he Town Clerk to remain in the old municipal buildings, the scheme
would instantly have taken life. The Town Clerk, being widowed, had
consoled himself with a young second wife. This girl adored dancing; the
Town Clerk adored her; and therefore where she danced he deemed it
prudent to attend. Driving home from a January ball at 4 a.m. the Town
Clerk had caught pneumonia. In a week he was dead, and his dynasty with
him. In a couple of months the pro-scheme party had carried the council
off its feet. Such are the realities, never printed in newspapers, of
municipal politics in the grim north.

Sketches of the site had appeared in the architectural press. John
Orgreave and Lucas were pencilling in turn upon one of these, a page
torn out of a weekly. George inserted himself between them, roughly
towards Lucas and deferentially towards Mr. John.

"But you've got the main axis wrong!" he exclaimed.

"How, wrong?" John Orgreave demanded.

"See here--give me the pencil, Looc."

George felt with a little thrill of satisfaction the respect for him
which underlay John Orgreave's curt tone of a principal--and a principal
from the Midlands. He did not miss, either, Lucas's quick, obedient,
expectant gesture in surrendering the pencil. Ideas for the plan of the
building sprang up multitudinously in his mind. He called; they came. He
snatched towards him a blank sheet of tracing-paper, and scrawled it
over with significant lines.

"That's my notion. I thought of it long ago," he said. "Or if you
prefer--"

The other two were impressed. He himself was impressed. His notion,
which he was modifying and improving every moment, seemed to him perfect
and ever more perfect. He was intensely and happily stimulated in the
act of creation; and they were all three absorbed.

"Why hasn't my desk been arranged?" said a discontented voice behind
them. Mr. Enwright had arrived by the farther door from the corridor.

Lucas glanced up.

"I expect Haim hasn't come again to-day," he answered urbanely,
placatingly.

"Why hasn't he come?"

"I hear his wife's very ill," said George.

"Who told you?"

"I happened to be round that way this morning."

"Oh! I thought all was over between you two."

George flushed. Nothing had ever been said in the office as to his
relations with Haim, though it was of course known that George no longer
lodged with the factotum. Mr. Enwright, however, often had disconcerting
intuitions concerning matters to