‘He’s here!’ exclaimed Milly, who was sitting near Leonora on the long Chesterfield.  Ethel, her face flushed by the fire, lay like a curving wisp of straw in John’s vast arm-chair.  Leonora was reading; she put down the magazine and glanced briefly at Ethel, then at the aspect of the room.  In silence she wished that Ethel’s characteristic attitudes could be a little more demure and sophisticated.  She wondered how often this apparently artless girl had surreptitiously seen Fred Ryley since the midnight meeting on Thursday, and she was amazed that a child of hers, so kindly disposed, could be so naughty and deceitful.  The door opened and Ethel sat up with a bound.

‘Mr. Burgess,’ the parlourmaid announced.  The three women sank back, disappointed and yet relieved.

Harry Burgess, though barely of age, was one of the acknowledged dandies of Hillport.  Slim and fair, with a frank, rather simple countenance, he supported his stylistic apparel with a natural grace that attracted sympathy.  Just at present he was achieving a spirited effect by always wearing an austere black necktie fastened with a small gold safety-pin; he wore this necktie for weeks to a bewildering variety of suits, and then plunged into a wild polychromatic debauch of neckties.  Upon all the niceties of masculine dress, the details of costume proper to a particular form of industry or recreation or ceremonial, he was a genuine authority.  His cricketing flannels—­he was a fine cricketer and lawn-tennis player of the sinuous oriental sort—­were the despair of other dandies and the scorn of the sloven; he caused the material, before it was made up, to be boiled for many hours by the Burgess charwoman under his own superintendence.  He had extraordinary aptitudes for drawing corks, lacing boots, putting ferrules on walking-sticks, opening latched windows from the outside, and rolling cigarettes; he could make a cigarette with one hand, and not another man in the Five Towns, it was said, could do that.  His slender convex silver cigarette-case invariably contained the only cigarettes worthy of the palate of a connoisseur, as his pipes were invariably the only pipes fit for the combustion of truly high-class tobacco.  Old women, especially charwomen, adored him, and even municipal seigniors admitted that Harry was a smart-looking youth.  Fatherless, he was the heir to a tolerable fortune, the bulk of which, during his mother’s life, he could not touch save with her consent; but his mother and his sister seemed to exist chiefly for his convenience.  His fair hair and his facile smile vanquished them, and vanquished most other people also; and already, when he happened to be crossed, there would appear on his winning face the pouting, hard, resentful lines of the man who has learnt to accept compliance as a right.  He had small intellectual power, and no ambition at all.  A considerable part of his prospective fortune was invested in the admirable shares of the Birmingham, Sheffield and District