John gave a scarcely perceptible start.  ‘Oh!  That!’ he exclaimed.  ‘That’s all right.  I’ve fixed it up.’

‘This morning?’

‘Eh?  Yes, this morning.’

During dinner he showed a certain careless amiability.

‘You needn’t go to the works any more to-day,’ he said to Ethel.

To celebrate this unexpected half-holiday, Ethel and Millicent decided that they would try to collect a scratch team for some hockey practice in the meadow.

‘And, mother, you must come,’ said Millicent.  ’You’ll make one more anyway.’

‘Yes,’ John agreed, ‘it will do your mother good.’

’He will never know, and never guess, and never care, what I have been through!’ she thought.

Before leaving for the works John helped the girls to choose some sticks.

When he reached his office, the first thing he did was to build up a good fire.  Next he looked into the safe.  Then he rang the bell, and Fred Ryley responded to the summons.

This family connection, whom he both hated and trusted, was a rather thickset, very neatly dressed man of twenty-three, who had been mature, serious, and responsible for eight years.  His fair, grave face, with its short thin beard, showed plainly his leading qualities of industry, order, conscientiousness, and doggedness.  It showed, too, his mild benevolence.  Ryley was never late, never neglectful, never wrong; he never wasted an hour either of his own or his employer’s time.  And yet his colleagues liked him, perhaps because he was unobtrusive and good-natured.  At the beginning of each year he laid down a programme for himself, and he was incapable of swerving from it.  Already he had acquired a thorough knowledge of both the manufacturing and the business sides of earthenware manufacture, and also he was one of the few men, at that period, who had systematically studied the chemistry of potting.  He could not fail to ‘get on,’ and to win universal respect.  His chances of a truly striking success would have been greater had he possessed imagination, humour, or any sort of personal distinction.  In appearance, he was common, insignificant; to be appreciated, he ‘wanted knowing’; but he was extremely sensitive and proud, and he could resent an affront like a Gascon.  He had apparently no humour whatever.  The sole spark of romance in him had been fanned into a small steady flame by his passion for Ethel.  Ryley was a man who could only love once for all.

‘Did you find that private ledger for me out of the old safe?’ Stanway demanded.

‘Yes,’ said Ryley, ’and I put it in your safe, at the front, and gave you the key back this morning.’

‘I don’t see it there,’ Stanway retorted.

‘Shall I look?’ Ryley suggested quietly, approaching the safe, of which the key was in the lock.

‘Never mind, now!  Never mind, now!’ Stanway stopped him.  ’I don’t want to be bothered now.  Later on in the afternoon, before Mr. Twemlow comes....  Did you write and ask him to call at four thirty?’