want to show you a house up at Hillport
that might do for us."

He winced. She had said nothing about a removal for quite some time. He
hated the notion of removal. ("Flitting," he called it.) It would mean
extra expense, too. As for Hillport, he was sure that nothing, except
cottages, could be got in Hillport for less than fifty pounds a year. If
she thought he was going to increase his rent by thirty-two pounds a
year, besides rates, she was in error. The breakfast finished in a
slight mist. He hardened. The idea of her indicating houses to him! The
idea of her assuming that----Well, no use in meeting trouble half-way!

CHAPTER XVI

THE HALL AND ITS RESULT

"Yes," said Mrs. Prockter, gazing about her, to James Ollerenshaw, "it
certainly is rather spacious."

"Rather spacious!" James repeated in the secret hollows of his mind. It
was not spacious; it was simply fantastic. They stood, those two--Mrs.
Prockter in her usual flowered silk, and James in his usual hard,
rent-collecting clothes--at the foot of the double staircase, which
sprang with the light of elegance of wings from the floor of the
entrance-hall of Wilbraham Hall. In front of them, over the great door,
was a musicians' gallery, and over that a huge window. On either side of
the great door were narrow windows which looked over stretches of green
country far away from the Five Towns. For Wilbraham Hall was on the
supreme ridge of Hillport, and presented only its back yard, so to
speak, to the Five Towns. And though the carpets were rolled up and tied
with strings, and though there were dark rectangular spaces on the walls
showing where pictures had been, the effect of the hall was quite a
furnished effect. Polished oak and tasselled hangings, and monstrous
vases and couches and chairs preserved in it the appearance of a home,
if a home of giants.

Decidedly it was worthy of the mighty reputations of the extinct
Wilbrahams. The Wilbrahams had gradually risen in North Staffordshire
for two centuries. About the Sunday of the Battle of Waterloo they were
at their apogee. Then for a century they had gradually fallen. And at
last they had extinguished themselves in the person of a young-old fool
who was in prison for having cheated a pawnbroker. This young-old fool
had nothing but the name of Wilbraham to his back. The wealth of the
Wilbrahams, or what remained of it after eight decades of declension,
had, during the course of a famous twenty years'