"Are you a friend of Mester Maldon's?" asked the grey-haired slattern who answered her summons at the door of Julian's lodgings in Granville Street, Knype. There was a challenge in the woman's voice. Rachel accepted it at once.
"Well, I don't know as I want any o' Mester Maldon's friends here," said the landlady loudly. "Mester Maldon's done a flit from here, Mester Maldon has; and," coming out on to the pavement and pointing upward to a broken pane in the first-floor window, "that's a bit o' his fancy work afore he flitted!"
"Can I give yer his new address? Pr'aps I can and pr'aps I canna, but I dunna see why I should waste my breath on Mester Maldon's friends--that I dunna! And I wunna!"
Rachel walked away. Before she reached the end of the frowsy street, whose meanness and monotony of tiny-bow-windows exemplified intensely the most deplorable characteristics of a district where brutish licence is decreasing, she was overtaken by a lanky girl in a pinafore.
"If ye please, miss, Mester Maldon's gone to live at 29 Birches Street, 'anbridge."
Having made this announcement, the girl ran off, with a short giggle.
Rachel, had to walk half a mile to reach the tram-route. This re-visiting of her native town, which she had quitted only a few weeks earlier, seemed to her like the sad resumption of an existence long forgotten. She was self-conscious and hoped that she would not encounter the curiosity of any of her Knype acquaintances. She felt easier when she was within the sheltering car and rumbling and jerking through the gloomy carnival of Easter Saturday afternoon in Knype and Cauldon on the way to Hanbridge.
After leaving the car in Crown Square, she had to climb through all the western quarter of Hanbridge to the very edge of the town, on the hummock that separates it from the Axe Moorlands. Birches Street, as she had guessed, was in the suburb known as Birches Pike. It ran right to the top of the hill, and the upper portion consisted of new cottage-houses in groups of two or three, with vacant lots between. Why should Julian have chosen Birches Street for residence, seeing that his business was in Knype? It was a repellent street; it was out even of the little world where sordidness is at any rate dignified by tradition and anaemic ideals can support each other in close companionship. It had neither a past nor a future. The steep end of it was an horizon of cloud. The April east wind blew the smoke of Hanbridge right across it.