THE best that could be said about the Wheatsheaf Hotel at Staithley Bridge was very good indeed; it was that when a certain eminent actor-manager was appearing in Manchester, he put up at the Wheatsheaf in Staithley and motored in and out. It is thirty miles each way, there is a Midland Hotel in Manchester, and actor-managers know all there is to know about personal comfort. That places the Wheatsheaf.

It was Staithley’s sporting hotel, and golf club-houses, not to mention the habit of golfers of motoring to their sport, have dispelled the illusion that sportsmen are a hardy race. The Wheatsheaf had its crowded hour when the visiting teams of professional footballers who came to oppose Staithley Rovers arrived in a charabanc, and attracted customers, who paid reckless prices for drinks in a place where they could get near views of authentic heroes: but for the most part, solid, quiet comfort was the keynote of the Wheatsheaf and commercial travelers knew it.

Those of them who were not victims of the falling status of the traveler, and the too closely scrutinized expense accounts, went to the Wheatsheaf; the others envied them and went where they could afford to go. The uninstructed Londoner would have passed it by without a second glance; the Wheatsheaf did not advertise. It was innocent of gilt, and its whisky was unwatered. It was a very good hotel.

Nevertheless, Mr. Alastair Montagu, who always stayed there when his company was at the Theater Royal, was surprised to see Lexley Chown in the smoking room of the Wheatsheaf. He remembered the eminent actor-manager, and his surprise was not that Chown, being in Staith-ley, should have the discrimination to stay at the Wheatsheaf, but that Chown should be in Staithley. Chown was a figure in the profession, but emphatically a London figure.

The business of Mr. Chown was that of an “artiste’s agent.” A middleman trading in human flesh and blood? Perhaps; but Chown was a useful clearing-house. He was an impressive person, floridly handsome, beautifully dressed, and the routine work which kept him and the expensively rented, exquisitely furnished suite of offices near Leicester Square was something like this. A manager would ring up and say that by to-morrow he must have a snub-nosed actor, six feet tall, with red hair and a cockney accent to play a part worth seven pounds a week. Mr. Chown, or Mr. Chown’s secretary, consulted the card index and, by its means, collected half a dozen unemployed actors who answered, roughly, to the manager’s specification, and sent them to see the manager, who might choose one of them but more probably would not. He would probably ring up and say, “I say, Chown, I’ve looked over this bunch. Not one of them a bit like it.” Chown would reply, truthfully, that each of his applicants had a snub nose, red hair, was six feet high and a cockney who was prepared to act for seven pounds a week, and that these were the qualifications the manager had demanded. The manager would not deny it, but “I had a brain-wave last night. Billy Wren is the man I want for that part. He was born to play it, only,” pathetically, “I don’t know where he is.”

“I do,” Mr. Chown would say calmly. “He’s in ‘The Poppy Plant,’ which is at Eastbourne this week and at Torquay next week.”

“Get him out of that for me, old man.”

“I’ll try, but Billy is five feet six, his hair is black and he’s got a Roman nose.”

“I don’t care: I want him.”

“And his salary is sixteen.”

“Who cares?” Billy would be wired for, cajoled into giving up the certainty of his tour for the uncertainty of a London run, his touring manager would be placated with a substitute at half Billy’s salary, and the London Manager would pay Mr. Chown precisely nothing for these services. Did Mr. Chown, then, help lame dogs over stiles for nothing? Not at all: he received ten per cent of the actor’s salary for the first ten weeks of a run, from the actor. His brains and his system were at the service of the manager, but it was the actor who paid all while receiving certainly not more than the manager who paid nothing, not even compliments to Mr. Chown on the astonishing efficiency of that compilation of many years, his card index.

That was the bread and butter work of Mr. Lexley Chown, but his portly form was not nourished on Lenten fare, nor was his wine bill paid out of his card index. He was an industrious seeker after talent buried in the English provinces; he had the flair—not the nose, for, remarkably, Mr. Chown was not a Jew—for discovering young people of merit whose market value, under intelligent handling, would in a few years be in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds a week. It is a profitable thing to be sole agent of a number of people each earning a hundred pounds a week.

