in her amazed Edwin, who could see the tears in her
eyes. The tableau of the little, silly old man looking up, and Hilda
looking down at him, with her lips parted in a heavenly invitation, and
one gloved hand caressing his greenish-black shoulder and the other
mechanically holding the parasol aloft,--this tableau was imprinted for
ever on Edwin's mind. It was a vision blended in an instant and in an
instant dissolved, but for Edwin it remained one of the epochal things
of his experience.

Hilda gave Edwin her parasol and quickly fastened Mr Shushions's
collar, and the old man consented to be led off between the two
rosettes. The bands were playing the Austrian hymn.

"Like to come up with your young lady friend?" Albert whispered to
Edwin importantly as he went.

"Oh no, thanks." Edwin hurriedly smiled.

"Now, old gentleman," he could hear Albert adjuring Mr Shushions, and
he could see him broadly winking to the other rosettes and embracing the
yielding crowd in his wink.

Thus was the doddering old fool who had given his youth to Sunday
schools when Sunday schools were not patronised by princes, archbishops,
and lord mayors, when Sunday schools were the scorn of the intelligent,
and had sometimes to be held in public-houses for lack of better
accommodation,--thus was he taken off for a show and a museum curiosity
by indulgent and shallow Samaritans who had not even the wit to guess
that he had sown what they were reaping. And Darius Clayhanger stood
oblivious at a high window of the sacred Bank. And Edwin, who, all
unconscious, owed the very fact of his existence to the doting imbecile,
regarded him chiefly as a figure in a tableau, as the chance instrument
of a woman's beautiful revelation. Mr Shushions's sole crime against
society was that he had forgotten to die.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR.

Hilda Lessways would not return to the barrels. She was taciturn, and
the only remark which she made bore upon the advisability of discovering
Janet and Mr Orgreave. They threaded themselves out of the moving
crowd and away from the hokey-pokey stall and the barrels into the
tranquillity of the market-place, where the shadow of the gold angel at
the top of the Town Hall spire was a mere squat shapeless stain on the
irregular paving-stones. The sound of the Festival came diminished from
the Square.

"You're very fond of poetry, aren't you?" Edwin asked h