What a life it is!”

She put down her fork and examined him for a moment with her pitying and curious stare.

“Does it ever occur to you,” she said, “that if we’re going to play to empty stands all this hurly-burly hasn’t got much point?”

And indeed it had occurred to him. He was only too well aware that the turmoil in his office was, in a sense, a sort of bombinating in a vacuum. You had only to look at the seating-plans in Virginia’s booking office to discover that the public at large regarded the Festival with supreme indifference. There was a thin speckling of crosses in the half-crown section, mostly representing charabanc parties, and here and there a few of the more expensive seats had been sold; but Stephen suspected that the purchasers of these were devoted or dutiful friends and relations of the performers. Virginia, knitting away uninterrupted, had finished her twin-set in record time and started on another one; her total takings amounted to less than a hundred and fifty pounds.

Encouraged by this, the anti-Festival faction had become more vociferous. The opposition was by no means confined to Miss Foulkes’ supporters and the workers in the balloon factory; letters began to appear in the Intelligencer signed “Ratepayer” and “Pro Bono Publico” asking who was going to foot the bill if the Festival lost two or three thousand pounds. Mr. Runcorn, meeting Stephen one morning in the street, declared in his most sepulchral tone: “I have my finger on the pulse of the town, Mr. Tasker; I do not like the feel of it at all.” Councillor Noakes haunted the booking office anxiously, peering short-sightedly at the seating-plans over Virginia’s shoulder and sighing deeply while he gave her small consoling pats upon various parts of her anatomy. In fact the only remaining optimists were the Mayor, who held fast to his belief that there would be a last-minute influx of Foreign Visitors, and the Vicar, who insisted that when the anticyclone arrived the bookings would be immediately trebled.

“Buzz-buzz-buzz,” said Faith, “like blowflies in a bottle. We make ourselves so busy we forget that nobody’s taking any notice of us.”

“We’ve spent more than we ought to on advertising already.”

“Just ordinary advertising. Posters and things. That’s no good. We must do something different. Have some cheese?”

“No, thanks, I’m full.”

Faith helped herself to a lump of Double Gloucester.

“Something different,” she munched.

“Yes, but what?”

“Bloons.”

“What?”

Faith finished her cheese in her own time and said:

“Balloons. Kill two birds with one stone. Win over the opposition by supporting a local industry and advertise the Festival all over the place.”

“I don’t quite get it,” said Stephen.

“You print on the balloons a neat little caption about the Pageant. You fill them with hydrogen. You ask for volunteers to let them go. (That’s more publicity because people love letting off balloons.) And they sail away wherever the wind listeth. I thought of it in the bath,” said Faith.

“Wouldn’t most of them come down in open country where they’d never be seen?”

“Yes. You’d want a lot of balloons.”

“How many?”

“Twenty thousand,” said Faith coolly. “At least. And perhaps you’d have to offer rewards and prizes to start people looking for them. But I worked it out in the bath and I thought that if five per cent were picked up, we’d have set a thousand people talking. There’s a lot of publicity in that.”

It sounded to Stephen a crazy idea. In any case, he protested, the factory couldn’t make them in time. There were only three weeks to go before the Festival; and to do any good the balloons would have to be dispatched within ten days.

“They can make them in ten days,” said Faith.

“What? You’ve talked to John Handiman already?”

“Have fixed,” said Faith. “One hundred and fifty gross at twelve-and-six a gross. Delivery to-morrow week.