eight, and looked
thirty-seven. Brother and sister had kept house together for twenty
years. They were passionately and profoundly attached to each other--and
did not know it. They grumbled at each other freely, and practised no
more conversation, when they were alone, than the necessities of
existence demanded (even at meals they generally read), but still their
mutual affection was tremendous. Moreover, they were very firmly fixed
in their habits. Now one of these habits was never to entertain company
on Friday night. Friday night was their night of solemn privacy. The
explanation of this habit offers a proof of the sentimental relations
between them.

Mr Morfe was an accountant. Indeed, he was _the_ accountant in Bursley,
and perhaps he knew more secrets of the ledgers of the principal
earthenware manufacturers than some of the manufacturers did themselves.
But he did not live for accountancy. At five o'clock every evening he
was capable of absolutely forgetting it. He lived for music. He was
organist of Saint Luke's Church (with an industrious understudy--for he
did not always rise for breakfast on Sundays) and, more important, he
was conductor of the Bursley Orpheus Glee and Madrigal Club. And herein
lay the origin of those Friday nights. A glee and madrigal club
naturally comprises women as well as men; and the women are apt to be
youngish, prettyish, and somewhat fond of music. Further, the
conductorship of a choir involves many and various social encounters.
Now Mary Morfe was jealous. Though Richard Morfe ruled his choir with
whips, though his satiric tongue was a scorpion to the choir, though he
never looked twice at any woman, though she was always saying that she
wished he would marry, Mary Morfe was jealous. It was Mary Morfe who had
created the institution of the Friday night, and she had created it in
order to prove, symbolically and spectacularly, to herself, to him, and
to the world, that he and she lived for each other alone. All their
friends, every member of the choir, in fact the whole of the respectable
part of barsley, knew quite well that in the Morfes' house Friday was
sacredly Friday.

And yet a caller!

"It's a woman," murmured Mary. Until her ear had assured her of this
fact she had seemed to be more disturbed than startled by the stir in
the lobby.

And it was a woman. It was Miss Eva Harracles, one of the principal
contraltos in the glee and madrigal club. She entered richly blushing,