Then he had to turn her in the yard, and get her and the dogcart down the passage.  He doubted whether he should do it, for the passage seemed a size too small.  However, he did it, or the mare did it, and the entire organism swerved across a portion of the footpath into Broad Street.

For quite a quarter of a mile down Broad Street Ellis blushed, and kept his gaze between the mare’s ears.  However, the mare went beautifully.  You could have driven her with a silken thread, so it seemed.  And then the dog, growing accustomed to his prominence up there on the dogcart, began to be a bit doggy.  He knew the little thing’s age and weight, but, really, when you take a girl out for a Sunday spin you want more information about her than that.  Her asked her name, and her name was Jenkins—­Ada.  She was the great Jenkins’s daughter.

(’Oh,’ thought Ellis, ‘the deuce you are!’)

‘Father’s gone to Manchester for the day, and aunt’s looking after me,’ said Ada.

‘Do they know you’ve come out—­like this?’

‘Not much!’ She laughed deliciously.  ‘How lovely it is!’

At Knype they drew up before the Five Towns Hotel and descended.  The Five Towns Hotel is the greatest hotel in North Staffordshire.  It has two hundred rooms.  It would not entirely disgrace Northumberland Avenue.  In the Five Towns it is august, imposing, and unique.  They had a lemonade there, and proceeded.  A clock struck; it was a near thing.  No more refreshments now until they had passed the three-mile limit!

Yes!  Not two hundred yards further on she spied an ice-cream shop in Fleet Road, and Ellis learnt that she adored ice-cream.  The mare waited patiently outside in the thronged street.

After that the pilgrimage to Sneyd was punctuated with ice-creams.  At the Stag at Sneyd (where, among ninety-and-nine dogcarts, Ellis’s dogcart was the brightest green of them all) Ada had another lemonade, and Ellis had something else.  They saw the Park, and Ada giggled charmingly her appreciation of its beauty.  The conversation throughout consisted chiefly of Ada’s teeth.  Ellis said he would return by a different route, and he managed to get lost.  How anyone driving to Hanbridge from Sneyd could arrive at the mining village of Silverton is a mystery.  But Ellis arrived there, and he ultimately came out at Hillport, the aristocratic suburb of Bursley, where he had always lived till the last year.  He feared recognition there, and his fear was justified.  Some silly ass, a schoolmate, cried, ‘Go it!’ as the machine bowled along, and the mischief was that the mare, startled, went it.  She went it down the curving hill, and the vehicle after her, like a kettle tied to a dog’s tail.

Ellis winked stoutly at Ada when they reached the bottom, and gave the mare a piece of his mind, to which she objected.  As they crossed the railway-bridge a goods-train ran underneath and puffed smoke into the mare’s eyes.  She set her ears back.