ght he had
forgotten. Finally he said he probably could not go to the opera at all,
and that at best he might look in at it for half an hour. He was careful
to disclaim all interest in the performance.

Carpenter had driven the two girls to the Town Hall at seven o'clock,
and at a quarter to eight he returned to fetch his mistress. Enveloped
in her fur cloak, Leonora climbed silently into the cart.

'I did hear,' said Carpenter, respectfully gossiping, 'as Mr. Twemlow
was gone back to America; but I seed him yesterday as I was coming back
from taking the mester to that there manufacturers' meeting at Knype....
Wonderful like his mother he is, mum.'

'Oh, indeed!' said Leonora.

Her first impatient querulous thought was that she would have preferred
Mr. Twemlow to be in America.

The illuminated windows of the Town Hall, and the knot of excited people
at the principal portico, gave her a sort of preliminary intimation that
the eternal quest for romance was still active on earth, though she
might have abandoned it. In the corridor she met Uncle Meshach, wearing
an antique frock-coat. His eye caught hers with quiet satisfaction.
There was no sign in his wrinkled face of their last interview.

'Your aunt's not very well,' he answered her inquiry. 'She wasn't equal
to coming, she said. I bid her go to bed. So I'm all alone.'

'Come and sit by me,' Leonora suggested. 'I have two spare tickets.'

'Nay, I think not,' he faintly protested.

'Yes, do,' she said, 'you must.'

As his trembling thin hands stole away her cloak, disclosing the
perfection and dark magnificence of her toilette, and as she perceived
in his features the admiration of a connoisseur, and in the eyes of
other women envy and astonishment, she began to forget her
despondencies. She lived again. She believed again in the possibility of
joy. And perhaps it was not strange that her thought travelled at once
to Ethel--Ethel whom she had not questioned further about her lover,
Ethel whom till then she had figured as the wretched victim of love,
but whom now she saw wistfully as love's elect.

* * * * *

The front seats of the auditorium were filled with all that was dashing,
and much that was solidly serious, in Bursley. Hoarded wealth, whose
religion was spotless kitchens and cash down, sat side by side with
flightiness and the habit of living by credit on rather more than one's
income. The members of the Society had ex