said to himself that her unique charm consisted in the fact that she
combined the attractiveness of woman with the powerful commonsense of
man. In common with a whole enthusiastic army of young husbands he had
been convinced that his wife was the one female creature on earth to
whom you could talk as you would to a male. "Oh!" he murmured.

"Have you forgotten it, then?" she asked coldly. To herself she was
saying: "Why am I behaving like this? After all, he's done no harm
yet." But she had set out, and she must continue, driven by the
terrible fear of what he might do. She stared at the blind. Through a
slit of window at one side of it she could see the lamp-post and the
iron kerb of the pavement.

"But that's all over long ago," he protested amiably. "Just look how
friendly you were with him yourself over supper! Besides--"

"Besides what? I wasn't friendly. I was only polite. I had to be.
Nobody's called Mr. Batchgrew worse names than you have. But you
forget. Only I don't forget. There's lots of things I don't forget,
although I don't make a song about them. I shan't forget in a hurry
how you let go of my bike without telling me and I fell all over the
road. I know I'm lots more black and blue even than I was."

If Rachel would but have argued according to his rules of debate,
Louis was confident that he could have conducted the affair to a
proper issue. But she would not. What could he say? In a flash he
saw a vista of, say, forty years of conjugal argument with a woman
incapable of reason, and trembled. Then he looked again, and saw
the lines of Rachel's figure in her delightful short skirt and was
reassured. But still he did not know what to say. Rachel spared
him further cogitation on that particular aspect of the question
by turning round and exclaiming, passionately, with a break in her
voice--

"Can't you see that he'll swindle you out of the money?"

It seemed to her that the security of their whole future depended on
her firmness and strong sagacity at that moment. She felt herself to
be very wise and also, happily, very vigorous. But at the same time
she was afflicted by a kind of despair at the thought that Louis had
indeed been, and still was, ready to commit the disastrous folly of
confiding money to Thomas Batchgrew for investment. And as Louis had
had a flashing vision of the future, so did Rachel now have such a
vision. But hers was more terrible than his. Louis foresaw merely
vexation. Rachel foresaw ruin doubtfully staved off by eternal
vigilance on her part and by nothing else--an instant's sleepiness,
and they might be in the gutter and she the wife of a ne'er-do-well.
She perceived that she must be reconciled to a future in which the
strain of intense vigilance could never once be relaxed. Strange that
a creature so young and healthy and in love should be so pessimistic,
but thus it was! She remembered in in spite of herself the warnings
against Louis which she had been compelled to listen to in the
previous year.

"Odd, of course!" said Louis. "But I can't exactly see how he'll
swindle me out of the money! A debenture is a debenture."

"Is it?"

"Do you know what a debenture is, my child?"

"I don't need to know what a debenture is, when Mr. Batchgrew's mixed
up in it."

Louis suppressed a sigh. He first thought of trying to explain to her
just what a debenture was. Then he abandoned the enterprise as too
complicated, and also as futile. Though he should prove to her that
a debenture combined the safety of the Bank of England with the
brilliance of a successful gambling transaction, she would not budge.
He was acquiring valuable and painful knowledge concerning women every
second. He grew sad, not simply with the weight of this new knowledge,
but more because, though he had envisaged certain difficulties of
married existence, he had not envisaged this difficulty. He had not
dreamed that a wife would demand a share, and demand it furiously, in
the control of his business affairs. He had sincerely imagined
that wives listened with much respect and little comprehension when
business was on the carpet, content to murmur soothingly from time to
time, "Just as you think best, dear." Life had unpleasantly astonished
him.

It was on the tip of his tongue to say to Rachel, with steadying
facetiousness--

"You mustn't forget that I know a bit about these things, having spent
years of my young life in a bank."

But a vague instinct told him that to draw attention to his career in
the bank might be unwise--at any rate, in principle.

"Can't you see," Rachel charged again, "that Mr. Batchgrew has only
been flattering you all this time so as to get hold of your money? And
wasn't it just like him to begin again harping on the electricity?>"

"Flattering me?"

