When the verdict was announced, the winning choir was to appear again on the platform to sing a voluntary and to receive acclamations and the challenge shield. Meanwhile, the whole four hundred contestants were herded together in the Drill Hall cellarage and Mr. Chown added himself inconspicuously to their number. Mistaken, as he hoped to be, for a Staithlwite just come off the platform, he found beer pressed fraternally upon him, and, heroically, he drank. Self-immolation and research are traditional companions. He felt that the beer had made him one of them, but could not withhold a backward glance at the vanity of West End tailoring. When he had said “Press” to the steward at the pass-door he had wondered if his costly cut were plausible and now that same cut was blandly accepted amongst the nondescript swallowtails of this unconforming mob. But he welcomed their inappreciation; he wanted to make the girl’s acquaintance first as one of themselves. A press of women came down the stairs into the cellar and Mary Ellen was with them but not of them. They chattered incessantly, excitedly, letting taut nerves relax in a spate of shouted words; she was silent, unmoved by the ordeal of the platform and the applause, nursing her sulky, secret resentment of Walter Pate who had refused to let her compete amongst the soloists. Mr. Pate was guarding his treasure against premature publicity; he was guarding her, specifically, against Mr. Chown, that annual raider who had so damnably ruined the Staithley Hand Bell Ringers by taking them to the music-halls; he hid her in the Choral Society and he underrated Mr. Chown’s perceptiveness. She had taken many things from Walter Pate--the good food which had so unrecognizably developed her, with the physical exercises he prescribed, from a sexless child into a woman of gracious curves; the good education, the good musical instruction; the good beginnings of every kind; and in return she gave him work. He was almost certain of her now: the tin was gone from her golden voice and when he let his hoarded secret loose upon the world he knew that, under God, he would be making a great gift to the concert-platform. He would give a glorious voice, perfectly trained, and perhaps more than that. But the more was still only “perhaps.” “Art,” he had said, “is unguessable” and it remained unguessable. But, “she’s not awakened yet,” he thought, and hoped for a time when her voice would be more than well-produced. It lacked color, warmth, feeling, but she was young and, meanwhile, he was doing his possible. It was the hardest thing to keep her back from public trial, both because of the girl herself and because of Tom Bradshaw, who was paying half her costs and didn’t share Walter’s faith. But they must wait, they must all wait, and if two years were not long enough they must wait longer.