We had a few hundred yards to walk down the silent, wide street, where the gas-lamps were burning with the strange, endless patience that gas-lamps have.  The stillness of a provincial town at night is quite different from that of London; we might have been the only persons alive in England.

Except for a feeling of unreality, a feeling that the natural order of things had been disturbed by some necromancer, I was perfectly well the same morning at breakfast, as the doctor had predicted I should be.  When I expressed to Mr Brindley my stupefaction at this happy sequel, he showed a polite but careless inability to follow my line of thought.  It appeared that he was always well at breakfast, even when he did stay up ’a little later than usual’.  It appeared further that he always breakfasted at a quarter to nine, and read the Manchester Guardian during the meal, to which his wife did or did not descend—­according to the moods of the nursery; and that he reached his office at a quarter to ten.  That morning the mood of the nursery was apparently unpropitious.  He and I were alone.  I begged him not to pretermit his Guardian, but to examine it and give me the news.  He agreed, scarcely unwilling.

‘There’s a paragraph in the London correspondence about Fuge,’ he announced from behind the paper.

‘What do they say about him?’

‘Nothing particular.’

‘Now I want to ask you something,’ I said.

I had been thinking a good deal about the sisters and Simon Fuge.  And in spite of everything that I had heard—­in spite even of the facts that the lake had been dug by a railway company, and that the excursion to the lake had been an excursion of Sunday-school teachers and their friends—­I was still haunted by certain notions concerning Simon Fuge and Annie Brett.  Annie Brett’s flush, her unshed tears; and the self-consciousness shown by Mrs Colclough when I had pointedly mentioned her sister’s name in connection with Simon Fuge’s:  these were surely indications!  And then the doctor’s recitals of manners in the immediate neighbourhood of Bursley went to support my theory that even in Staffordshire life was very much life.

‘What?’ demanded Mr Brindley.

‘Was Miss Brett ever Simon Fuge’s mistress?’

At that moment Mrs Brindley, miraculously fresh and smiling, entered the room.

‘Wife,’ said Mr Brindley, without giving her time to greet me, ‘what do you think he’s just asked me?’

‘I don’t know.’

’He’s just asked me if Annie Brett was ever Simon Fuge’s mistress.’

She sank into a chair.

‘Annie Brett?’ She began to laugh gently.  ’Oh!  Mr Loring, you really are too funny!’ She yielded to her emotions.  It may be said that she laughed as they can laugh in the Five Towns.  She cried.  She had to wipe away the tears of laughter.

‘What on earth made you think so?’ she inquired, after recovery.