ll bent unknowing over his plate and gobbled his Irish
stew.

"Mr. Houghton!" said Miss Pinnegar, in a sudden changed voice. She
had gone a livid yellow colour. And she gave a queer, sharp little
rap on the table with her hand.

James started. He looked up bewildered, as one startled out of
sleep.

"Eh?" he said, gaping. "Eh?"

"Answer me," said Miss Pinnegar. "What manager?"

"Manager? Eh? Manager? What manager?"

She advanced a little nearer, menacing in her black dress. James
shrank.

"What manager?" he re-echoed. "My manager. The manager of my
cinema."

Miss Pinnegar looked at him, and looked at him, and did not speak.
In that moment all the anger which was due to him from all womanhood
was silently discharged at him, like a black bolt of silent
electricity. But Miss Pinnegar, the engine of wrath, felt she would
burst.

"Cinema! Cinema! Do you mean to tell me--" but she was really
suffocated, the vessels of her heart and breast were bursting. She
had to lean her hand on the table.

It was a terrible moment. She looked ghastly and terrible, with her
mask-like face and her stony eyes and her bluish lips. Some fearful
thunderbolt seemed to fall. James withered, and was still. There was
silence for minutes, a suspension.

And in those minutes, she finished with him. She finished with him
for ever. When she had sufficiently recovered, she went to her
chair, and sat down before her plate. And in a while she began to
eat, as if she were alone.

Poor Alvina, for whom this had been a dreadful and uncalled-for
moment, had looked from one to another, and had also dropped her
head to her plate. James too, with bent head, had forgotten to eat.
Miss Pinnegar ate very slowly, alone.

"Don't you want your dinner, Alvina?" she said at length.

"Not as much as I did," said Alvina.

"Why not?" said Miss Pinnegar. She sounded short, almost like Miss
Frost. Oddly like Miss Frost.

Alvina took up her fork and began to eat automatically.

"I always think," said Miss Pinnegar, "Irish stew is more tasty with
a bit of Swede in it."

"So do I, really," said Alvina. "But Swedes aren't come yet."

"Oh! Didn't we have some on Tuesday?"

"No, they were yellow turnips--but they weren't Swedes."

"Well then, yellow turnip. I like a little yellow turnip," said Miss
Pinnegar.

"I might have put some in, if I'd known," said Alvina.

"Yes. We will another time," said Miss Pinnegar.

Not another word about the cinema: