that her aesthetic appreciation would be as great as his own. But she had been bored to death, had come home cross, and the subject of play-going became a dangerous one. This time, however, by way of compensation, it was the Adelphi. Lizzie laughed and wept and squeezed Daniel’s arm, and enjoyed herself amazingly. She did not know with whom she was the more delighted, Mr. William Terriss or Daniel. On the top of the homeward ’bus she decided in favour of Daniel. She nestled close to him on the garden-seat, and brought his arm round her. Then she drew off her well-worn glove, so as to put her bare hand in his. He was touched, tightened his circling arm, and bent down his head till the fluffy fair curls brushed his lips.

“Why don’t you hug me oftener, Dan?” she murmured. “Like this. It makes me feel much more homey with you.”

“We are not always on top of a ’bus,” said Dan.

She gave him a little nudge to show him that she appreciated his jest, but she went on—

“I don’t mind your kissing me, Dan. I like it. Now we’re engaged you ought to be awfully spoony, you know, and squeeze me, and tell me how lovely I look, and all that.”

They were on the front seat of the ’bus; the people behind did not count as spectators; the hurrying roadway and crowded pavement below were remote as the clear-shining stars above. Daniel surrendered to the coaxing murmur, and kissed her a long lover’s kiss. When an inspector, a short time afterwards, demanded their tickets, Goddard forgot his Collectivist principles and became a fierce Individualist.

“What a confounded nuisance—these fellows disturbing us! It oughtn’t to be allowed,” he said, resettling himself. And Lizzie acquiesced.

Towards the end of the journey they grew silent. Lizzie, tired, dozed with her head on his shoulder. A sudden jolt of the ‘bus awakened her. She laughed, and rubbed her eyes.

“I do believe I’ve been asleep. What have you been doing all the time?”

“Thinking,” he replied, smiling at the question.

“What of?”

“Well, I was thinking of my speech on Saturday in Hyde Park, you know. There is an Eight Hour demonstration, and the League people have asked me to take a platform. I’m becoming quite an important person, you see, Liz.”

“I thought you were going to say you’d been thinking of me,” said Lizzie, piqued. “I call that beastly of you.”

It took him all the time until they parted to re-establish the “spoony” relations that alone, according to Lizzie, seemed to make for happiness between them.

But when he went to bed that night he found himself wondering for the first time whether his political interests might not cause serious friction between Lizzie and himself. To give them up was out of the question. Vague doubts came as to the wisdom of the step he was about to take.

They troubled him, kept him from sleep for some hours.

But before he could give the question fuller thought, new and undreamed of conditions arose that changed the whole aspect of his life.

It was a couple of days afterwards. He sat in a solicitor’s office staring at a little whiskered gentleman, whose even voice seemed to come from some other world. He had called in response to a letter, bringing with him the few documents he possessed—his dead mother’s marriage certificate, his own birth certificate, and his old indentures of apprenticeship. He had thought it a question of some trifling legacy on the part of the dead uncle whom he had never known, who had disowned his mother because she had brought disgrace on the family by marrying Sam Goddard the builder. He had conjectured that the hard old heart that had stonily refused succour to widowed sister had melted before his death, and had sought to make some little posthumous reparation to his sister’s son. Save that Robert Haig was a well-to-do hosier in Birmingham, Goddard knew nothing at all about him. But when the little whiskered man announced that this unknown uncle had died, wifeless, childless, and intestate, that he, Goddard, was the next-of-kin, and inherited, not only the business as it stood, but a considerable sum of invested money, that brought in between four and five hundred a year, he stared, open-mouthed, in blank amazement, and it was some time before he could recover his bewildered faculties.

“Is there no one who has a better right to all this money than I?” he asked, after a while.

“Not a soul. Since the death of his wife and daughter the late Mr. Haig had neither kith nor kin besides yourself.”

“How did you find my whereabouts?”

It seemed to him as if he were living for the moment the irresponsible life of comic opera.

“Simplest thing in the world,” replied the lawyer. “Your mother’s letters were found docketed amongst Mr. Haig’s papers. The last one, appealing to him for help on the occasion of your father’s death, contained the address of the firm of cabinetmakers to whom you were indentured. They gave us your present address.”

