back his permission, and the next moment the Bursley Operatic Society tasted the delight of its first encore.  The pert fascinations of the heroine, the bravery of the Colonel and his guards, the clowning of Bunthorne, combined with the continuous seduction of the music and the scene, very quickly induced the audience to accept without reserve this amazing intrigue of logical absurdities which was being unrolled before it.  The opera ceased to appear preposterous; the convention had won, and the audience had lost.  Small slips in delivery were unnoticed, big ones condoned, and nervousness encouraged to depart.  The performance became a homogeneous whole, in which the excellence of the best far more than atoned for the clumsy mediocrity of the worst.  When the curtains fell amid storms of applause and cut off the stage, the audience perceived suddenly, like a revelation, that the young men and women whom it knew so well in private life had been creating something—­an illusion, an ecstasy, a mood—­which transcended the sum total of their personalities.  It was this miracle, but dimly apprehended perhaps, which left the audience impressed, and eager for the next act.

* * * * *

‘That madam will go her own road,’ said Uncle Meshach under cover of the clapping.

Leonora’s smile was embarrassed.  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked him.

He bent his head towards her, looking into her face with a sort of generous cynicism.

‘I mean she’ll go her own road,’ he repeated.

And then, observing that most of the men were leaving their seats, he told Leonora that he should step across to the Tiger if she would let him.  As he passed out, leaning forward on a stick lightly clutched in the left hand, several people demanded his opinion about the spectacle.  ‘Nay, nay——­’ he replied again and again, waving one after another out of his course.

In the bar-parlour of the Tiger, the young blades, the genuine fast men, the deliberate middle-aged persons who took one glass only, and the regular nightly customers, mingled together in a dense and noisy crowd under a canopy of smoke.  The barmaid and her assistant enjoyed their brief minutes of feverish contact with the great world.  Behind the counter, walled in by a rampart of dress-shirts, they conjured with bottles, glasses, and taps, heard and answered ten men at once, reckoned change by a magic beyond arithmetic, peered between shoulders to catch the orders of their particular friends, and at the same time acquired detailed information as to the progress of the opera.  Late comers who, forcing a way into the room, saw the multitude of men drinking and smoking, and the unapproachable white faces of these two girls distantly flowering in the haze and the odour, had that saturnalian sensation of seeing life which is peculiar to saloons during the entr’actes of theatrical entertainments.  The success of the opera, and of that chit Millicent