n that night!"

Strictly speaking, they hadn't a cent between them, except his hundred a
year. But he married her hair and she married his melancholy eyes; and
she was content to settle in Oldcastle, where there are almost no slums.
And her stepmother was forced by Edith to make the hundred up to four
hundred. This was rather hard on Mrs Ebag. Thus it fell out that Mrs
Ebag remained a widow, and that Miss Ebag continues a flower uncalled.
However, gossip was stifled.

In his appointed time, and in the fulness of years, Goldie died, and was
mourned. And by none was he more sincerely mourned than by the aged
bedridden Caiaphas.

"I miss my cat, I can tell ye!" said old Caiaphas pettishly to Carl, who
was sitting by his couch. "He knew his master, Goldie did! Edith did her
best to steal him from me when you married and set up house. A nice
thing considering I bought him and he never belonged to anybody but me!
Ay! I shall never have another cat like that cat."

And this is the whole truth of the affair.

THE FORTUNE TELLER

I

The prologue to this somewhat dramatic history was of the simplest. The
affair came to a climax, if one may speak metaphorically, in fire and
sword and high passion, but it began like the month of March. Mr Bostock
(a younger brother of the senior partner in the famous firm of Bostocks,
drapers, at Hanbridge) was lounging about the tennis-court attached to
his house at Hillport. Hillport has long been known as the fashionable
suburb of Bursley, and indeed as the most aristocratic quarter strictly
within the Five Towns; there certainly are richer neighbourhoods not far
off, but such neighbourhoods cannot boast that they form part of the
Five Towns--no more than Hatfield can boast that it is part of London. A
man who lives in a detached house at Hillport, with a tennis-court, may
be said to have succeeded in life. And Mr Bostock had succeeded. A
consulting engineer of marked talent, he had always worked extremely
hard and extremely long, and thus he had arrived at luxuries. The chief
of his luxuries was his daughter Florence, aged twenty-three, height
five feet exactly, as pretty and as neat as a new doll, of expensive and
obstinate habits. It was Florence who was the cause of the episode, and
I mention her father only to show where Florence stood in the world. She
ruled her father during perhaps eleven months of the year. In the
twelfth month (which was usually January--after the Chris