ssy horse and galloped at a terrific rate, plunging down ravines,
and then trotting fast over the crests of clearings. She came to a man
who was boiling a kettle over a camp-fire, and slipped lithely from
the horse, and the man, with a start of surprise, seized her pretty
waist and kissed her passionately, in the midst of the immense
forest whose every leaf was moving. And she returned his kiss without
restraint. For they were betrothed. And Rachel imagined the free
life of distant forests, where love was, and where slim girls rode
mettlesome horses more easily than the girls of the Five Towns
rode bicycles. She could not even ride a bicycle, had never had the
opportunity to learn. The vision of emotional pleasures that in
her narrow existence she had not dreamed of filled her with mild,
delightful sorrow. She could conceive nothing more heavenly than to
embrace one's true love in the recesses of a forest.... Then came
crouching Indians.... And then she heard Louis Fores behind her. She
had not meant to turn round, but when a hand was put heavily on her
shoulder she turned quickly, resenting the contact.

"I should like a word with ye, if ye can spare a minute, young miss,"
whispered a voice as heavy as the hand. It was old Thomas Batchgrew's
face and whiskers that she was looking up at in the gloom.

As if fascinated, she followed in terror those flaunting whiskers up
the slope of the narrow isle to the back of the auditorium. Thomas
Batchgrew seemed to be quite at home in the theatre; he wore no hat
and there was a pen behind his ear. Never would she have set foot
inside the Imperial de Luxe had she guessed that Thomas Batchgrew was
concerned in it. She thought she had heard once, somewhere, that he
had to do with cinemas in other parts of the country, but it would
not have occurred to her to connect him with a picture-palace so near
home. She was not alone in her ignorance of the councillor's share in
the Imperial. Practically nobody had heard of it until that night, for
Batchgrew had come into the new enterprise by the back door of a loan
to its promoters, who were richer in ideas than in capital; and now,
the harvest being ripe, he was arranging, by methods not unfamiliar to
capitalists, to reap where he had not sown.

Shame and fear overcame Rachel. The crystal dream was shivered
to dust. Awful apprehension, the expectancy of frightful events,
succeeded to it. She perceived that since the very moment of quitting