One goes, ascending all the way, through Cheetham Hill, the Ghetto, to the heights of Crumpsall and the Park by a municipal tram, which is admirably cheap or criminally cheap (according to one’s views on municipal trams), and, in any case, magnificently efficient: and at the end of the ride, one finds beauty. One may find tea at Heaton Hall, and pictures that overflow from the meagre Art Gallery in Mosley Street, and municipal golf-links, but one finds also beauty. It is a rolling country, raised above the smoke, dotted with wood and lake. Old gardens cling about the Hall, with rhododendron glades where there are sculpture and pools, and the Park rolls free in open air that is as clean as any air can be within five miles of Manchester Town Hall. It, lacks of Paradise, and if one can see green hills from Heaton Park, one cannot kelp but see the factory stacks that crown them or rise up from the valleys, but beauty lingers here on the outskirts of an ugly city secure against the jerry-builder and the ultimate defilement. Ada was going to Heaton Park. Lovers have gone to Heaton Park before Ada and they will go when Ada has crumbled to dust. Ada went, and Sam went with her. He went with her, not she with him: but if she led, he was very, very far from admitting it, though it may have been his obscure, subconscious knowledge of her leadership which made him outwardly assume the mien and the gestures of a leader. He asserted, every inch of him, that he was man, the conqueror, and she permitted the assertion and flattered it. Leading, indeed, was not a habit of Ada’s, who was born to be led, but it is given to all of us to outstrip our nature on occasion, and this was Ada’s chance. A subtle skill was granted her that she might be cunning with her opportunity. She was all calculation now, while Sam forgot to calculate, and walked with Ada on his arm along the main drive of Heaton Park. Romance kept step with him and put a radiant veil between his sober senses and this witching hour: through glamour he beheld his Ada, and saw that she was good. He soared to high ambition, either to die or to possess the nymph, and now, that heady hour, to put all to the test amongst the rhododendron bushes behind the Hall. There, by a patch of ancient turf, he halted her, and found a seat near the pool where water-lilies thrive: a lovers’ nook, love haunted. Who knows what ardours of the old régime, when lords and ladies trod that turf, had passed upon the now decaying stone of that comely seat? What ghostly lovers in satin and brocade stood round to bless them or to mock? Wood pigeons cooed above them, calling the tune, and Sam danced to it in an ecstasy of hot desire. She had the sleek self-satisfaction of a cat, the same unhurried certainty that the mouse was hers to gobble when she chose. Ada was very happy.