When business was good—and Staithley was a good “No. 2” town—Mr. Alastair Montagu was capable of believing what his posters asked the public to believe about the merits of his company, but in his most optimistic, his most characteristically showman-like mood, he could not persuade himself that Lexley Chown had come from London to Staithley looking for stars of the future amongst the sprightly old women and elderly young men of “The Woman Who Paid” company. There was old Tom Hall, of course, a sound actor who ought to be in London, but Chown knew all about Tom, and about Tom’s trouble, too. Whisky drinkers on Tom’s scale weren’t Chown’s quarry, nor, indeed, he reflected, were sound actors either. To be a “sound actor” is to be damned with faint praise and a mediocre salary. No: Chown must be after something at the music-hall, and Montagu had “popped in” the other evening without seeing anything extraordinary. But that was just it, with Chown. There was nothing extraordinary about the people he discovered until after he discovered them; then every one saw how extraordinary they were.

Chown, shaking Montagu’s hand and bending over it with an inclination of the body which seemed derived from Paris rather than London, was merely Chown not differentiating between this unimportant touring manager and the great ones of the earth who paid high salaries to established reputations. But Mr. Montagu was flattered, he had a fine capacity for flattery.

“My dear Montagu, I’m delighted,” said Mr. Chown. “You will honor me by dining with me? They have a Chablis here that really is not unworthy of your acceptance.”

It was flattering to be thought a connoisseur of wine, and Chown had skillfully mentioned a wine that couldn’t go beyond Montagu’s savoir vivre, instead of the more esoteric drinks of his own preferring. Yet Mr. Chown, taking trouble to secure a guest, wanted nothing of Montagu but his company. The theater is at once convivial and self-insulating. Chown hated solitude, and though there were hail-fellow-well-met commercial travelers in the hotel whose conversation would have been a tonic, he preferred the limited Mr. Montagu. Erroneously, Mr. Chown despised commercial travelers.

Mr. Montagu, in gratitude, decided to give Mr. Chown a hint. Mr. Chown was in evening dress.

“I am glad to hear,” said Mr. Chown, who had heard nothing at all, “that you are having excellent houses.”

The houses were no better than Montagu’s inexpensive company deserved. “I am not,” he confessed, “doing musical comedy business. Still, they have a feeling for the legitimate here. Staithley’s a good town, if,” he added, trying to give his kindly hint, “it isn’t dressy.”

“No. I suppose one mustn’t judge these people by their clothes. They don’t put their money on their backs in the North. They’ve more left to spend on the theater, Montagu.”

“And the music-hall.”

“Ah! You feel the competition?”

“I wasn’t meaning that. Look here, Chown, are you coming in to see my show to-night?”

“Well—” Mr. Chown’s whole anatomy, as seen above the table, was apology incarnate.

“No. You’re not. I didn’t think it and that’s why I didn’t ask at once. It’s some one at the Palace you’ve come to see, isn’t it?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well, there’s nothing else in Staithley.” The theater is self-insulating. “And you haven’t come here for your health. But, if you’ll excuse my saying it, they don’t dress for the theater, let alone the Palace, and if you go there as you are, they’ll throw things at you from the gallery.”

“Montagu, I shan’t forget this kindness,” said Chown.

“You put me under obligation to you. But—did you never hear of an Eisteddfod?”

“Is it a new act on the halls?” asked Mr. Montagu, who did not rapidly clear his mind of an obsession.

Mr. Chown smiled. “Not yet,” he said, but “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,” he thought, mentally filing an idea for future reference.

“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Montagu. “Why am I thinking of Lloyd George?”

“Because of a natural association of ideas. Staithley Eisteddfod, however, is a Lancashire occasion with a Welsh label that hasn’t much to do with it. You may recall the Hand Bell Ringers who were on the halls some years ago. I picked them up at Staithley Eisteddfod. It’s a sort of competitive festival of song, and if I were not dressed, I should not be admitted to the stalls.”

Staithley was, so to speak, on Montagu’s beat, and it was not on, obviously, Chown’s. Yet here was Chown telling Montagu something about Staithley quite material to his business, which he did not know. Staithley Eisteddfod did not advertise: the largest hall in the town was too small to hold the friends of the competitors, let alone the hardly more dispassionate public, and Chown had his ticket for the stalls because he was a subscriber to the funds. Short of theft, it was the only way by which one could become possessed of a ticket.

He did not add, though he knew, that Montagu’s second-rate company with their third-rate play was at the Staithley Theater Royal that week because more alert managers, with better attractions, steered clear of the place in that week of musical ferment, and the resident theater manager had to take what he could, by diplomatic silence, get. One lives and learns and Mr. Montagu would learn that week without a living wage; his moderate houses belonged with the early, pre-Eisteddfod nights of the week and though only the favored few would crowd into the Eisteddfod Hall, the rest of Staithley, hot partisans of the performers, watched and waited.

