This decided Mrs. Malpas.  She returned suddenly to the Five Towns, where at least her reputation was secure.  Only a week previously Lemuel had learnt indirectly that she had left their native district.  He determined thenceforward to forget her completely.  Mrs. Malpas’s prettiness was of the fleeting sort.  After Nina’s birth she began to get stout and coarse, and the nostalgia of the saloon-bar, the coffee-room, and the sanded portico overtook her.  The Tiger at Bursley was for sale, a respectable commercial hotel, the best in the town.  She purchased it, wines, omnibus connection, and all, and developed into the typical landlady in black silk and gold rings.

In the Tiger Nina was brought up.  She was a pretty child from her earliest years, and received the caresses of all as a matter of course.  She went to a good school, studied the piano, and learnt dancing, and at sixteen did her hair up.  She did as she was told without fuss, being apparently of a lethargic temperament; she had all the money and all the clothes that her heart could desire; she was happy, and in a quiet way she deemed herself a rather considerable item in the world.  When she was eighteen her mother died miserably of cancer, and it was discovered that the liabilities of Mrs. Malpas’s estate exceeded its assets—­and the Tiger mortgaged up to its value!  The creditors were not angry; they attributed the state of affairs to illness and the absence of male control, and good-humouredly accepted what they could get.  None the less, Nina, the child of luxury and sloth, had to start life with several hundreds of pounds less than nothing.  Of her father all trace had been long since lost.  A place was found for her, and for over two years she saw the world from the office of a famous hotel in Doncaster.  Her lethargy, and an invaluable gift of adapting herself to circumstances, saved her from any acute unhappiness in the Yorkshire town.  Instinctively she ceased to remember the Tiger and past splendours. (Equally, if she had married a Duke instead of becoming a book-keeper, she would have ceased to remember the Tiger and past humility.) Then by good or ill fortune she had the offer of a situation at the Hotel Majestic, Strand, London.  The Majestic and the sights thereof woke up the sleeping soul.

Before her death Mrs. Malpas had told Nina many things about the vanished Lemuel; among others, the curious detail that he had two small moles—­one hairless, the other hirsute—­close together on the under side of his right wrist.  Nina had seen precisely such marks of identification on the right wrist of Mr. Lionel Belmont.

She was convinced that Lionel Belmont was her father.  There could not be two men in the world so stamped by nature.  She perceived that in changing his name he had chosen Lionel because of its similarity to Lemuel.  She felt certain, too, that she had noticed vestiges of the Five Towns accent beneath his Americanisms.  But apart from these reasons, she knew by a superrational instinct that Lionel Belmont was her father; it was not the call of blood, but the positiveness of a woman asserting that a thing is so because she is sure it is so.