“No.” Walter mused upon the authority of a foster-father, clamping his anger down, recognizing the weakness of his position. He was not her guardian; he had no reason to suppose that her parents were alive or that any one had better right than he had to command her, but he had assumed possession of Mary Ellen as if she were a kitten and a girl was not a kitten. He could only rule by the consent of the ruled, and he thought he had earned her consent. He had given her so much--even, treating her as of discreet age, his confidence--and he had thought she had responded, he had thought she had reasonably understood what he was doing and why. But if she put it that he was simply a tyrant, there was nothing to do but to humor her till, in time, she saw indisputably that he was right. To let her go, to lose what had been so well begun, was unthinkable. Mrs. Butterworth, sensitive to Walter’s suffering, broke in upon his thoughts. “I’d like to whip the thankless brat,” she said viciously, and if she was hinting at a policy it might have been a sound one. But Walter was not thinking whether Mary Ellen was or was not still of whipable age, he was going back, whimsically, to his beginnings with her, he was thinking how he had said to Tom, “If she goes on to where I’m seeing her, she’ll wipe her boots on me.” The boot-wiping had begun before he looked for it; that was all except that it was his system on which she wiped her boots, his system off which she rubbed the bloom. He went to Mary, still staring at her uneaten meal, with a compromise. “I think you might sing this season with the Choral Society, Mary,” he said, “attending their practices and appearing in public when they appear.” “Daddy Pate,” she said, “I didn’t mean to be a nuisance, but I had to make you see it. The Choral Society? That means just in the chorus.” “Well, for this season, Mary.” “But the ‘Messiah’? You promised me.” “Oh, hardly. But we shall see, Mary. We shall see.” And knowing that she had got him, so to speak, with his foot on the butter-side, she kissed him very sweetly and then, to show him what a practical, commonsensical person she really was, she sat down to breakfast. “And I don’t mind,” she said, “if the bacon is cold,” and ate, magnanimously. CHAPTER IV--MR. CHOWN OF LONDON 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.