Carpenter had driven the two girls to the Town Hall at seven o’clock, and at a quarter to eight he returned to fetch his mistress.  Enveloped in her fur cloak, Leonora climbed silently into the cart.

‘I did hear,’ said Carpenter, respectfully gossiping, ’as Mr. Twemlow was gone back to America; but I seed him yesterday as I was coming back from taking the mester to that there manufacturers’ meeting at Knype....  Wonderful like his mother he is, mum.’

‘Oh, indeed!’ said Leonora.

Her first impatient querulous thought was that she would have preferred Mr. Twemlow to be in America.

The illuminated windows of the Town Hall, and the knot of excited people at the principal portico, gave her a sort of preliminary intimation that the eternal quest for romance was still active on earth, though she might have abandoned it.  In the corridor she met Uncle Meshach, wearing an antique frock-coat.  His eye caught hers with quiet satisfaction.  There was no sign in his wrinkled face of their last interview.

‘Your aunt’s not very well,’ he answered her inquiry.  ’She wasn’t equal to coming, she said.  I bid her go to bed.  So I’m all alone.’

‘Come and sit by me,’ Leonora suggested.  ‘I have two spare tickets.’

‘Nay, I think not,’ he faintly protested.

‘Yes, do,’ she said, ‘you must.’

As his trembling thin hands stole away her cloak, disclosing the perfection and dark magnificence of her toilette, and as she perceived in his features the admiration of a connoisseur, and in the eyes of other women envy and astonishment, she began to forget her despondencies.  She lived again.  She believed again in the possibility of joy.  And perhaps it was not strange that her thought travelled at once to Ethel—­Ethel whom she had not questioned further about her lover, Ethel whom till then she had figured as the wretched victim of love, but whom now she saw wistfully as love’s elect.

* * * * *

The front seats of the auditorium were filled with all that was dashing, and much that was solidly serious, in Bursley.  Hoarded wealth, whose religion was spotless kitchens and cash down, sat side by side with flightiness and the habit of living by credit on rather more than one’s income.  The members of the Society had exerted themselves in advance to impress upon the public mind that the entertainment would be nothing if not fashionable and brilliant; and they had succeeded.  There was not a single young man, and scarcely an old one, but wore evening-dress, and the frocks of the women made a garden of radiant blossoms.  Supreme among the eminent dandies who acted as stewards in that part of the house was Harry Burgess, straight out of Conduit Street, W., with a mien plainly indicating that every reserved seat had been sold two days before.  From the second seats the sterling middle classes, half envy and half disdain, examined the glittering