"Have you ever been to Manchester?" he asked Katharine.

"Never," she replied.

"Why do you object to it, then?"

Katharine stirred her tea, and seemed to speculate, so Denham thought,
upon the duty of filling somebody else's cup, but she was really
wondering how she was going to keep this strange young man in harmony
with the rest. She observed that he was compressing his teacup, so
that there was danger lest the thin china might cave inwards. She
could see that he was nervous; one would expect a bony young man with
his face slightly reddened by the wind, and his hair not altogether
smooth, to be nervous in such a party. Further, he probably disliked
this kind of thing, and had come out of curiosity, or because her
father had invited him--anyhow, he would not be easily combined with
the rest.

"I should think there would be no one to talk to in Manchester," she
replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment
or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he
smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.

"In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly
hits the mark," he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque
contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers
pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of
Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the
town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live,