Goddard rose from his chair, and made one or two turns about the room.

“It’s difficult to realise it all at once,” he said, stopping before the solicitor. “But I think I have grasped it now. What would you advise me to do?”

“You had better go as soon as possible to Birmingham and see our principals, Messrs. Taylor & Blythe. We are only acting for them, you know. They will be able to go into fuller details with you, particularly in the matter of the hosiery business.”

“They’ll have to sell that,” said Goddard quickly. “It would be a white elephant to me.”

“I should strongly dissuade you from parting with it,” said the lawyer. “It appears to be a going concern. You should keep it on. Work it up. You would soon get into the way of it.”

“And turn hosier? Oh no! I’m proud of my handicraft, and I would go on with it if there were any necessity. But to wear a long frock-coat, and sell collars and neckties behind a counter—I am afraid I wasn’t made for it.”

He laughed at the vision of himself. The lawyer smiled too. The dark, heavily-cut face, with its great forehead and bright clever eyes, giving its promise of strength and intellect, seemed fitted for more strenuous work than shrewd buying and polite selling of hosiery.

“Well, you’ll think it over,” said the lawyer. “Yes,” said Goddard. “It strikes me I have a deal of thinking to do the next few days.”

He got into a District train to return to the workshop, from which he had obtained a couple of hours’ leave of absence. The journey passed in a dream. The fortune that had befallen him seemed almost beyond his powers of realisation. The prospective changes in his life presented themselves before him in quick succession—the suggestion of one leading to the shock of another. His trade would be abandoned, unless he chose to continue it as a hobby. He need never do an hour’s work again as long as he lived. He could live in a comfortable house of his own, surround himself with books—an endless vista of shelf upon shelf quivered before his eyes. The possession of such an income demanded changes in habits, food, raiment. It gave infinite leisure. And then a thought that had gradually been piercing through the cloud of his bewilderment broke out like a sun over his mind, causing his heart to leap in a thrilling delight, as a great life-work was revealed to him. He no longer need stand at the brink of the great struggle, lending a helping hand in all too few hours of leisure. He could plunge into the very midst, fight for the cause of the people with all his brain and heart and energies. His face flushed, and his breath came quickly. It was a chilly day, and a man seated opposite to him in the third-class carriage was surprised to see him wipe the perspiration from his forehead.

And then there was Lizzie. He would tell her that evening. He pictured to himself the ecstatic wonder on her pretty face. But the greater passion held him, and Lizzie’s face floated vaguely behind the flashing dreams of work and struggle and victories.

At the workshop he sought his employer, but the latter was absent. Goddard took off his coat, put on his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and turned to the fitting of the writing-table on which he had been engaged that morning. The feeling that he was doing this familiar thing for the last time made it appear strangely unreal. His tool-bag seemed no longer to belong to him. He had given it, in his mind, to the young apprentice who was working at his side. He joined in the desultory chat and jesting of his companions with the ready good humour that had always made him popular among them; but his brain throbbed with the effort of self-control. He worked steadily, with the deft, sure touch of the skilled craftsman. The pigeon-hole slides ran into the grooves without a hairbreadth deviation, the little secret panel ran in and out without the hitch that a grain of dust could have made. It was gratifying to him to be able to put the finishing touches to a piece of work he had undertaken. When he had done, he passed his hand caressingly over the polished curves of the sliding cover. He was proud of his craft. It was a beautiful thing that had shaped itself under his touch.

“If all the work I do in the future,” he thought, “is as perfect of its kind as this, I need fear no rivals.”

It was over. He had had a pleasant interview with his employer, had received the hearty congratulations of his mates, who, after the manner understanded of the British workman, drank to his health and prosperity at a neighbouring tavern. He had bidden farewell to the trade in which he had found so much honest happiness. Again the sense of unreality came over him. The change had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. That morning he had risen a poor artisan; he would lie down that night the owner of fabulous wealth, which he was going to Birmingham the next day to claim. In spite of the strong will that strove to repress extravagant fancies, and to put matters in a common-sense, practical light, his imagination slipped elusively from his control, and ran riot amid the courts and halls of airy palaces.