He looked up and saw the venerable face and long white beard of George Christopher Timmis.

Ezra Brunt shrank away, embittered and ashamed.

‘I cannot,’ he murmured with difficulty.

‘The love of God is all-powerful.’

‘Will it make you part with that bit o’ property, think you?’ said Ezra Brunt, with a kind of despairing ferocity.

‘Brother,’ replied the aged servant of God, unmoved, ’if my shop is in truth a stumbling-block in this solemn hour, you shall have it.’

Ezra Brunt was staggered.

‘I believe!  I believe!’ he cried.

‘Praise God!’ said the chemist, with majestic joy.

* * * * *

Three months afterwards Eva Brunt and Clive Timmis were married.  It is characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the surface harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54 Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the rest of his premises.  In all its shabbiness it stands between the other big dazzling shops as a reminding monument.

* * * * *

PHANTOM

I

The heart of the Five Towns—­that undulating patch of England covered with mean streets, and dominated by tall smoking chimneys, whence are derived your cups and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a portion of your iron—­is Hanbridge, a borough larger and busier than its four sisters, and even more grimy and commonplace than they.  And the heart of Hanbridge is probably the offices of the Five Towns Banking Company, where the last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of human existence, and the meaning of life is expressed in balances, deposits, percentages, and overdrafts—­especially overdrafts.  In a fine suite of rooms on the first floor of the bank building resides Mr. Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May and their children.  Mrs. Woolley is compelled to change her white window-curtains once a week because of the smuts.  Mr. Woolley, forty-five, rather bald, frigidly suave, positive, egotistic, and pontifical, is a specimen of the man of business who is nothing else but a man of business.  His career has been a calculation from which sentiment is entirely omitted; he has no instinct for the things which cannot be defined and assessed.  Scarcely a manufacturer in Hanbridge but who inimically and fearfully regards Mr. Woolley as an amazing instance of a creature without a soul; and the absence of soul in a fellow-man must be very marked indeed before a Hanbridge manufacturer notices it.  There are some sixty thousand immortal souls in Hanbridge, but they seldom attract attention.