Music is music in Lancashire.

“Ah.” said the innocent Mr. Montagu, “if it’s music, and dressed at that, it’ll not affect me at the theater.”

“Let me fill your glass.” said Mr. Chown. “What’s your opinion of the cinemas?”

Mr. Montagu was of the opinion, current, in 1912. that, the cinemas were of no account. Revolutions in the making are apt to go unperceived by their contemporaries. Chown was less insular, but “Imagine.” he said, “the strangled emotions of the young man in the stalls who desires a woman he sees on the cinema and then realizes she is a shadow on a screen.” They finished dinner on a genially Rabelaisian note.

Chown chose this, the first evening of the Eisteddfod, because there were to be no Hand Bell Ringers and no instrumentalists: there was choral singing and there were soloists. He was going to hear Choral Societies from all over Lancashire sing, one after the other, the same chorus from “King Olaf,” and he was going to hear soloists, one after the other, sing the same song. It was, on the face of it, the dullest possible way of spending an evening, yet the packed audience in Staithley Drill Hall considered themselves privileged to be there. The official judges who were Walter Pate and two others (which meant, for practical purposes. Walter Pate alone) sat screened oft from view of the performers, lest prejudice should mar the fairness of their decisions. They heard but did not see.

The audience heard and saw, and the singers were not numbers to them but “our Annie”’ or “our Sam”’ or “our lot fra? Blackburn”’ and so on. Local feeling ran high under an affectation of cool discrimination and broke out in wild applause, intended to influence the judges’ verdict, coming, curiously localized, from parts of the hall where adherents had gathered together in the belief that union is strength. But they were, one and all, susceptible to fine shades of singing; they didn’t withhold applause from a fine rendering because the singers were of some other district than their own. Local patriotism was disciplined to their musical appreciations.

Mr. Chown, of London, had ceased, as an annual visitor, to be surprised by this musical cockpit, where not money but taintless glory was the prize. They competed for the honor of their birthplaces, and for the privilege of holding a “challenge shield,” inscribed with the winners’ names, until the nest contest. He had ceased even to wonder at that drastic rule of an autocratic committee imposing evening dress upon the occupants of the front seats and at its phenomenal results. He was a worker in research, he was scientifically unemotional about the motive of his research, but he was on fertile ground here, and if he drew blank at Staithley Eisteddfod, then Lancashire was not the county he took it for.

Yet his was not the point of view of Mr. Pate, and the capacity to sing was the least of the qualities for which he looked. To a sufficing extent, the capacity would be present in all of to-night’s competitors, even in those who sang only in chorus, and what Mr. Chown was looking for was best indicated by the algebraic symbol, X. He couldn’t, himself, have defined the quality he sought. The reflection of Mr. Montagu about the actor Tom Hall may be recalled. Tom Hall was a sound actor, lacking X. If there is a word for X, it is personality. Good locks went for something, and so did the evident possession of either sex but the whole of X depended neither upon good looks nor upon sex, and was a mystery of the stars whom Mr. Chown, with his trustworthy flair, discovered before they were stars. Technique could be acquired, and Mr.

Chown did not condemn technique, but X was and it was not possible to acquire it. Add X to technique and the result was a hundred pounds a week: technique without X was Tom Hall, “The Woman Who Paid” and the whisky of conscious failure in life.

He sat down with a silent prayer that an X performer would appear on the platform and that he might not repeat his poignant disappointment of last year when he had found an unmistakable X only to learn that its possessor was a Wesleyan who looked upon a theater door as the main entrance to hell. “But you’re a great artist,” he had told her and “I’m a Christian woman,” she had replied and left him frustrate.

His program informed him that the first part of the evening would be occupied by choral singing, and he settled himself on a spartan chair to await, with what patience he might, the turn of the soloists. There were ten choirs on the program; at least two hours of it, he reckoned, but Mr. Chown was no quitter and the zeal of the conductors and the rusticity of the choirs’ clothing might be trusted to afford him some amusement. And yet he flagged; the monotony was drugging him, and the Wheatsheaf had done him very well....

Had he slept? That was the question he asked himself as he saw the girl. Had he slept through the choral and perhaps half of the solo singing? He sat up sharply, and, as he did so, realized that a full choir was on the platform. But his first impression had been that the girl was alone, and, even now, he found it difficult to see that there were thirty-nine other people with her.

