Louis shook his head.

Mrs. Heath called out in severe accents which were a reproof and a warning:  “Got a sweetbread, Robert?  It’s for Mrs. Maldon.”

The clumsy fool understood that he had blundered.

He had no sweetbread—­not even for Mrs. Maldon.  The cutlets were wrapped in newspaper, and Louis rather self-consciously opened the maw of the reticule for them.

“No offence, I hope, sir,” said Heath as the pair left the shop, thus aggravating his blunder.  Louis and Rachel crossed Duck Bank in constrained silence.  Rachel was scarlet.  The new cinema next to the new Congregational chapel blazed in front of them.

“Wouldn’t care to look in here, I suppose, would you?” Louis imperturbably suggested.

Rachel did not reply.

“Only for a quarter of an hour or so,” said Louis.

Rachel did not venture to glance up at him.  She was so agitated that she could scarcely speak.

“I don’t think so,” she muttered.

“Why not?” he exquisitely pleaded.  “It will do you good.”

She raised her head and saw the expression of his face, so charming, so provocative, so persuasive.  The voice within her was insistent, but she would not listen to it.  Nobody had ever looked at her as Louis was looking at her then.  The streets, the town faded.  She thought:  “Whatever happens, I cannot withstand that face.”  She was feverishly happy, and at the same time ravaged by both pain and fear.  She became a fatalist.  And she abandoned the pretence that she was not the slave of that face.  Her eyes grew candidly acquiescent, as if she were murmuring to him, “I am defenceless against you.”

III

It was not surprising that Rachel, who never in her life had beheld at close quarters any of the phenomena of luxury, should blink her ingenuous eyes at the blinding splendour of the antechambers of the Imperial Cinema de Luxe.  Eyes less ingenuous than hers had blinked before that prodigious dazzlement.  Even Louis, a man of vast experience and sublime imperturbability, visiting the Imperial on its opening night, had allowed the significant words to escape him, “Well, I’m blest!”—­proof enough of the triumph of the Imperial!

The Imperial had set out to be the most gorgeous cinema in the Five Towns; and it simply was.  Its advertisements read:  “There is always room at the top.”  There was.  Over the ceiling of its foyer enormous crimson peonies expanded like tropic blooms, and the heart of each peony was a sixteen-candle-power electric lamp.  No other two cinemas in the Five Towns, it was reported, consumed together as much current as the Imperial de Luxe; and nobody could deny that the degree of excellence of a cinema is finally settled by its consumption of electricity.