grand manner
in every gesture! Her entertainments at her house at Hillport were
unsurpassed, and those who had been invited to them seldom forgot to
mention the fact. Thomas, a person not easily staggered, was
nevertheless staggered to see her travelling by car to Moorthorne--even
in his car, which to him in some subtle way was not like common
cars--for she was seldom seen abroad apart from her carriage. She kept
two horses. Assuredly both horses must be laid up together, or her
coachman ill. Anyhow, there she was, in Thomas's car, splendidly dressed
in a new spring gown of flowered silk.

"Thank you," she said very sweetly to Chadwick, in acknowledgment of his
assistance.

Then three men of no particular quality mounted the car.

"How do, Tommy?" one of them carelessly greeted the august conductor.
This impertinent youth was Paul Ford, a solicitor's clerk, who often
went to Moorthorne because his employer had a branch office there, open
twice a week.

Tommy did not respond, but rather showed his displeasure. He hated to be
called Tommy, except by a few intimate coevals.

"Now then, hurry up, please!" he said coldly.

"Right oh! your majesty," said another of the men, and they all three
laughed.

What was still worse, they all three wore the Federationist rosette,
which was red to the bull in Thomas Chadwick. It was part of Tommy's
political creed that Federationists were the "rag, tag, and bob-tail" of
the town. But as he was a tram-conductor, though not an ordinary
tram-conductor, his mouth was sealed, and he could not tell his
passengers what he thought of them.

Just as he was about to pull the starting bell, Mrs Clayton Vernon
sprang up with a little "Oh, I was quite forgetting!" and almost darted
out of the car. It was not quite a dart, for she was of full habit, but
the alacrity of her movement was astonishing. She must have forgotten
something very important.

An idea in the nature of a political argument suddenly popped into
Tommy's head, and it was too much for him. He was obliged to let it out.
To the winds with that impartiality which a tram company expects from
its conductors!

"Ah!" he remarked, jerking his elbow in the direction of Mrs Clayton
Vernon and pointedly addressing his three Federationist passengers,
"she's a lady, she is! _She_ won't travel with anybody, she won't! _She
chooses her company_--_and quite right too, I say_!"

And then he started the car. He felt himself richly aveng