"Well, he couldn't bear you before--if you'd only heard the things he
used to say!--and now he simply licks your boots."

"What things did he say?" Louis asked, disturbed.

"Oh, never mind!"

Louis became rather glum and obstinate.

"The money will be perfectly safe," he insisted, "and our income
pretty nearly doubled. I suppose I ought to know more about these
things than you."

"What's the use of income being doubled if you lose the capital?"
Rachel snapped, now taking a horrid, perverse pleasure in the perilous
altercation. "And if it's so safe why is he ready to give you so much
interest?"

The worst of women, Louis reflected, is that in the midst of a silly
argument that you can shatter in ten words they will by a fluke insert
some awkward piece of genuine ratiocination, the answer to which must
necessarily be lengthy and ineffective.

"It's no good arguing," he said pleasantly, and then repeated, "I
ought to know more about these things than you."

Rachel raised her voice in exasperation--

"I don't see it, I don't see it at all. If it hadn't been for me you'd
have thrown up your situation--and a nice state of affairs there would
have been then! And how much money would you have wasted on holidays
and so on and so on if I hadn't stopped you, I should like to know!"

Louis was still more astonished. Indeed, he was rather nettled. His
urbanity was unimpaired, but he permitted himself a slight acidity of
tone as he retorted with gentle malice--

"Well, you can't help the colour of your hair. So I'll keep my nerve."

"I didn't expect to be insulted!" cried Rachel, flushing far redder
than that rich hair of hers, and paced pompously out of the room, her
face working violently. The door was ajar. She passed Mrs. Tams on the
stairs, blindly, with lowered head.



V

In the conjugal bedroom, full of gas-glare and shadows, there were two
old women. One was Mrs. Tams, ministering; the other was Rachel Fores,
once and not long ago the beloved and courted girlish Louise of a
chevalier, now aged by all the sorrow of the world. She lay in bed--in
her bed nearest the fireplace and farthest from the door.

She had undressed herself with every accustomed ceremony, arranging
each article of attire, including the fine frock left on the bed,
carefully in its place, as is meet in a chamber where tidiness depends
on the loyal cooperation of two persons, but through her tears.
She had slipped sobbing into bed. The other bed was empty, and its
emptiness seemed sinister to her. Would it ever be occupied again?
Impossible that it should ever be occupied again! Its rightful
occupant was immeasurably far off, along miles of passages, down
leagues of stairs, separated by impregnable doors, in another
universe, the universe of the ground floor. Of course she might have
sprung up, put on her enchanting dressing-gown, tripped down a few
steps in a moment of time, and peeped in at the parlour door--just
peeped in, in that magic ribboned peignoir, and glanced--and the whole
planet would have been reborn. But she could not. If the salvation of
the human race had depended on it, she could not--partly because she
was a native of the Five Towns, where such things are not done, and no
doubt partly because she was just herself.

She was now more grieved than angry with Louis. He had been wrong; he
was a foolish, unreliable boy--but he was a boy. Whereas she was his
mother, and ought to have known better. Yes, she had become his mother
in the interval. For herself she experienced both pity and anger. What
angered her was her clumsiness. Why had she lost her temper and her
head? She saw clearly how she might have brought him round to her view
with a soft phrase, a peculiar inflection, a tiny appeal, a caress,
a mere dimpling of the cheek. She saw him revolving on her little
finger.... She knew all things now because she was so old. And then
suddenly she was bathing luxuriously in self-pity, and young and
imperious, and violently resentful of the insult which he had put upon
her--an insult which recalled the half-forgotten humiliations of her
school-days, when loutish girls had baptized her with the name of a
vegetable.... And then, again suddenly, she deeply desired that Louis
should come upstairs and bully her.

