They were off, together.  Ruth, it had appeared, was actually staying at the Five Towns Hotel at Knype, which at that epoch was the only hotel in the Five Towns seriously pretending to be “first-class” in the full-page advertisement sense.  The fact that Ruth was staying at the Five Towns Hotel impressed Denry anew.  Assuredly she did things in the grand manner.  She had meant to walk down by the Park to Bursley Station and catch the last loop-line train to Knype, and when Denry suddenly disclosed the existence of his motor-car, and proposed to see her to her hotel in it, she in her turn had been impressed.  The astonishment in her tone as she exclaimed:  “Have you got a motor?” was the least in the world naive.

Thus they departed together from the stricken house, Ruth saying brightly to Nellie, who had reappeared in a painful state of demoralisation, that she should return on the morrow.

And Denry went down the obscure drive with a final vision of the poor child, Nellie, as she stood at the door to speed them.  It was extraordinary how that child had remained a child.  He knew that she must be more than half-way through her twenties, and yet she persisted in being the merest girl.  A delightful little thing; but no savoir vivre, no equality to a situation, no spectacular pride.  Just a nice, bright girl, strangely girlish....  The Cotterills had managed that bad evening badly.  They had shown no dignity, no reserve, no discretion; and old Cotterill had been simply fatuous in his suggestion.  As for Mrs Cotterill, she was completely overcome, and it was due solely to Ruth’s calm, managing influence that Nellie, nervous and whimpering, had wound herself up to come and shut the front door after the guests.

It was all very sad.

When he had successfully started the car, and they were sliding down the Moorthorne hill together, side by side, their shoulders touching, Denry threw off the nightmarish effect of the bankrupt household.  After all, there was no reason why he should be depressed.  He was not a bankrupt.  He was steadily adding riches to riches.  He acquired wealth mechanically now.  Owing to the habits of his mother, he never came within miles of living up to his income.  And Ruth—­she, too, was wealthy.  He felt that she must be wealthy in the strict significance of the term.  And she completed wealth by experience of the world.  She was his equal.  She understood things in general.  She had lived, travelled, suffered, reflected—­in short, she was a completed article of manufacture.  She was no little, clinging, raw girl.  Further, she was less hard than of yore.  Her voice and gestures had a different quality.  The world had softened her.  And it occurred to him suddenly that her sole fault—­extravagance—­ had no importance now that she was wealthy.

He told her all that Mr Cotterill had said about Canada.  And she told him all that Mrs Cotterill had said about Canada.  And they agreed that Mr Cotterill had got his deserts, and that, in its own interest, Canada was the only thing for the Cotterill family; and the sooner the better.  People must accept the consequences of bankruptcy.  Nothing could be done.