The film showed a forest with a wooden house in the middle of it.  Out of this house came a most adorable young woman, who leaped on to a glossy horse and galloped at a terrific rate, plunging down ravines, and then trotting fast over the crests of clearings.  She came to a man who was boiling a kettle over a camp-fire, and slipped lithely from the horse, and the man, with a start of surprise, seized her pretty waist and kissed her passionately, in the midst of the immense forest whose every leaf was moving.  And she returned his kiss without restraint.  For they were betrothed.  And Rachel imagined the free life of distant forests, where love was, and where slim girls rode mettlesome horses more easily than the girls of the Five Towns rode bicycles.  She could not even ride a bicycle, had never had the opportunity to learn.  The vision of emotional pleasures that in her narrow existence she had not dreamed of filled her with mild, delightful sorrow.  She could conceive nothing more heavenly than to embrace one’s true love in the recesses of a forest....  Then came crouching Indians....  And then she heard Louis Fores behind her.  She had not meant to turn round, but when a hand was put heavily on her shoulder she turned quickly, resenting the contact.

“I should like a word with ye, if ye can spare a minute, young miss,” whispered a voice as heavy as the hand.  It was old Thomas Batchgrew’s face and whiskers that she was looking up at in the gloom.

As if fascinated, she followed in terror those flaunting whiskers up the slope of the narrow isle to the back of the auditorium.  Thomas Batchgrew seemed to be quite at home in the theatre; he wore no hat and there was a pen behind his ear.  Never would she have set foot inside the Imperial de Luxe had she guessed that Thomas Batchgrew was concerned in it.  She thought she had heard once, somewhere, that he had to do with cinemas in other parts of the country, but it would not have occurred to her to connect him with a picture-palace so near home.  She was not alone in her ignorance of the councillor’s share in the Imperial.  Practically nobody had heard of it until that night, for Batchgrew had come into the new enterprise by the back door of a loan to its promoters, who were richer in ideas than in capital; and now, the harvest being ripe, he was arranging, by methods not unfamiliar to capitalists, to reap where he had not sown.

Shame and fear overcame Rachel.  The crystal dream was shivered to dust.  Awful apprehension, the expectancy of frightful events, succeeded to it.  She perceived that since the very moment of quitting the house the dread of some disaster had been pursuing her; only she had refused to see it—­she had found oblivion from it in the new and agitatingly sweet sensations which Louis Fores had procured for her.  But now the real was definitely sifted out from the illusory.  And nothing but her own daily existence, as she had always lived it, was real.  The rest was a snare.  There were no forests, no passionate love, no flying steeds, no splendid adorers—­for her.  She was Rachel Fleckring and none else.