She eclipsed them. “She’s got it,” he prevented himself with difficulty from shouting aloud—and Mr. Chown was no easy prey to enthusiasm. Still, a girl who could wipe out thirty-nine other people, who could glow uniquely in a crowd! “Put her on a stage,” he was thinking, “and they’ll feel her to the back row of the gallery.” He noted as additional facts, accidentals but fortifying, that she had youth and good looks. He tried, honestly, to fix his attention on a large-headed man in the choir who had a red handkerchief stuck into his shirt-front, and a made-up tie that had wandered below his ear. The fellow was richly droll, but it was no use: the girl drew him back to her. He tried again, with an earnest spinsterish lady who looked strong-minded enough for anything: and the girl had him in the fraction of a minute. “She’ll do,” he thought—“if she hasn’t got religion,” he added ruefully. “Number seven—Staithley Bridge Choral Society,” he read on his program. That was a simplification, anyhow: the girl must live in Staithley.

They were the home choir, Staithley’s own, and the applause was long, detaining them in embarrassed acknowledgment on a platform they vehemently wished to quit, but Mr. Chown, making for the pass-door under cover of the applause, observed that there was no embarrassment about the girl. “Um,” he thought, “no nerves. They’re better with them. Well, one can’t have everything.” At the pass-door, a steward stood sentinel. “Press,” said Mr. Chown with aplomb, using an infallible talisman, and the sentinel made way for him.

When the verdict was announced, the winning choir was to appear again on the platform to sing a voluntary and to receive acclamations and the challenge shield. Meanwhile, the whole four hundred contestants were herded together in the Drill Hall cellarage and Mr. Chown added himself inconspicuously to their number. Mistaken, as he hoped to be, for a Staithlwite just come off the platform, he found beer pressed fraternally upon him, and, heroically, he drank. Self-immolation and research are traditional companions. He felt that the beer had made him one of them, but could not withhold a backward glance at the vanity of West End tailoring. When he had said “Press” to the steward at the pass-door he had wondered if his costly cut were plausible and now that same cut was blandly accepted amongst the nondescript swallowtails of this unconforming mob. But he welcomed their inappreciation; he wanted to make the girl’s acquaintance first as one of themselves.

A press of women came down the stairs into the cellar and Mary Ellen was with them but not of them. They chattered incessantly, excitedly, letting taut nerves relax in a spate of shouted words; she was silent, unmoved by the ordeal of the platform and the applause, nursing her sulky, secret resentment of Walter Pate who had refused to let her compete amongst the soloists. Mr. Pate was guarding his treasure against premature publicity; he was guarding her, specifically, against Mr. Chown, that annual raider who had so damnably ruined the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers by taking them to the music-halls; he hid her in the Choral Society and he underrated Mr. Chown’s perceptiveness.

She had taken many things from Walter Pate—the good food which had so unrecognizably developed her, with the physical exercises he prescribed, from a sexless child into a woman of gracious curves; the good education, the good musical instruction; the good beginnings of every kind; and in return she gave him work. He was almost certain of her now: the tin was gone from her golden voice and when he let his hoarded secret loose upon the world he knew that, under God, he would be making a great gift to the concert-platform. He would give a glorious voice, perfectly trained, and perhaps more than that. But the more was still only “perhaps.”

“Art,” he had said, “is unguessable” and it remained unguessable. But, “she’s not awakened yet,” he thought, and hoped for a time when her voice would be more than well-produced.

It lacked color, warmth, feeling, but she was young and, meanwhile, he was doing his possible. It was the hardest thing to keep her back from public trial, both because of the girl herself and because of Tom Bradshaw, who was paying half her costs and didn’t share Walter’s faith. But they must wait, they must all wait, and if two years were not long enough they must wait longer.

Mr. Pate, who looked upon her as the great servant he would give to music, was screened away in the judges’ box: Mr. Chown, who looked upon her as an income, watched Mary Ellen take her cloak from a long row hanging on the wall and go towards the stairs she had just descended.

Evidently, she was for a breath of air and he thought it would be a shrewd air on his bare head, but the opportunity of private conversation was too good to be missed and he awaited her return at the foot of the stair.

“Oh, you are going out?” he said. “So’m I. It’s hot in here.” He modified the Gallicism of his bow.

“Yes,” she said, consenting to his escort. She knew, better than he did, that the sort of boisterous crowd which awaits the declaration of an election result was assembled round the Drill Hall; it would be convenient to have this big man with her to shoulder a way through it.

Their clothes stamped them as competitors and the crowd gave passage. Evening dress was licensed in Staithley that night, but his arm was agreeably protective till they were through the crush; then he withdrew it.

