‘Then be damned to you!’ said Ezra Brunt, who had never been known to swear before.

Thenceforth a feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in which nothing was said and nothing done—­a silent and implacable mutual resistance.  The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive luxurious facades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected.  The pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and, fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no inconvenience; but in that the aged chemist had lived on just half his small income for some fifty years past, his position was impregnable.  Hanbridge smiled cynically at this impasse produced by an idle word, and, recognising the equality of the antagonists, leaned neither to one side nor to the other.  At intervals, however, the legend of the feud was embroidered with new and effective detail in the mouth of some inventive gossip, and by degrees it took high place among those piquant social histories which illustrate the real life of a town, and which parents recount to their children with such zest in moods of reminiscence.

When George Christopher Timmis buried his wife, Ezra Brunt, as a near neighbour, was asked to the funeral.  ‘The cortege will move at 1.30,’ ran the printed invitation, and at 1.15 Brunt’s carriage was decorously in place behind the hearse and the two mourning-coaches.  The demeanour of the chemist and the draper towards each other was a sublime answer to the demands of the occasion; some people even said that the breach had been healed, but these were not of the discerning.

The most active person at the funeral was the chemist’s only nephew, Clive Timmis, partner in a small but prosperous firm of majolica manufacturers at Bursley.  Clive, who was seldom seen in Hanbridge, made a favourable impression on everyone by his pleasing, unaffected manner and his air of discretion and success.  He was a bachelor of thirty-two, and lived in lodgings at Bursley.  On the return of the funeral-party from the cemetery, Clive Timmis found Brunt’s daughter Eva in his uncle’s house.  Uninvited, she had left her place in the private room at her father’s shop in order to assist Timmis’s servant Sarah in the preparation of that solid and solemn repast which must inevitably follow every proper interment in the Five Towns.  Without false modesty, she introduced herself to one or two of the men who had surprised her at her work, and then quietly departed just as they were sitting down to table and Sarah had brought in the hot tea-cakes.  Clive Timmis saw her only for a moment, but from that moment she was his one thought.  During the evening, which he spent alone with his uncle, he behaved in every particular as a nephew should, yet he was acting a part; his real self roved after Ezra Brunt’s daughter, wherever she might be.  Clive had never