THERE were moments during that night when Sam imagined that he was in the stranglehold of a grand passion: times when he quite successfully deceived himself that he burned for Ada.

And certainly the experience, unique for him, of a sleepless night lent colour to the belief that he was passionately in love, whereas he was, in fact, merely attracted by a girl who had spared no pains to attract; and what kept Sam awake was not passion but calculation. The affair, indeed, was as broad as it was long: it had a slender basis of mutual attraction, and a monstrous superstructure on each side of self-interest.

He did not “see through” Ada to the point of being prophetic about her, but he did even from the beginning perceive that Anne was not likely to be enthusiastic. But would Anne greet any daughter-in-law with open arms? Was there born the daughter of Eve whom Anne would think the peer of her Sam? He did not want to cross his mother, but a man must be a man, and a mother’s fondness and her jealousy of the intending wife were things about which one had to be callous. The world, as Benedick said, must be peopled.

Anne would see eye to eye with him as to the practical advantages of Ada. Ada was Peter’s daughter.

That parentage had, by way of discount, the defect of its quality. Socially it was a great thing to be Peter’s son-in-law, and not only socially but ideally. Sam’s admiration for the curate was genuine enough, and he knew that Anne shared it. But there was the question of money, and Peter had none. Sam kept his mother, and would have to keep his wife. He saw in Ada an asset which he could ultimately exploit, but, in the meantime, until there came into his mind the scheme which should turn his association with Peter into money, he must reckon on a tight period. Anne would see the tight period, but not the unborn, fruitful plan on which he counted for their future. And he could not hurry that plan to birth. His schemes came to him when he least expected them, spontaneously. They were not to be forced by worry.

Again, he reminded himself, there was no hurry. He had only just met Ada, and was planning as if his engagement ring were on her finger. Not that he had any serious doubts about that ring and Ada’s willingness to wear it, but she did not wear it yet, and there was time in hand, and to spare, for consideration of these practical affairs.

Meantime, he loved her, and love, according to the authors, was the most wonderful thing in the world. He told himself very firmly that he loved Ada, and that love was wonderful. Reiteration is so potent that before morning he believed what he wished to believe. He recalled the soft pressure of her hand when she said “Good night,” the froufrou of her skirt, her melting eye; and persuaded himself that Ada Struggles was a pearl beyond price.

He was perfectly sure that he loved her, and for proof there was his sleeplessness. It occurred to him that as he could not sleep, and was only thinking in circles, he might as well do something to hasten the time when he could see Ada again. He could not return “Marcus Aurelius” to Peter until he had read it, and if he returned it with unexpected promptitude, he must be ready to face a stiff examination in it; therefore he lit the gas and read “Marcus Aurelius” by way of serving Ada, whom he loved.

Hard service, too, for there was not much in Sam’s philosophy which agreed with the Emperor’s, but two nights later he was ringing Peter’s bell with the book under his arm, an ordered prÉcis of it in his mind, and some selected passages from it on his tongue. They were not selected because Sam liked them, but because he thought Peter liked them.

Peter was out, but Ada was in, and, curiously enough for one who was not an optimist either by nature or experience, dressed again in her Sunday clothes.

She opened the door to him. “Father is out, Mr. Branstone,” she said.

“I only called to return him this book.”

“I do not think he will be long,” said Ada promptly, who knew very well that Peter would certainly be late. “Will you not come in and wait for him?”

He came, crossing his Rubicon. The unchaperoned intimacy of that night struck both of them as a daring short cut to a position to which they were not entitled—a thing properly done only by the engaged and the maturely and securely engaged. Luck fought for Ada.

“I’m afraid I can’t stay very long,” he hedged desperately.

Ada sat down and crossed her knees. A neat ankle was effectively on exhibition. “That chair of father’s,” she said, “is fairly comfortable.” Also, it faced Ada’s, and he drew up another, less inviting, chair, and placed it flush with the fire. Except by a side-glance, he could not see her ankle now, and evaded that aphrodisiac, while Peter’s chair, though empty, completed the semi-circle, and seemed to give a sort of countenance to their interview. Sam drew much comfort from that chair, and tried to guide their conversation into literary paths of which the chair would have approved. He discoursed of “Marcus Aurelius,” and he was very dull, but felt virtuous.

Ada did not believe that it was virtuous to be dull, and mentally cursed that tertium quid, the ghost of Peter Struggles, whom Sam had so firmly established in his chair; but she saw that the pace was not to be quickened here, under Peter’s roof.

“I think your knowledge of books is wonderful, Mr. Branstone,” she said, when Sam had exhausted his ideas about “Marcus Aurelius.”

“I never find time to read, myself. Whenever I have the opportunity of recreation, I go out for exercise.” The statement lacked the merit of truth She never took exercise, but was adept at sitting in front of a fire doing exactly nothing. The point was that in this house of the good Peter, Sam’s enterprise was burked, and she wanted him where he could race without a handicap. “Do you ever go to Heaton Park?” she asked conversationally. “I shall probably be going there on Saturday.”

“With—with your father?” asked Sam.

“Oh, no,” she answered brightly. “Saturday is sermon day. That is why I am in the way here, although,” she added pathetically, “I fear he often finds me in the way. I am not bookish like you and him.” She gave that explanation suddenly, and it satisfied him.

“I am not really bookish, either,” he said. “Of course you won’t be going alone to Heaton Park.”

