Strictly speaking, they hadn’t a cent between them, except his hundred a year.  But he married her hair and she married his melancholy eyes; and she was content to settle in Oldcastle, where there are almost no slums.  And her stepmother was forced by Edith to make the hundred up to four hundred.  This was rather hard on Mrs Ebag.  Thus it fell out that Mrs Ebag remained a widow, and that Miss Ebag continues a flower uncalled.  However, gossip was stifled.

In his appointed time, and in the fulness of years, Goldie died, and was mourned.  And by none was he more sincerely mourned than by the aged bedridden Caiaphas.

“I miss my cat, I can tell ye!” said old Caiaphas pettishly to Carl, who was sitting by his couch.  “He knew his master, Goldie did!  Edith did her best to steal him from me when you married and set up house.  A nice thing considering I bought him and he never belonged to anybody but me!  Ay!  I shall never have another cat like that cat.”

And this is the whole truth of the affair.

THE FORTUNE TELLER

I

The prologue to this somewhat dramatic history was of the simplest.  The affair came to a climax, if one may speak metaphorically, in fire and sword and high passion, but it began like the month of March.  Mr Bostock (a younger brother of the senior partner in the famous firm of Bostocks, drapers, at Hanbridge) was lounging about the tennis-court attached to his house at Hillport.  Hillport has long been known as the fashionable suburb of Bursley, and indeed as the most aristocratic quarter strictly within the Five Towns; there certainly are richer neighbourhoods not far off, but such neighbourhoods cannot boast that they form part of the Five Towns—­no more than Hatfield can boast that it is part of London.  A man who lives in a detached house at Hillport, with a tennis-court, may be said to have succeeded in life.  And Mr Bostock had succeeded.  A consulting engineer of marked talent, he had always worked extremely hard and extremely long, and thus he had arrived at luxuries.  The chief of his luxuries was his daughter Florence, aged twenty-three, height five feet exactly, as pretty and as neat as a new doll, of expensive and obstinate habits.  It was Florence who was the cause of the episode, and I mention her father only to show where Florence stood in the world.  She ruled her father during perhaps eleven months of the year.  In the twelfth month (which was usually January—­after the Christmas bills) there would be an insurrection, conducted by the father with much spirit for a time, but ultimately yielding to the forces of the government.  Florence had many admirers; a pretty woman, who habitually rules a rich father, is bound to have many admirers.  But she had two in particular; her cousin, Ralph Martin, who had been apprenticed to her father, and Adam Tellwright, a tile manufacturer at Turnhill.