in the afternoon from a week’s visit to London, and he was glad to get back again.  He loved his wife and adored his daughter, in his own way, and he enjoyed the feminized domestic atmosphere of his fine new house with exactly the same zest as, on another evening, he might have enjoyed the blue haze of the billiard-room at the Conservative Club.  The interior of the drawing-room realized very well Peake’s ideals.  It was large, with two magnificent windows, practicably comfortable, and unpretentious.  Peake despised, or rather he ignored, the aesthetic crazes which had run through fashionable Hillport like an infectious fever, ruthlessly decimating its turned and twisted mahogany and its floriferous carpets and wall-papers.  That the soft thick pile under his feet would wear for twenty years, and that the Welsbach incandescent mantles on the chandelier saved thirty per cent, in gas-bills while increasing the light by fifty per cent.:  it was these and similar facts which were uppermost in his mind as he gazed round that room, in which every object spoke of solid, unassuming luxury and represented the best value to be obtained for money spent.  He desired, of a Saturday night, nothing better than such a room, a couple of packs of cards, and the presence of wife and child and his two life-long friends, Sneyd and Lovatt—­safe men both.  After cards were over—­and on Lovatt’s account play ceased at ten o’clock—­they would discuss Bursley and Bursley folk with a shrewd sagacity and an intimate and complete knowledge of circumstance not to be found in combination anywhere outside a small industrial town.  To listen to Sneyd and Mrs Peake, when each sought to distance the other in tracing a genealogy, was to learn the history of a whole community and the secret springs of the actions which constituted its evolution.

“Haven’t you any news for me?” asked Peake, during a pause in the talk.  At the same moment the door opened and Mrs Lovatt entered.  “Eh, Auntie Lovatt,” he went on, greeting her, “we’d given ye up.”  Mrs Lovatt usually visited the Peakes on Saturday evenings, but she came later than her husband.

“Eh, but I was bound to come and see you to-night, Uncle Peake, after your visit to the great city.  Well, you’re looking bonny.”  She shook hands with him warmly, her face beaming goodwill, and then she kissed her half-sister and Ella, and told Sneyd that she had seen him that morning in the market-place.

Mrs Peake and Mrs Lovatt differed remarkably in character and appearance, though this did not prevent them from being passionately attached to one another.  Mrs Lovatt was small, and rather plain; content to be her husband’s wife, she had no activities beyond her own home.  Mrs Peake was tall, and strikingly handsome in spite of her fifty years, with a brilliant complexion and hair still raven black; her energy was exhaustless, and her spirit indomitable; she was the moving force of the Wesleyan Sunday School, and there was not a man in England who could have driven her against her will.  She had a fortune of her own.  Enoch Lovatt treated her with the respect due to an equal who had more than once proved herself capable of insisting on independence and equal rights in the most pugnacious manner.