She hoped not. “I expect so,” she said.

Sam took the plunge. “Could I have the honour of accompanying you, Miss Struggles?”

“Oh, but you are so busy. I must not waste your time.”

“It couldn’t be wasted with you,” said Sam, and glanced guiltily at Peter’s chair, as if he had exceeded the limits of propriety, but he had never seen Peter with anything but a benevolent smile, on his face, and was unable to see him imaginatively now in any other mood. He took fresh courage. “May I call for you?”

“That,” said Ada, “would never do. It would disturb father at his sermon. I shall go by tram at about three o’clock.” She rose. There was nothing to be done with Sam in that house, but she pinned her faith to Heaton Park: and not in vain.

Allow for the difference in size, distance and the general scale of things, and Heaton Park may be regarded as the Manchester equivalent to Richmond Park.

Once upon a time the Manchester Town Council had a magnificent opportunity, and lost it. There are legends that they did not mean to lose it, and that they did not lose it through any fault of theirs. But they lost it. They lost the chance of buying Trafford Park, which lies along the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal, and was bought by Mr. Ernest Terah Hooley. It is said that Trafford Park, now a flourishing and rather American-look-ing industrial town (even the streets in its residential area are numbered, and not named, after the American plan, and railways stray about the roads, more Americano), is the one successful enterprise associated with the name of Hooley. That may or may not be true: at any rate the Manchester Town Council missed its chance at Trafford Park, and when Heaton Park, another old estate, came into the market, the Council did not repeat their mistake.

One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to the heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which is admirably cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on municipal trams), and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the end of the ride, one finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and pictures that overflow from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and municipal golf-links, but one finds also beauty.

It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that is as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. It, lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, one cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up from the valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly city secure against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement.

Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went with her.

He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very far from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was man, the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. Leading, indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but it is given to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this was Ada’s chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be cunning with her opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park.

Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall.

There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who knows what ardours of the old rÉgime, when lords and ladies trod that turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to mock? Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to it in an ecstasy of hot desire.

She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried certainty that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very happy.

But apprehension gripped him now. He had not known her for a week, and she was Ada. Peter’s daughter. He stood aghast at his precipitance, then, with the feeling that it was after all a “stroke” (though a larger one than ever before), and that he believed in acting promptly, cleared his throat and plunged into speech.

“Miss Struggles,” he said, “I know that I have only made your acquaintance during the current week, but I seem to have known you all my life. It’s because I used to see you in church, I daresay. I mean we were not strangers when we met, and, anyhow,” he continued recklessly, “I don’t care if we were. I’m not the hesitating sort. I mean, show me a thing, and I can tell you right off whether it’s good or bad. My mind’s made up in a jiffy: that’s the kind of fellow I am. And when my mind’s made up, I act.”

Ada had given a little gasp at the phrasing of his opening—that “during the current week,” an idiom from his business correspondence slipping in here to mark his nervousness—but he was fairly launched now, and she purred gently like a cat well lubricated with butter.

“Yes, Mr. Branstone,” she said, “I think men ought to be resolute.”

“So do I,” he replied. “And so I am. Quite resolute and quite determined about you.”

“About me?” She turned innocent eyes wonderingly at him. “I didn’t know you were being personal.”

“Well,” he said, “I am. I am,” he repeated, and took her hand.

“Mr. Branstone,” she murmured, as one who sees a vision splendid in a dream, and let her hand lie limp in his.

He bent to her. “Can’t you,” he asked hoarsely, “can’t you call me Sam?”

She called him Sam, and he kissed her.

“Ada!” He spoke her name like a caress. “Ada!” Her name was wonderful; she was a miracle; Sam was triumphant love. At that moment he was passionately in love, and he had conquered. He had pressed the lips of his divinity, shyly, with a revealing inexpertness which should have charmed her, who, being a woman, knew all about love while Sam was in short trousers. It didn’t charm Ada, it touched no deeper chord than satisfaction at a good job well done. This was his first, his freshest love, but she cared only that the fish was on her line, securely hooked. He saw her face, idealized her face and gloried in her face: she saw a wedding-ring, she was to be Mrs., she was to escape the book-ridden home of Peter Struggles. Both had their moment then, but Sam, in his, loved Ada, and Ada only loved herself.

“Darling,” he said, and sought her lips again She saw the thirst of him—and used it.

She drew back. “I do not think you ought to kiss me again until we have mentioned this to father,” said Ada Struggles, digging the hook more deeply in her fish. “Not,” she went on, as she saw him flinch, “that I do not want you to. Only——”

“Yes,” he said, as she left it at the “only,” and allowed him to appreciate her infinite delicacy. “Yes. Of course. Shall we have tea at the Hall?”

“Oh,” said Ada, “ought we to?” She was seen to tremble on the brink of a delicious temptation, and with difficulty to resist. “I’m afraid,” she decided, “not yet. But father will have finished his sermon by now, and if you came and saw him at once, then... then, Sam...” She eyed him, languishing, and opened up for him the golden vista of a jocund courtship—once Peter had been “seen.” He came, obediently, to see Peter, and she relaxed her standard so far as to take his arm down the drive of Heaton Park. Indeed, just at the corner by the copse, where they were hidden, he had an arm round her waist: his feet trod air, and his head was with the stars.

Ada was thinking, “If he gets the engagement ring to-night, I can show it after church to-morrow.”