but he never gave the true reasons, even to himself.  The true reasons were, first, that he hated and detested the idea of moving office, and, second, that he wanted acutely to be able to say in the fullness of years that he had completed half a century of municipal work in one and the same room.  If the pro-scheme party had had the wit to invent a pretext for allowing the Town Clerk to remain in the old municipal buildings, the scheme would instantly have taken life.  The Town Clerk, being widowed, had consoled himself with a young second wife.  This girl adored dancing; the Town Clerk adored her; and therefore where she danced he deemed it prudent to attend.  Driving home from a January ball at 4 a.m. the Town Clerk had caught pneumonia.  In a week he was dead, and his dynasty with him.  In a couple of months the pro-scheme party had carried the council off its feet.  Such are the realities, never printed in newspapers, of municipal politics in the grim north.

Sketches of the site had appeared in the architectural press.  John Orgreave and Lucas were pencilling in turn upon one of these, a page torn out of a weekly.  George inserted himself between them, roughly towards Lucas and deferentially towards Mr. John.

“But you’ve got the main axis wrong!” he exclaimed.

“How, wrong?” John Orgreave demanded.

“See here—­give me the pencil, Looc.”

George felt with a little thrill of satisfaction the respect for him which underlay John Orgreave’s curt tone of a principal—­and a principal from the Midlands.  He did not miss, either, Lucas’s quick, obedient, expectant gesture in surrendering the pencil.  Ideas for the plan of the building sprang up multitudinously in his mind.  He called; they came.  He snatched towards him a blank sheet of tracing-paper, and scrawled it over with significant lines.

“That’s my notion.  I thought of it long ago,” he said.  “Or if you prefer—­”

The other two were impressed.  He himself was impressed.  His notion, which he was modifying and improving every moment, seemed to him perfect and ever more perfect.  He was intensely and happily stimulated in the act of creation; and they were all three absorbed.

“Why hasn’t my desk been arranged?” said a discontented voice behind them.  Mr. Enwright had arrived by the farther door from the corridor.

Lucas glanced up.

“I expect Haim hasn’t come again to-day,” he answered urbanely, placatingly.

“Why hasn’t he come?”

“I hear his wife’s very ill,” said George.

“Who told you?”

“I happened to be round that way this morning.”

“Oh!  I thought all was over between you two.”

George flushed.  Nothing had ever been said in the office as to his relations with Haim, though it was of course known that George no longer lodged with the factotum.  Mr. Enwright, however, often had disconcerting intuitions concerning matters to which Mr. Orgreave and Lucas were utterly insensible.