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‘Oh! Price is all right,’ her father remarked, with an apparent benignity which surprised her. ‘He’ll pay when he can.’

‘I think it’s a shame,’ she repeated emphatically. Agnes looked with a mystified air from one to the other, instinctively divining that something very extraordinary had happened during her absence at school.

‘Ye mun’na be too hard, Anna,’ said Tellwright. ‘Supposing ye sold owd Titus up? What then? D’ye reckon ye’d get a tenant for them ramshackle works? A thousand pound spent wouldn’t ‘tice a tenant. That Edward Street property was one o’ ye grandfeyther’s specs; ‘twere none o’ mine. You’d best tak’ what ye can get.’

Anna felt a little ashamed of herself, not because of her bad policy, but because she saw that Mr. Price might have been handicapped by the faults of her property.

That afternoon it was a shy and timid Anna who swung back the heavy polished and glazed portals of the Bursley branch of the Birmingham, Sheffield and district Bank, the opulent and spacious erection which stands commandingly at the top of St. Luke’s Square. She looked about her, across broad counters, enormous ledgers, and rows of bent heads, and wondered whom she should address. Then a bearded gentleman, who was weighing gold in a balance, caught sight of her: he slid the gold into a drawer, and whisked round the end of the counter with a celerity which was, at any rate, not born of practice, for he, the cashier, had not done such a thing for years.