We were all of us in the Hall, an inattentive, chattering audience of between twenty and thirty people. The last dance had been stopped at ten minutes to twelve, in order that the local parson and his wife--their name was Sturton--might be out of the house of entertainment before the first stroke of Sunday morning. Every one was wound up to a pitch of satisfied excitement. The Cinderella had been a success. The floor and the music and the supper had been good, Mrs. Jervaise had thrown off her air of pre-occupation with some distasteful suspicion, and we had all been entertained and happy. And yet these causes for satisfaction had been nothing more than a setting for Brenda Jervaise. It was she who had stimulated us, given us a lead and kept us dancing to the tune of her exciting personality. She had made all the difference between an ordinarily successful dance and what Mrs. Sturton at the open door continually described as "a really delightful evening." She had to repeat the phrase, because with the first stroke of midnight ringing out from the big clock over the stables, came also the first intimation of the new movement. Mrs. Sturton's fly was mysteriously delayed; and I had a premonition even then, that the delay promised some diversion. The tone of the stable clock had its influence, perhaps. It was so precisely the tone of a stage clock--high and pretentious, and with a disturbing suggestion of being unmelodiously flawed. Miss Tattersall, Olive Jervaise's friend, a rather abundant fair young woman, warmed by excitement to the realisation that she must flirt with some one, also noticed the theatrical sound of that announcement of midnight. She giggled a little nervously as stroke succeeded stroke in an apparently unending succession. "It seems as if it were going on all night," she said to me, in a self-conscious voice, as if the sound of the bell had some emotional effect upon her. "It's because it's out of place," I said for the sake of saying something; "theatrical and artificial, you know. It ought to be..." I did not know quite what it ought to be and stopped in the middle of the sentence. I was aware of the wide open door, of the darkness beyond, and of the timid visiting of the brilliant, chattering crowd by the fragrance of scented night-stock--a delicate, wayward incursion that drifted past me like the spirit of some sweet, shabby fairy. What possible bell could be appropriate to that air? I began, stupidly, to recall the names of such flowers as bluebell, hare-bell, Canterbury-bell. In imagination I heard their chime as the distant tinkling of a fairy musical-box. Miss Tattersall, however, took no notice of my failure to find the ideal. "Yes, isn't it?" she said, and then the horrible striking ceased, and we heard little Nora Bailey across the Hall excitedly claiming that the clock had struck thirteen. "I counted most carefully," she was insisting.