"Yes, yes. He behaved very well." Now that she put it to him that way he was touched by Horace's behaviour. He could always be touched by the thought of anything you did for _him_. But Ralph Bevan could have told Fanny she was mistaken. Young Horace didn't do it altogether for his father; he did it for himself, for an ideal of conduct, an ideal of honour that he had, to let off steam, to make a sensation in the Town Hall, to feel himself magnificent and brave; because he, too, was an egoist, though a delightful one. Mr. Waddington returned to his speech. "I can't think what made me leave out that bit about the dawn." "Oh, bother your old dawn," said Fanny. "I'm going to bed." She went, consoled. "Dear Horry," she thought, "I'm glad he did that." VIII 1 The Ballinger affair did not end with the demonstration in the Town Hall. It had unforeseen and far-reaching consequences. The first of these appeared in a letter which Mr. Waddington received from Mr. Hitchin: "DEAR SIR,-- "_Re_ my estimate for decoration and additional building to Mrs. Levitt's house, I beg to inform you that recent circumstances have rendered it impossible for me to take up the contract. I must therefore request you to transfer your esteemed order to some other firm. "Faithfully yours, "THOMAS HITCHIN." Mr. Hitchin expressed his attitude even more clearly to the foreman of his works. "I'm not going to build bathrooms and boudoirs and bedrooms for that--" the word he chose completed the alliteration. So that Mr. Waddington was compelled to employ a Cheltenham builder whose estimate exceeded Mr. Hitchin's estimate by thirty pounds. And Mr. Hitchin's refusal was felt, even by people who resented his estimates, to be a moral protest that did him credit. It impressed the popular imagination. In the popular imagination Mrs. Levitt was now inextricably mixed up with the Ballinger affair. Public sympathy was all with Ballinger, turned out of his house and forced to take refuge with his wife's father at Medlicott, forced to trudge two and a half miles every day to his work and back again. The Rector and Major Markham of Wyck Wold, meditating on the Ballinger affair as they walked back that night from the Town Hall, pronounced it a mystery. "It wasn't likely," Major Markham said, "that Ballinger, of his own initiative, would leave a comfortable house in Sheep Street for a damp cottage in Lower Wyck." "Was it likely," the Rector said, "that Waddington would turn him out?" He couldn't believe that old Waddington would do anything of the sort. "Unless," Major Markham suggested, "he's been got at. Mrs. Levitt may have got at him." He was a good sort, old Waddy, but he would be very weak in the hands of a clever, unscrupulous woman. The Rector said he thought there was no harm in Mrs. Levitt, and Major Markham replied that he didn't like the look of her.