She attached a superstitious and terrible importance to the tragical
episode in the parlour because it was their first quarrel as husband
and wife. True, she had stormed at him before their engagement, but
even then he had kept intact his respect for her, whereas now, a
husband, he had shamed her. The breach, she knew, could never be
closed. She had only to glance at the empty bed to be sure that it was
eternal. It had been made slowly yet swiftly; and it was complete and
unbridgable ere she had realized its existence. When she contrasted
the idyllic afternoon with the tragedy of the night, she was astounded
by the swiftness of the change. The catastrophe lay, not in the
threatened loss of vast sums of money and consequent ruin--that had
diminished to insignificance!--but in the breach.

And then Mrs. Tams had inserted herself in the bedroom. Mrs. Tams knew
or guessed everything. And she would not pretend that she did not; and
Rachel would not pretend--did not even care to pretend, for Mrs. Tams
was so unimportant that nobody minded her. Mrs. Tams had heard and
seen. She commiserated. She stroked timidly with her gnarled hand the
short, fragile sleeve of the nightgown, whereat Rachel sobbed afresh,
with more plenteous tears, and tried to articulate a word, and could
not till the third attempt. The word was "handkerchief." She was not
weeping in comfort. Mrs. Tams was aware of the right drawer and
drew from it a little white thing--yet not so little, for Rachel was
Rachel!--and shook out its quadrangular folds, and it seemed beautiful
in the gaslight; and Rachel took it and sobbed "Thank you."

Mrs. Tams rose higher than even a general servant; she was the
soubrette, the confidential maid, the very echo of the young and
haughty mistress, leagued with the worshipped creature against the
wickedness and wile of a whole sex. Mrs. Tams had no illusions save
the sublime illusion that her mistress was an angel and a martyr. Mrs.
Tams had been married, and she had seen a daughter married. She was
an authority on first quarrels and could and did tell tales of first
quarrels--tales in which the husband, while admittedly an utterly
callous monster, had at the same time somehow some leaven of decency.
Soon she was launched in the epic recital of the birth and death of
a grandchild; Rachel, being a married women like the rest, could
properly listen to every interesting and recondite detail. Rachel
sobbed and sympathized with the classic tale. And both women, as it
was unrolled, kept well in their minds the vision of the vile man,
mysterious and implacable, alone in the parlour. Occasionally Mrs.
Tams listened for a footstep, ready discreetly to withdraw at the
slightest symptom on the stairs. Once when she did this, Rachel
murmured, weakly, "He won't--" and then lapsed into new weeping. And
after a little time Mrs. Tams departed.



VI

Mrs. Tams had decided to undertake an enterprise involving extreme
gallantry--surpassing the physical. She went downstairs and stood
outside the parlour door, which was not quite shut. Within the
parlour, or throne-room, existed a beautiful and superior being, full
of grace and authority, who belonged to a race quite different from
her own, who was beyond her comprehension, who commanded her and kept
her alive and paid money to her, who accepted her devotion casually
as a right, who treated her as a soft cushion between himself and
the drift and inconvenience of the world, and who occasionally, as a
supreme favour, caught her a smart slap on the back, which flattered
her to excess. She went into the throne-room if she was called
thither, or if she had cleansing or tidying work there; she spoke to
the superior being if he spoke to her. But she had never till then
conceived the breath-taking scheme of entering the throne-room for
a purpose of her own, and addressing the superior being without an
invitation to do so.

Nevertheless, since by long practice she was courageous, she meant to
execute the scheme. And she began by knocking at the door. Although
Rachel had seriously warned her that for a domestic servant to
knock at the parlour door was a grave sin, she simply could not help
knocking. Not to knock seemed to her wantonly sacrilegious. Thus she
knocked, and a voice told her to come in.

There was the superior being, his back to the fire and his legs
apart--formidable!

She curtsied--another sin according to the new code. Then she
discovered that she was inarticulate.

"Well?"

Words burst from her--

"Her's crying her eyes out up yon, mester."

And Mrs. Tams also snivelled.

The superior being frowned and said testily, yet not without a touch
of careless toleration--

"Oh, get away, you silly old fool of a woman!"

