She smiled kindly on him, thinking the while what a clumsy and objectionable fat little man he was.  She knew he admired her, and would have given much to dance with her; but she did not care for his heavy eyes, and she despised him because he could not screw himself up to demand a place on her programme.

‘Yes, very large company, I believe,’ he said again, moving about nervously on his toes.

‘Do you know how many invitations?’ she asked.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Dain!’ John called out, ‘come and listen to this.’  And the lawyer escaped from her presence like a schoolboy running out of school.

‘What men!’ she thought bitterly, standing neglected with all her charm and all her distinction.  ‘What chivalry!  What courtliness!  What style!’ Her son belonged to a different race of beings.

Down the corridor came Harry Burgess deep in converse with a male friend; the two were walking quickly.  She did not choose to greet them waiting there alone, and so she deliberately turned and put her head within the curtains of the cloak-room as if to speak to some one inside.

‘Twemlow was saying——­’

It seemed to her that Harry in passing had uttered that phrase to his companion.  She flushed, and shook from head to foot.  Then she reflected that Twemlow was a name common to dozens of people in the Five Towns.  She bit her lip, surprised and angered at her own agitation.  At the same time she remembered—­and why should she remember?—­some gossip of John’s to the effect that Harry Burgess was under a cloud at the Bank because he had gone to London by a day-trip on the previous Thursday without leave.  London ... perhaps....

‘Am I forty—­or fourteen?’ she contemptuously asked herself.

She heard John and Dain laugh loudly, and the jolly voice of the old doctor:  ‘Come along into the refreshment-room for a minute.’  Determined not to linger another moment for these boors, she moved into the corridor.

At the end of the vista of red carpet and gas-jets rose the grand staircase, and on the lowest stair stood Arthur Twemlow.  She had begun to traverse the corridor and she could not stop now, and fifty feet lay between them.

‘Oh!’ her heart cried in the intolerable spasm of a swift and mysterious convulsion.  ‘Why do you thus torture me?’ Every step was an agony.

He moved towards her, and she noticed that he was extremely pale.  They met.  His hand found hers.  Then it was that she perceived, with a passionate gratitude, how heaven had been watching over her.  If John had not hesitated about coming, if her daughters had not deserted her in the cloak-room, if the old doctor had not provided himself with a new supply of naughty stories, if indeed everything had not occurred exactly as it had occurred—­she would have been forced to undergo in the presence of witnesses the shock which she had just experienced; and she would have died.  She felt that in those seconds she had endured emotion to the last limit of her capacity.  She traced a providence even in Harry’s chance phrase, which had warned her and so broken the force of the stroke.