was disgusted with Fred Ryley because he was not as other young men were—­Harry Burgess for instance.  The startling hint from Leonora that perhaps all was not well at the works exasperated her.  She held the works in abhorrence.  With her sisters, she had always regarded the works as a vague something which John Stanway went to and came away from, as the mysterious source of food, raiment, warmth.  But she was utterly ignorant of its mechanism, and she wished to remain ignorant.  That its mechanism should be in danger of breaking down, that it should even creak, was to her at first less a disaster than a matter for resentment.  She hated the works as one is sometimes capable of unreasonably hating a benefactor.

On Monday morning, rising a little earlier than usual, she was surprised to find her mother alone at a disordered breakfast-table.

‘Has dad finished his breakfast already?’ she inquired, determined to be cheerful.  Sleep, and her fundamental good-nature, had modified her mood, and for the moment she meant to play the role of dutiful daughter as well as she could.

‘He has had to go off to Manchester by the first train,’ said Leonora.  ‘He’ll be away all day.  So you won’t begin till to-morrow.’  She smiled gravely.

‘Oh, good!’ Ethel exclaimed with intense momentary relief.

But now again in Leonora’s voice, and in her eye, there was the soft warning, which Ethel seized, and which, without a relevant word spoken, she communicated to her sisters.  John Stanway’s young women began to reflect apprehensively upon the sudden irregularities of his recent movements, his conferences with his lawyer, his bluffing air; a hundred trifles too insignificant for separate notice collected themselves together and became formidable.  A certain atmosphere of forced and false cheerfulness spread through the house.

‘Not gone to bed!’ said Stanway briskly, when he returned home by the late train and discovered his three girls in the drawing-room.  They allowed him to imagine that his jaunty air deceived them; they were jaunty too; but all the while they read his soul and pitied him with the intolerable condescension of youth towards age.

The next day Ethel had a further reprieve of several hours, for Stanway said that he must go over to Hanbridge in the morning, and would come back to Hillport for dinner, and escort Ethel to the works immediately afterwards.  None asked a question, but everyone knew that he could only be going to Hanbridge to consult with David Dain.  This time the programme was in fact executed.  At two o’clock Ethel found herself in her father’s office.