Mr. Chown looked hard at her, and she met his eye unflinchingly. It was perfectly understood between them that Walter Pate was a ladder by which she had reached a secure place. Having reached it, she could kick the ladder from her, and “Well,” thought Mr. Chown, “she can do it to Pate, but I’m forewarned.” He turned to go back to the Drill Hall expecting her to follow. She did not follow, she was gazing fixedly up the street in which they stood and when he returned, a trifle ill-tempered at being kept longer than need be in the chilling air, her remark was disconcerting. The street ran uphill from the valley of the town, by daylight bleak and mean, each small house monotonously the repetition of its neighbor, but seen as she saw it now, blurred in the misty night, it led like an escape from man’s sordid handiwork to the everlasting hills beyond. Dimly the rim of Staithley Edge showed as she raised her eyes, vague blackness obscurely massed beneath a gloomy sky, and above it floated the trail of smoke emitted from some factory-stack where the night stokers fed a furnace. Chimneys, the minarets of Staithley; stokers, the muezzins; smoke, the prayer. Somewhere wind stirred on the blemished moors and a fresher air blew through the street. Mary Ellen breathed deeply, greedily filling her lungs as if she feared that to go from Staithley was to dive into some strange element which would suffocate her unless she had a stored reserve of vital air. But she was not thinking that. Mr. Chown was watching her in some bewilderment. She brought her eyes down from Staithley Edge to the level of his face. “London’s flat,” asserted Mary Ellen. “Not absolutely,” he assured her. “It’s flat,” she insisted. “I’m going to miss the Staithley hills.” It was right and proper for Mr. Chown, agent, to have his offices near Leicester Square and his beautifully furnished rooms in the Albany; but it was not right for Mary Ellen Bradshaw to adumbrate the instincts of the homing pigeon. In Mr. Chown’s opinion, home was a superstition of the middle-classes, and if an artist was not a nomad at heart, the worse artist she. He returned to his seat in the Drill Hall, with his bright certainty of Mary Ellen a trifle dimmed by her unreadiness to forget the Staithley hills, just as Walter Pate announced the judges’ decision of the choral competition. Staithley Bridge were not the first; he faced an audience which was three parts Staithley and gave the verdict to another choir. It was wonderful proof of their opinion of Walter Pate that there was no disposition to mob the referee. CHAPTER V--HUGH DARLEY’S HANDIWORK