adian kind of girl. If she could only get something to do
here. ...If something could be found for her."

"Oh, I don't agree with you at _all_," said Ruth. "Do you really
think she ought to leave her parents just _now_? Her place is with
her parents. And besides, between you and me, she'll have a much better
chance of marrying there than in _this_ town--after all this. Of
course I shall be very sorry to lose her--and Mrs Cotterill, too.
But...."

"I expect you're right," Denry concurred.

And they sped on luxuriously through the lamp-lit night of the Five
Towns. And Denry pointed out his house as they passed it. And they both
thought much of the security of their positions in the world, and of
their incomes, and of the honeyed deference of their bankers; and also
of the mistake of being a failure.... You could do nothing with a
failure.

IV

On a frosty morning in early winter you might have seen them together in
a different vehicle--a first-class compartment of the express from Knype
to Liverpool. They had the compartment to themselves, and they were
installed therein with every circumstance of luxury. Both were enwrapped
in furs, and a fur rug united their knees in its shelter. Magazines and
newspapers were scattered about to the value of a labourer's hire for a
whole day; and when Denry's eye met the guard's it said "shilling." In
short, nobody could possibly be more superb than they were on that
morning in that compartment.

The journey was the result of peculiar events.

Mr Cotterill had made himself a bankrupt, and cast away the robe of a
Town Councillor. He had submitted to the inquisitiveness of the Official
Receiver, and to the harsh prying of those rampant baying beasts, his
creditors. He had laid bare his books, his correspondence, his lack of
method, his domestic extravagance, and the distressing fact that he had
continued to trade long after he knew himself to be insolvent. He had
for several months, in the interests of the said beasts, carried on his
own business as manager at a nominal salary. And gradually everything
that was his had been sold. And during the final weeks the Cotterill
family had been obliged to quit their dismantled house and exist in
lodgings. It had been arranged that they should go to Canada by way of
Liverpool, and on the day before the journey of Denry and Ruth to
Liverpool they had departed from the borough of Bursley (which Mr
Cotterill had so extensively faced with ter