Mrs. Tarns got away, not entirely ill-content.

In the lobby she heard an unusual rapping on the glass of the front
door, and sharply opened it to inform the late disturber that there
existed a bell and a knocker for respectable people. A shabby youth
gave her a note for "Louis Fores, Esq.," and said that there was an
answer. So that she was forced to renew the enterprise of entering the
throne-room.

In another couple of minutes Louis was running upstairs. His wife
heard him, and shook in bed from excitement at the crisis which
approached. But she could never have divined the nature of the
phenomenon by which the unbridgable breach was about to be closed.

"Louise!"

"Yes," she whimpered. Then she ventured to spy at his face through
an interstice of the bedclothes, and saw thereon a most queer, white
expression.

"Some one's just brought this. Read it."

He gave her the note, and she deciphered it as well as she could--

DEAR Louis,--If you aren't gone to bed I want to see you
to-night about that missing money of aunt's. I've something I
must tell you and Rachel. I'm at the "Three Tuns."

JULIAN MALDON.

"But what does he mean?" demanded Rachel, roused from her heavy mood
of self-pity.

"I don't know."

"But what can he mean?" she insisted.

"Haven't a notion."

"But he must mean something!"

Louis asked--

"Well, what should _you_ say he means?"

"How very strange!" Rachel murmured, not attempting to answer the
question. "And the 'Three Tuns'! Why does he write from the 'Three
Tuns'? What's he doing at the 'Three Tuns'? Isn't it a very low
public-house? And everybody thought he was still in South Africa!... I
suppose, then, it _must_ have been him that we saw to-night."

"You may bet it was."

"Then why didn't he come straight here? That's what I want to know. He
couldn't have called before we got here, because if he had Mrs. Tams
would have told us."

Louis nodded.

"Didn't you think Mr. Batchgrew looked very _queer_ when you
mentioned Julian to-night?" Rachel continued to express her curiosity
and wonder.

"No. I didn't notice anything particular," Louis replied vaguely.

Throughout the conversation his manner was self-conscious. Rachel
observed it, while feigning the contrary, and in her turn grew uneasy
and even self-conscious also. Further, she had the feeling that Louis
was depending upon her for support, and perhaps for initiative. His
glance, though furtive, had the appealing quality which rendered him
sometimes so exquisitely wistful to her. As he stood over her by the
bed, he made a peculiar compound of the negligent, dominant masculine
and the clinging feminine.

"And why didn't he let anybody know of his return?" Rachel went on.

Louis, veering towards the masculine, clenched the immediate point--

"The question before the meeting is," he smiled demurely, "what answer
am I to send?"

"I suppose you must see him to-night."

"Nothing else for it, is there? Well, I'll scribble him a bit of a
note."

"But I shan't see him, Louis."

"No?"

In an instant Rachel thought to herself: "He doesn't want me to see
him."

Aloud she said: "I should have to dress myself all over again.
Besides, I'm not fit to be seen."

She was referring, without any apparent sort of shame, to the redness
of her eyes.

"Well, I'll see him by myself, then."

Louis turned to leave the bedroom. Whereat Rachel was very
disconcerted and disappointed. Although the startling note from Julian
had alarmed her and excited in her profound apprehensions whose very
nature she would scarcely admit to herself, the main occupation of her
mind was still her own quarrel with Louis. The quarrel was now over,
for they had conversed in quite sincere tones of friendliness, but she
had desired and expected an overt, tangible proof and symbol of peace.
That proof and symbol was a kiss.

Louis was at the door ... he was beyond the door ... she was lost.

"Louis!" she cried.

He put his face in at the door.

"Will you just pass me my hand-mirror. It's on the dressing-table."

