minutes past nine.

"Am I all right for time?" asked Eva.

"Yes, you're all right," said he. "If you go when that clock strikes
half-past, and take the next car down, you'll make the connection easily
at Turnhill. I'll put you into the car."

"Oh, thanks!" said Eva.

Mr Morfe kept his modern choral music beneath a broad seat under the bow
window. The music was concealed by a low curtain that ran on a rod--the
ingenious device of Mary. He stooped down to find the _Vision of
Cleopatra_, and at first he could not find it. Mary walked towards that
end of the drawing-room with a vague notion of helping him, and then Eva
did the same, and then Mary walked back, and then Mr Morfe happily put
his hand on the _Vision of Cleopatra_.

He opened the score for Eva's inspection, and began to hum passages and
to point out others, and Eva also began to hum, and they hummed in
concert, at intervals exclaiming against the wantonness with which
Havergal Brian had invented difficulties. Eva glanced at the clock.

"You're all right," Mr Morfe assured her somewhat impatiently. And he,
too, glanced at the clock: "You've still nearly ten minutes."

And proceeded with his critical and explanatory comments on the _Vision
of Cleopatra_.

He was capable of becoming almost delirious about music. Mary Morfe had
seated herself in silence.

At last Eva and Mr Morfe approached the fire and the mantelpiece again.
Mr Morfe shut up the score, dismissed his delirium, and looked at the
clock, quite prepared to see it pointing to twenty-nine and a half
minutes past nine. Instead, the clock pointed to only twenty-two
minutes past nine.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed. He went nearer.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed again rather more loudly. "I do believe that
clock's stopped!"

It had. The pendulum hung perpendicular, motionless, dead.

He was astounded. For the clock had never been known to stop. It was a
presentation clock, of the highest guaranteed quality, offered to him as
a small token of regard and esteem by the members of the Bursley Orpheus
Glee and Madrigal Club to celebrate the twelfth anniversary of his
felicitous connection with the said society. It had stood on his
mantelpiece for four years and had earned an absolutely first-class
reputation for itself. He wound it up on the last day of every month,
for it was a thirty-odd day clock, specially made by a famous local
expert; and he had not known it to vary more than ten minutes a month at
th