“I’m glad to be out of that,” he said.

“There’s too much crowd to-night,” said Mary Ellen.

“Ah, you feel that, do you?”

“Choral singing!” she said, with immense disgust.

“Yes, indeed. It does make one feel one of a crowd. I’ve often wondered, in my own case, if I shouldn’t have done better to have gone on the stage.”

She looked him over. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you weren’t always fat. It’s too late now.”

Mr. Chown swallowed hard. “Yes, for me,” he said. “Not for you. Would you care to go on the stage if the chance came?”

“Would a duck swim?”

Ducks, he thought, more often drowned than swam on the stage; that was why there was always so much room at the top. “It’s very hard work,” he said.

“I’m not afraid of work,” she said, and then remembered her grievance, “if I can see it leading anywhere. Work that only leads to singing with the crowd isn’t funny.”

“Oh, I can do better than that for you.”

“You can? You?”

“If you will work. If, for instance, you will get rid of your Lancashire accent.”

“Tha’ gornless fule,” she said, “if tha’ doan’t kna’ th’ differ ’atween Lankysheer an’ t’other A’ll show thee. Me got an accent? Me that’s worked like a Fury these last two years to lose my accent? Let me tell you I’ve had the best teachers in Staithley and—”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “The difference is amazing. I realize how you must have worked. It is only a question now of, so to speak, a finishing school. The best teachers in Staithley are, after all, Staithley teachers. I am thinking of London and perhaps not so much of conscious work as unconscious imitation of the speech of the people who are around you.”

“London!” she said. “London! Who are you?”

“I’m a well-known theatrical agent, and I became well-known by making the right people famous. You are one of the right people, but there is work before you. You can’t act yet. You have it all to learn, acting, dancing—”

“Not all,” she said. “I can sing.”

“In a Choral Society,” he said.

“You go and ask Walter Pate,” she said, professing a faith in Walter’s judgment which might, in her circumstances, have been to her credit, but that all Staithley shared that faith.

All Staithley and Mr. Chown who was at once impressed by her giving Walter Pate so confidently as reference for her abilities. “Does Mr. Pate believe in you?” he asked.

“Ask him yourself. Ask him why he keeps me and teaches me and when he’s told you that, ask him a question for me. Ask why he wouldn’t let me go in for the solo competition to-night when he says I’m to sing solo in the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas, and if you get the answer to that, tell me, for I don’t know.”

Chown thought he could tell her without asking, and marked, gladly, her bitterness. If Pate was training this girl, it was because he believed in her. Pate did not take all who came, and wasted no time on fools, but he had not let her sing as a soloist to-night, though she was to sing “The Messiah” in a few months. Why? Because tonight was Chown’s night for being in Staithley and Pate was afraid of Chown. Pate (the dog) had found something in this girl and was keeping it to himself. He imagined he had hidden her safely in that choir, did he? But old Chown had the flair, Chown had spotted the girl’s possession of something Pate did not know her to possess. Pate only knew she had a voice: Chown knew she had the stuff in her that stars were made of. Certainly her voice, a Pate-approved, Pate-produced voice, put an even better complexion on the matter than Chown had suspected; it meant that here was immediate, and not merely future, exploitability. She was ripe at once for musical comedy on tour and when she had shed her accent and picked up some tricks of the trade, he would stun London with her—if he could filch her from the wary Mr. Pate.

He did not think of it, precisely, as filching, because his conscience was quite clear that he, being Chown, could do immensely more for her than Pate. Pate would be thinking of the salary of a musical comedy star. Pate would do her positive damage by over-training her up to some impossible standard ridiculously above the big public’s head; and the big public was the only public that counted. Mr. Chown saw himself, in all sincerity, as the girl’s benefactor, if not as her savior.

A word of hers came back to him as a menace to his hopes. “Did I understand you to say that Mr. Pate keeps you?”

Mary Ellen nodded, and he felt he had struck a snag.

“You are a relative of his?”

“I’m not then. If you want to know, he found me singing in the streets.”

“And was this long ago?”

“Getting on for two years.”

Mr. Chown had the grace to feel a twinge: she was, beyond a doubt, Pate’s property. But he recovered balance, telling himself very firmly that Pate would mismanage the property; that life was a battlefield and that “Vae Victis” was its motto; that one must live and that if Pate had taken reasonable precautions, he would not have exposed the girl to the marauding Mr. Chown. And, anyhow, Pate was a provincial.

