That evening Rosamund sang at a charity concert in the City Hall.  Her music was already a legend in Welsley and the neighborhood.  Mr. Dickinson, who always accompanied her singing, declared it emphatically to be “great.”  The wife of the Bishop, Mrs. Mabberley, pronounced the verdict, “She sings with her soul rather than with her voice,” without intention of paying a left-handed compliment.  The Cathedral Choir boys affirmed that “our altos are a couple of squeaks beside her.”  Even Mrs. Dickinson, “the cold douche,” as she was named in the Precincts, had long ago “come round” about Mrs. Dion Leith, and had been heard to say of her, “She’s got more than a contralto, she’s got a heart, and I couldn’t say that of some women in high positions.”  This was “aimed” at the Dean’s wife, Mrs. Jasper, who gave herself musical airs, and sometimes tried to “interfere with the Precentor’s arrangements,” which meant falling foul of “Henry.”

As Rosamund looked down upon the rows of friendly and familiar faces from the platform, as she heard the prolonged applause which greeted her before she sang, and the cries of “Encore!” which saluted her when she finished, she felt that she had given her heart irrevocably to Welsley, and the thought came to her, “How can I leave it?” This was cozy, and London could never be cozy.  She could identify herself with the concentrated life here, without feeling it a burden upon her.  For she was so much beloved that people even respected her privacy, and fell in with what she called “my absurd little ways.”  In London, however many people you knew, you saw strangers all the time, strangers with hard, indifferent eyes and buttoned-up mouths.  And one could never say of London “my London.”

When the concert was over she wound a veil about her pale yellow hair, wrapped a thin cloak round her shoulders, took up her music case and asked for Beattie.  An eager boy with a smiling round face, one of the Cathedral Choristers, darted off to find Mrs. Daventry, the sister of “our Mrs. Leith”; Mr. Dickinson gently, but decisively, took the music case from Rosamund’s hand with an “I’ll carry that home for you”; a thin man, like an early primrose obliged by some inadvertence of spring to work for its living, sidled up and begged for the name of “your most beautiful and chaste second encore for our local paper, the ’Welsley Whisperer’”; and Mrs. Dickinson in a pearl gray shawl, with an artificial pink camellia carelessly entangled in her marvelously smooth mouse-colored hair, appeared to tell Mrs. Leith authoritatively that “Madame Patey in her heyday never sang ‘O Rest in the Lord’ as we have heard it sung to-night.”

Then Rosamund, pleasantly surrounded by dear provincial enthusiasts, made her way to the door where Beattie, with more enthusiasts, was waiting for her; and they all came out into the narrow High Street, and found the September moon riding above their heads to give them a greeting nobly serene and beneficent, and they set out sans facon, many of them bare-headed, to walk home down tiny “Archbishop’s Lane” to the Precincts.