Bursley and went to Llandudno for a spell. Horace envied them, but
he saw them off at the station as an elder brother should, and
tipped the porters.

Certainly he was relieved of the formality of paying eight pounds
a week to his brother. But this did not help him much. The sad
fact was that 'things' (by which is meant fate, circumstances,
credit, and so on) had gone too far. It was no longer a question
of eight pounds a week; it was a question of final ruin.

Surely he might have borrowed money from Sidney? Sidney had no
money; the money was Ella's, and Horace could not have brought
himself to borrow money from a woman--from Ella, from a heavenly
creature who always had a soothing sympathetic word for him. That
would have been to take advantage of Ella. No, if you suggest such
a thing, you do not know Horace.

I stated in the beginning that he had no faults. He was therefore
absolutely honest. And he called his creditors together while he
could yet pay them twenty shillings in the pound. It was a noble
act, rare enough in the Five Towns and in other parts of England.
But he received no praise for it. He had only done what every man
in his position ought to do. If Horace had failed for ten times
the sum that his debts actually did amount to, and then paid two
shillings in the pound instead of twenty, he would have made a
stir in the world and been looked up to as no ordinary man of
business.

Having settled his affairs in this humdrum, idiotic manner, Horace
took a third-class return to Llandudno. Sidney and Ella were