Louis was thrilled by this simple request. The hand-mirror had arrived
in the house as a wedding-present. It was backed with tortoise-shell,
and seemingly the one thing that had reconciled Rachel the
downright to the possession of a hand-mirror was the fact that the
tortoise-shell was real tortoise-shell. She had "made out" that a
hand-mirror was too frivolous an object for the dressing-table of
a serious Five Towns woman. She had always referred to it as "the"
hand-mirror--as though disdaining special ownership. She had derided
it once by using it in front of Louis with the mimic foolish graces of
an empty-headed doll. And now she was asking for it because she wanted
it; and she had said "my" hand-mirror!

This revelation of the odalisque in his Rachel enchanted Louis, and
incidentally it also enchanted Rachel. She had employed a desperate
remedy, and the result on both of them filled her with a most
surprising gladness. Louis judged it to be deliciously right that
Rachel should be anxious to know whether her weeping had indeed made
her into an object improper for the beholding of the male eye, and
Rachel to her astonishment shared his opinion. She was "vain," and
they were both well content. In taking it she touched his hand. He
bent and kissed her. Each of them was ravaged by formidable fears for
the future, tremendously disturbed in secret by the mysterious word
from Julian; and yet that kiss stood unique among their kisses, and
in their simplicity they knew not why. And as they kissed they hated
Julian, and the past, and the whole world, for thus coming between
them and deranging their love. They would, had it been possible, have
sold all the future for tranquillity in that moment.



VII

Going downstairs, Louis found Mrs. Tarns standing in the back part of
the lobby between the parlour door and the kitchen; obviously she had
stationed herself there in order to keep watch on the messenger from
the "Three Tuns." As the master of the house approached with dignity
the foot of the stairs, the messenger stirred, and in the classic
manner of messengers fingered uneasily his hat. The fingers were
dirty. The hat was dirty and shabby. It had been somebody else's hat
before coming into the possession of the messenger. The same applied
to his jacket and trousers. The jacket was well cut, but green; the
trousers, with their ragged, muddy edges, yet betrayed a pattern of
distinction. Round his neck the messenger wore a thin muffler, and
on his feet an exhausted pair of tennis-shoes. These noiseless shoes
accentuated and confirmed the stealthy glance of his eyes. Except for
an unshaven chin, and the confidence-destroying quality that lurked
subtly in his aspect, he was not repulsive to look upon. His features
were delicate enough, his restless mouth was even pretty, and
his carriage graceful. He had little of the coarseness of
industrialism--probably because he was not industrial. His age was
about twenty, and he might have sold _Signals_ in the street, or
run illegal errands for street-bookmakers. At any rate, it was certain
that he was not above earning a chance copper from a customer of the
"Three Tuns." His clear destiny was never to inspire respect or trust,
nor to live regularly (save conceivably in prison), nor to do any
honest daily labour. And if he did not know this, he felt it. All his
movements were those of an outcast who both feared and execrated the
organism that was rejecting him.

Louis, elegant, self-possessed, and superior, passed into the parlour
exactly as if the messenger had been invisible. He was separated from
the messenger by an immeasurable social prestige. He was raised to
such an altitude above the messenger that he positively could not see
the messenger with the naked eye. And yet for one fraction of a second
he had the illusion of being so intimately akin to the messenger
that a mere nothing might have pushed him into those vile clothes
and endowed him with that furtive look and that sinister aspect of
a helot. For one infinitesimal instant he was the messenger; and
shuddered. Then the illusion as swiftly faded, and--such being Louis'
happy temperament--was forgotten. He disappeared into the parlour,
took a piece of paper and an envelope from the small writing-table
behind Rachel's chair, and wrote a short note to Julian--a note from
which facetiousness was not absent--inviting him to come at once. He
rang the bell. Mrs. Tams entered, full of felicity because the great
altercation was over and concord established.

"Give this to that chap," said Louis, casually imperative, holding out
the note but scarcely glancing at Mrs. Tams.

"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Tarns with humble eagerness, content to be a
very minor tool in the hidden designs of the exalted.

"And then you can go to bed."

"Oh! It's of no consequence, I'm sure, sir," Mrs. Tams answered.

