mother watches over a son. The notion that he was not QUITE right
in the pate gradually died away, and everybody 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.