you realise just what
this may _mean_, to all of us?"

Jervaise evidently had failed to appreciate the detail that I had relished
with such delight. He had certainly not savoured the quality of it. And in
one sense I may claim to have invented the business of the scene. I may
have added to it by my imaginative participation. In any case my
understanding as interpreter was the prime essential--a fact that shows
how absurd it is to speak of "photographic detail" in literature, or
indeed to attempt a proper differentiation between realism and romance.

We were all of us in the Hall, an inattentive, chattering audience of
between twenty and thirty people. The last dance had been stopped at ten
minutes to twelve, in order that the local parson and his wife--their name
was Sturton--might be out of the house of entertainment before the first
stroke of Sunday morning. Every one was wound up to a pitch of satisfied
excitement. The Cinderella had been a success. The floor and the music and
the supper had been good, Mrs. Jervaise had thrown off her air of
pre-occupation with some distasteful suspicion, and we had all been
entertained and happy. And yet these causes for satisfaction had been
nothing more than a setting for Brenda Jervaise. It was she who had
stimulated us, given us a lead and kept us dancing to the tune of her
exciting personality. She had made all the difference between an
ordinarily successful dance and what Mrs. Sturton at the open door
continually described as "a really delightful evening."

She had to repeat the phrase, because with the first stroke of midnight
ringing out from the big clock over the stables, came also the first
intimation of the new movement. Mrs. Sturton's fly was mysteriously
delayed; and I had a premonition even then, that the delay promised some
diversion. The tone of the stable clock had its influence, perhaps. It was
so precisely the tone of a stage clock--high and pretentious, and with a
disturbing suggestion of being unmelodiously flawed.

Miss Tattersall, Olive Jervaise's friend, a rather abundant fair young
woman, warmed by excitement to the realisation that she must flirt with
some one, also noticed the theatrical sound of that announcement of
midnight. She giggled a little nervously as stroke succeeded stroke in an
apparently unending succession.

"It seems as if it were going on all night," she said to me, in a
self-conscious voice, as if the sound of the bell had some emotio