verybody was thankful for that, though it was feared an
untimely grave might be his portion.

III

She was a nice girl: the nicest girl that Horace had ever met with,
because her charming niceness included a faculty of being really
serious about serious things--and yet she could be deliciously gay. In
short, she was a revelation to Horace. And her name was Ella, and she
had come one year to spend some weeks with Mrs Penkethman, the widowed
headmistress of the Wesleyan Day School, who was her cousin. Mrs
Penkethman and Ella had been holidaying together in France; their
arrival in Bursley naturally coincided with the reopening of the school
in August for the autumn term.

Now at this period Horace was rather lonely in his large house and
garden; for Sidney, in pursuit of health, had gone off on a six weeks'
cruise round Holland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, in one of those
Atlantic liners which, translated like Enoch without dying, become in
their old age 'steam-yachts', with fine names apt to lead to confusion
with the private yacht of the Tsar of Russia. Horace had offered him
the trip, and Horace was also paying his weekly salary as usual.

So Horace, who had always been friendly with Mrs Penkethman, grew now
more than ever friendly with Mrs Penkethman. And Mrs Penkethman and
Ella were inseparable. The few aristocrats left in Bursley in September
remarked that Horace knew what he was about, as it was notorious that
Ella had the most solid expectations. But as a matter of fact Horace
did not know what he was about, and he never once thought of Ella's
expectations. He was simply, as they say in Bursley, knocked silly by
Ella. He honestly imagined her to be the wonderfullest woman on the
earth's surface, with her dark eyes and her expressive sympathetic
gestures, and her alterations of seriousness and gaiety. It astounded
him that a girl of twenty-one could have thought so deeply upon life as
she had. The inexplicable thing was that she looked up to HIM. She
evidently admired HIM. He wanted to tell her that she was quite wrong
about him, much too kind in her estimate of him--that really he was a
very ordinary man indeed. But another instinct prevented him from thus
undeceiving her.

And one Saturday afternoon, the season being late September, Horace
actually got those two women up to tea in his house and garden. He had
not dared to dream of such bliss. He had hesitated long before asking
them to come, and in