hat do you think the refreshments was contracted at a 'ead?"
asked Miss Nippett.

"Give it up," replied Mavis.

"Why, no less than three shillin's, wasn't it, Mr Poulter?"

"True enough," replied Mr Poulter. "But I must admit the attendants did
look 'old-fashioned' at you, if you 'ad two glasses of claret-cup
running."

By this time, they were outside of the front door, where Mr Poulter
paused, as if designing not to go any further into the night air,
which, for the time of year, was close and warm.

"I don't want to give the 'Bush' the chance of saying Poulter never
shows himself outside the walls of the academy," remarked the
dancing-master complacently.

"There's so much jealousy of fame in the 'Bush,'" added Miss Nippett.

As they stood on the steps, Mavis could not help noticing that whereas
Miss Nippett had only eyes for Mr Poulter, the latter's attention was
fixed on the plaster figure of "Turpsichor" to the exclusion of
everything else.

"A classic figure"--(he pronounced it "clarsic")--"gives a distinction
to an academy, which is denied to mongrel and mushroom imitations," he
presently remarked.

"Quite so," assented Mavis.

"She has been with 'Poulter's' fifteen years."

"Almost as long as I have," put in Miss Nippett.

"The figure?" asked Mavis.

"The statue 'Turpsichor,'" corrected Mr Poulter.

"Turpsichor," in common with other down-at-heel people, had something
of a history. She was originally the plaster cast model of a marble
statue ordered by a sorrowing widow to grace the last resting-place of
the dear departed, a widow, whose first transports of grief were as
extravagant as the order she gave to the monumental mason. But when the
time came for the statue to be carved, and a further deposit to be
paid, the widow had been fascinated by a man whom she had met in a
'bus, when on her way to visit the cemetery where her husband was
interred. She was now loth to bear the cost of the statue and, as she
had changed her address, she took no notice of the mason's repeated
applications. "Turpsichor" had then been sold cheap to a man who had
started a tea-garden, in the vain hope of reviving the glories of those
forgotten institutions; when he had drifted into bankruptcy, she had
been knocked down for a song to a second-hand shop, where she had been
bought for next to nothing by Mr Poulter as "the very thing." Now she
stood in the entrance hall of the academy, where, it can truthfully be
said, t