He asked her age, and “Twenty-one,” she said brazenly, aware of the trammels of minority. He guessed her eighteen at most, but she wasn’t impossibly twenty-one and he had his reasons for believing her.

“You couldn’t be a better age,” he said. “I have some doubt as to what Mr. Pate will say to my proposal of the stage for you.”

“Are you going to tell him about it?” she asked in alarm.

“I will tell you,” he said, “now. If you come with me to-morrow to London, you can begin at once in a musical comedy on tour.” She gave a gasp. “Oh,” he said, “you wish to hear no more. You are anxious to return to the Drill Hall. You are, perhaps, cold?” He was very cold, but not too cold to play his fish.

“Cold? I could listen all night to this.” Mr. Chown envied her the undistinguished cloak she wore: per ardua ad astra.

“Well,” he said, “it is true that the work I have to offer you is very different from the restrained, the almost caged existence you have been enduring. But you will begin in the chorus. You have stage fright to get over, and all the green sickness of a raw beginner. My friend Hubert Rossiter”—even Mary Ellen had heard of Rossiter—“will take you and I shall see that he passes you on from company to company. Soon you will play small parts, and then leading parts. Possibly, for experience, a pantomime at Christmas. And while you are learning your business in this way you will be paid all the time.”

“How much?” she asked promptly.

“Exactly what you are worth,” he said. “You won’t starve and I call your attention to this point. I act as your agent and I take a ten per cent commission of your salary. That is all I take, and you will see that it is to my interests that your salary shall be large. If I did not believe that your salary in a very few years will be considerable, I should not be standing bareheaded and without a coat in a Staithley by-street. The train to London leaves at ten in the morning. Am I to take a ticket for you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“It is a curious fact,” he remarked, “that I do not know your name. Mine is Chown. Lexley Chown.”

“Mine’s Mary Ellen Bradshaw,” she said, jettisoning the name of Pate as useless cargo now.

“Mary,” he mused. “I think we’ll keep the Mary. But we’ll improve the rest. And now that you and I have settled this between ourselves, when do I see Mr. Pate?”

“He’s very busy to-night,” said Mary Ellen, “and the train leaves early to-morrow.”

Mr. Chown looked hard at her, and she met his eye unflinchingly. It was perfectly understood between them that Walter Pate was a ladder by which she had reached a secure place. Having reached it, she could kick the ladder from her, and “Well,” thought Mr. Chown, “she can do it to Pate, but I’m forewarned.” He turned to go back to the Drill Hall expecting her to follow. She did not follow, she was gazing fixedly up the street in which they stood and when he returned, a trifle ill-tempered at being kept longer than need be in the chilling air, her remark was disconcerting.

The street ran uphill from the valley of the town, by daylight bleak and mean, each small house monotonously the repetition of its neighbor, but seen as she saw it now, blurred in the misty night, it led like an escape from man’s sordid handiwork to the everlasting hills beyond. Dimly the rim of Staithley Edge showed as she raised her eyes, vague blackness obscurely massed beneath a gloomy sky, and above it floated the trail of smoke emitted from some factory-stack where the night stokers fed a furnace. Chimneys, the minarets of Staithley; stokers, the muezzins; smoke, the prayer. Somewhere wind stirred on the blemished moors and a fresher air blew through the street. Mary Ellen breathed deeply, greedily filling her lungs as if she feared that to go from Staithley was to dive into some strange element which would suffocate her unless she had a stored reserve of vital air. But she was not thinking that.

Mr. Chown was watching her in some bewilderment. She brought her eyes down from Staithley Edge to the level of his face. “London’s flat,” asserted Mary Ellen.

“Not absolutely,” he assured her.

“It’s flat,” she insisted. “I’m going to miss the Staithley hills.”

It was right and proper for Mr. Chown, agent, to have his offices near Leicester Square and his beautifully furnished rooms in the Albany; but it was not right for Mary Ellen Bradshaw to adumbrate the instincts of the homing pigeon. In Mr. Chown’s opinion, home was a superstition of the middle-classes, and if an artist was not a nomad at heart, the worse artist she.

He returned to his seat in the Drill Hall, with his bright certainty of Mary Ellen a trifle dimmed by her unreadiness to forget the Staithley hills, just as Walter Pate announced the judges’ decision of the choral competition. Staithley Bridge were not the first; he faced an audience which was three parts Staithley and gave the verdict to another choir. It was wonderful proof of their opinion of Walter Pate that there was no disposition to mob the referee.