Louis heard her say importantly and condescendingly to the messenger--

"Here ye are, young man."

She shut the front door as though much relieved to get such a source
of peril and infection out of the respectable house.

Immediately afterwards strange things happened to Louis in the
parlour. He had intended to return at once to his wife in order to
continue the vague, staggered conversation about Julian's thunderbolt.
But he discovered that he could not persuade himself to rejoin Rachel.
A self-consciousness, growing every moment more acute and troublesome,
prevented him from so doing. He was afraid that he could not discuss
the vanished money without blushing, and it happened rarely that he
lost control of his features, which indeed he could as a rule mould
to the expression of a cherub whenever desirable. So he sat down in
a chair, the first chair to hand, any chair, and began to reflect. Of
course he was safe. The greatest saint on earth could not have been
safer than he was from conviction of a crime. He might be suspected,
but nothing could possibly be proved against him. Moreover, despite
his self-consciousness, he felt innocent; he really did feel innocent,
and even ill-used. The money had forced itself upon him in an
inexcusable way; he was convinced that he had never meant to
misappropriate it; assuredly he had received not a halfpenny of
benefit from it. The fault was entirely the old lady's. Yes, he was
innocent and he was safe.

Nevertheless, he did not at all like the resuscitation of the affair.
The affair had been buried. How characteristic of the inconvenient
Julian to rush in from South Africa and dig it up! Everybody concerned
had decided that the old lady on the night of her attack had not been
responsible for her actions. She had annihilated the money--whether by
fire, as Batchgrew had lately suggested, or otherwise, did not matter.
Or, if she had not annihilated the money, she had "done something"
with it--something unknown and unknowable. Such was the acceptable
theory, in which Louis heartily concurred. The loss was his--at least
half the loss was his--and others had no right to complain. But Julian
was without discretion. Within twenty-four hours Julian might well set
the whole district talking.

Louis was dimly aware that the district already had talked, but he was
not aware to what extent it had talked. Neither he nor anybody else
was aware how the secret had escaped out of the house. Mrs. Tarns
would have died rather than breathe a word. Rachel, naturally, had
said naught; nor had Louis. Old Batchgrew had decided that his highest
interest also was to say naught, and he had informed none save Julian.
Julian might have set the secret free in South Africa, but in a highly
distorted form it had been current in certain strata of Five Towns
society long before it could have returned from South Africa. The
rough, commonsense verdict of those select few who had winded the
secret was simply that "there had been some hanky-panky," and that
beyond doubt Louis was "at the bottom of it," but that it had little
importance, as Mrs. Maldon was dead, poor thing. As for Julian, "a
rough customer, though honest as the day," he was reckoned to be
capable of protecting his own interests.

And then, amid all his apprehensions, a new hope sprouted in Louis'
mind. Perhaps Julian was acquainted with some fact that might lead to
the recovery of a part of the money. Had Louis not always held
that the pile of notes which had penetrated into his pocket did
not represent the whole of the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds?
Conceivably it represented about half of the total, in which case a
further sum of, say, two hundred and fifty pounds might be coming to
Louis. Already he was treating this two hundred and fifty pounds as
a windfall, and wondering in what most pleasant ways he could employ
it!... But with what kind of fact could Julian be acquainted?...
Had Julian been dishonest? Louis would have liked to think Julian
dishonest, but he could not. Then what ...?

He heard movements above. And the front gate creaked. As if a spring
had been loosed, he jumped from the chair and ran upstairs--away from
the arriving Julian and towards his wife. Rachel was just getting up.

"Don't trouble," he said. "I'll see him. I'll deal with him. Much
better for you to stay in bed."

He perceived that he did not want Rachel to hear what Julian had to
say until after he had heard it himself.

Rachel hesitated.

"Do you think so?... What have you been doing? I thought you were
coming up again at once."

"I had one or two little things--"

A terrific knock resounded on the front door.

"There he is!" Louis muttered, as it were aghast.




