So she floated forward, charmingly and inexorably.  She was what in the Five Towns is called “a stylish piece of goods.”  She wore a black-and-white frock, of a small check pattern, with a black belt and long black gloves, and she held over her serenity a black parasol richly flounced with black lace—­a toilet unusual in the district, and as effective as it was unusual.  She knew how to carry it.  She was a tall girl, and generously formed, with a complexion between fair and dark; her age, perhaps, about twenty-five.  She had the eye of an empress—­and not an empress-consort either, nor an empress who trembles in secret at the rumour of cabals and intrigues.  Yes, considered as a decoration of the terrace, she was possibly the finest, most dazzling thing that Bursley could have produced; and Bursley doubtless regretted that it could only claim her as a daughter by adoption.

Approaching, step by dainty and precise step, the seat invested by Mr. James Ollerenshaw, she arrived at the point whence she could distinguish the features of her forestaller; she was somewhat short-sighted.  She gave no outward sign of fear, irresolution, cowardice.  But if she had not been more afraid of her own contempt than of anything else in the world, she would have run away; she would have ceased being an empress and declined suddenly into a scared child.  However, her fear of her own contempt kept her spine straight, her face towards the danger, and her feet steadily moving.

“It’s not my fault,” she said to herself.  “I meant to occupy that bench, and occupy it I will.  What have I to be ashamed of?”

And she did occupy that bench.  She contrived to occupy it without seeing Mr. Ollerenshaw.  Each separate movement of hers denied absolutely the existence of Mr. Ollerenshaw.  She arranged her dress, and her parasol, and her arms, and the exact angle of her chin; and there gradually fell upon her that stillness which falls upon the figure of a woman when she has definitively adopted an attitude in the public eye.  She was gazing at the gold angel, a mile off, which flashed in the sun.  But what a deceptive stillness was that stillness!  A hammer was hammering away under her breast with what seemed to her a reverberating sound.  Strange that that hammering did not excite attention throughout the park!  Then she had the misfortune to think of the act of blushing.  She violently willed not to blush.  But her blood was too much for her.  It displayed itself in the most sanguinary manner first in the centre of each cheek, and it increased its area of conquest until the whole of her visible skin—­even the back of her neck and her lobes—­had rosily yielded.  And she was one of your girls who never blush!  The ignominy of it!  To blush because she found herself within thirty inches of a man, an old man, with whom she had never in her life exchanged a single word!

CHAPTER II

AN AFFAIR OF THE SEVENTIES