“He is ready to start,” Ellen replied sharply.  “Haven’t forgotten you’re taking us to the band, have you?”

“I had forgotten it,” Burton admitted, “but I am quite willing to go.”

Ellen turned towards the stairs.

“Down in five minutes,” she announced.  “I hope you’ve finished all that rubbishing talk.  There’s some tea in the tea-pot on the hob, if you want any.  Don’t upset things.”

Burton drifted mechanically into the kitchen, noting its disorder with a new disapproval.  He sat on the edge of the table for a few moments, gazing helplessly about him.  Presently Ellen descended the stairs and called to him.  He took up his hat and followed his wife and the boy out of the house.  The latter eyed him wonderingly.

“Look at pa’s hat!” he shouted.  “Oh, my!”

Ellen stopped short upon her way to the gate.

“Alfred,” she exclaimed, “you don’t mean to say you’re coming out with us like that—­coming to the band, too, where we shall meet everyone?”

“Certainly, my dear,” Burton replied, placing the object of their remarks fearlessly upon his head.  “You may not be quite used to it yet, but I can assure you that it is far more becoming and suitable than a cheap silk hat, especially for an occasion like the present.”

Ellen opened her mouth and closed it again—­it was perhaps wise!

“Come on,” she said abruptly.  “Alfred wants to hear the soldier music and we are late already.  Take your father’s hand.”

They started upon their pilgrimage.  Burton, at any rate, spent a miserable two hours.  He hated the stiff, brand-new public garden in which they walked, with its stunted trees, its burnt grass, its artificial and weary flower-beds.  He hated the people who stood about as they did, listening to the band,—­the giggling girls, the callow, cigarette-smoking youths, the dressed up, unnatural replicas of his own wife and himself, with whom he was occasionally forced to hold futile conversation.  He hated the sly punch in the ribs from one of his quondam companions, the artful murmur about getting the missis to look another way and the hurried visit to a neighboring public-house, the affected anger and consequent jokes which followed upon their return.  As they walked homeward, the cold ugliness of it all seemed almost to paralyze his newly awakened senses.  It was their social evening of the week, looked forward to always by his wife, spoken of cheerfully by him even last night, an evening when he might have had to bring home friends to supper, to share a tin of sardines, a fragment of mutton, Dutch cheese, and beer which he himself would have had to fetch from the nearest public-house.  He wiped his forehead and found that it was wet.  Then Ellen broke the silence.

“What I should like to know, Alfred, is—­what’s come to you?” she commenced indignantly.  “Not a word have you spoken all the evening—­you that there’s no holding generally with your chaff and jokes.  What Mr. and Mrs. Johnson must have thought of you, I can’t imagine, standing there like a stick when they stopped to be civil for a few minutes, and behaving as though you never even heard their asking us to go in and have a bite of supper.  What have we done, eh, little Alf and me?  You look at us as though we had turned into ogres.  Out with it, my man.  What’s wrong?”