CHAPTER XI

JULIAN'S DOCUMENT


I

Julian Maldon faced Louis in the parlour. Louis had conducted him
there without the assistance of Mrs. Tams, who had been not merely
advised, but commanded, to go to bed. Julian had entered the house
like an exasperated enemy--glum, suspicious, and ferocious. His mien
seemed to say: "You wanted me to come, and I've come. But mind you
don't drive me to extremities." Impossible to guess from his grim
face that he had asked permission to come! Nevertheless he had shaken
Louis' hand with a ferocious sincerity which Louis felt keenly the
next morning. He was the same Julian except that he had grown a brown
beard. He had exactly the same short, thick-set figure, and the same
defiant stare. South Africa had not changed him. No experience could
change him. He would have returned from ten years at the North Pole
or at the Equator, with savages or with uncompromising intellectuals,
just the same Julian. He was one of those beings who are violently
themselves all the time. By some characteristic social clumsiness
he had omitted to remove his overcoat in the lobby. And now, in
the parlour, he could not get it off. As a man seated, engaged in
conversation by a woman standing, forgets to rise at once and then
cannot rise, finding himself glued to the chair, so was Julian with
his overcoat; to take it off he would have had to flay himself alive.

"Won't you take off your overcoat?" Louis suggested.

"No."

With his instinctive politeness Louis turned to improve the fire.
And as he poked among the coals he said, in the way of amiable
conversation--

"How's South Africa?"

"All right," replied Julian, who hated to impart his sensations. If
Julian had witnessed Napoleon's retreat from Moscow he would have come
to the Five Towns and, if questioned--not otherwise--would have said
that it was all right.

Louis, however, suspected that his brevity was due to Julian's
resentment of any inquisitiveness concerning his doings in South
Africa; and he therefore at once abandoned South Africa as a subject
of talk, though he was rather curious to know what, indeed, Julian had
been about in South Africa for six mortal months. Nobody in the Five
Towns knew for certain what Julian had been about in South Africa. It
was understood that he had gone there as a commercial traveller
for his own wares, when his business was in a highly unsatisfactory
condition, and that he had meant to stay for only a month. The
excursion had been deemed somewhat mad, but not more mad than sundry
other deeds of Julian. Then Julian's manager, Foulger, had (it
appeared) received authority to assume responsible charge of the
manufactory until further notice. From that moment the business had
prospered: a result at which nobody was surprised, because Foulger was
notoriously a "good man" who had hitherto been baulked in his ideas by
an obstinate young employer.

In a community of stiff-necked employers, Julian already held a high
place for the quality of being stiff-necked. Jim Horrocleave, for
example, had a queer, murderous manner with customers and with
"hands," but Horrocleave was friendly towards scientific ideas in the
earthenware industry, and had even given half a guinea to the fund for
encouraging technical education in the district. Whereas Julian Maldon
not only terrorized customers and work-people (the latter nevertheless
had a sort of liking for him), but was bitingly scornful of "cranky
chemists," or "Germans," as he called the scientific educated experts.
He was the pure essence of the British manufacturer. He refused to
make what the market wanted, unless the market happened to want what
he wanted to make. He hated to understand the reasons underlying
the processes of manufacture, or to do anything which had not been
regularly done for at least fifty years. And he accepted orders like
insults. The wonder was, not that he did so little business, but that
he did so much. Still, people did respect him. His aunt Maldon, with
her skilled habit of finding good points in mankind, had thought that
he must be remarkably intelligent because he was so rude.

Beyond a vague rumour that Julian had established a general pottery
agency in Cape Town with favourable prospects, no further news of
him had reached England. But of course it was admitted that his
inheritance had definitely saved the business, and also much improved
his situation in the eyes of the community ... And now he had achieved
a reappearance which in mysteriousness excelled even his absence.

"So you see we're installed here," said Louis, when he had finished
with the fire.

"Aye!" muttered Julian dryly, and shut his lips.

Louis tried no more conversational openings. He was afraid. He waited