to exist.  However, when it had recovered from the shock of seeing Dick Povey’s announcement of bargains in the Signal, the district most sensibly decided that there was no reason why Dick Povey should not sell bicycles as well as a man with normal parents.  He was now supposed to be acquiring wealth rapidly.  It was said that he was a marvellous chauffeur, at once daring and prudent.  He had one day, several years previously, overtaken the sisters in the rural neighbourhood of Sneyd, where they had been making an afternoon excursion.  Constance had presented him to Sophia, and he had insisted on driving the ladies home.  They had been much impressed by his cautious care of them, and their natural prejudice against anything so new as a motorcar had been conquered instantly.  Afterwards he had taken them out for occasional runs.  He had a great admiration for Constance, founded on gratitude to Samuel Povey; and as for Sophia, he always said to her that she would be an ornament to any car.

“You haven’t heard his latest, I suppose?” said the doctor, smiling.

“What is it?” Sophia asked perfunctorily.

“He wants to take to ballooning.  It seems he’s been up once.”

Constance made a deprecating noise with her lips.

“However, that’s not his surprise,” the doctor added, smiling again at the floor.  He was sitting on the music-stool, and saying to himself, behind his mask of effulgent good-nature:  “It gets more and more uphill work, cheering up these two women.  I’ll try them on Federation.”

Federation was the name given to the scheme for blending the Five Towns into one town, which would be the twelfth largest town in the kingdom.  It aroused fury in Bursley, which saw in the suggestion nothing but the extinction of its ancient glory to the aggrandizement of Hanbridge.  Hanbridge had already, with the assistance of electric cars that whizzed to and fro every five minutes, robbed Bursley of two-thirds of its retail trade—­as witness the steady decadence of the Square!—­and Bursley had no mind to swallow the insult and become a mere ward of Hanbridge.  Bursley would die fighting.  Both Constance and Sophia were bitter opponents of Federation.  They would have been capable of putting Federationists to the torture.  Sophia in particular, though so long absent from her native town, had adopted its cause with characteristic vigour.  And when Dr. Stirling wished to practise his curative treatment of taking the sisters ‘out of themselves,’ he had only to start the hare of Federation and the hunt would be up in a moment.  But this afternoon he did not succeed with Sophia, and only partially with Constance.  When he stated that there was to be a public meeting that very night, and that Constance as a ratepayer ought to go to it and vote, if her convictions were genuine, she received his chaff with a mere murmur to the effect that she did not think she should go.  Had the man forgotten that Spot was dead?  At length he became grave, and examined them both as to their ailments, and nodded his head, and looked into vacancy while meditating upon each case.  And then, when he had inquired where they meant to go for their summer holidays, he departed.