“This is a cousin of Sarah Roberts,” explained the foreman.  “Spinning runs in the Northover family, and though Sarah is a spreader and never will be anything else, there have been wondrous good spinners in the clan.  This girl is called Milly Morton, and her mother and grandmother spun before her.  Her father was Jack Morton, one of the last of the old hand spinners.  To see him walking backwards from his wheel, and paying out fibre from his waist with one hand and holding up the yarn with the other, was a very good sight.  He’d spin very nearly a hundred pounds of hemp in a ten hours’ day, and turn out seven or eight miles of yarn, and walk every yard of it, of course.  The rope makers swore by him.”

“I’m sure spinning runs in the blood!” agreed Estelle.  “Both Sarah’s little girls are longing for the time when they can come into the Mill and mind cans; and, of course, the boy wants to do his father’s work and be a lathe hand.”

Best nodded.

“You’ve hit it,” he declared.  “It runs in the blood in a very strange fashion.  Take Sabina’s child.  By all accounts, his old grandmother did everything in her power to poison his mind against the Mill as well as the master.  She was a lot bitterer than Sabina herself, as the years went on; and if you could look back and uncover the past, you’d find it was her secret work to make that child what he is.  But the Mill draws him like cheese draws a mouse.  I’ll find him here a dozen times in a month—­just popping in when my back’s turned.  Why he comes I couldn’t say; but I think it is because his mother was a spinner and the feeling for the craft is in him.”

“His father is a spinner, too, for that matter,” suggested Estelle.

“In the larger sense of ownership, yes; but it isn’t that that draws him.  His father’s got no great part in him by all accounts.  It’s the mother in him that brings him here.  Not that she knows he comes so often, and I dare say she’d be a good deal put about if she did.”

“Why shouldn’t he come, John?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I see no reason against.  One gets so used to the situation that its strangeness passes off, but it’s very awkward, so to say, that nothing can be done for Abel by his father.  Sabina’s wrong to hold out there, and so I’ve told her.”

“She doesn’t influence Abel one way or the other.  The child seems to hate Mister Ironsyde.”

“Well, he loves the Mill, though you’d think he might hate that for his father’s sake.”

“He’s hard for a little creature of ten years old,” said Estelle.  “He won’t make friends with me, but holds off and regards me—­just as rabbits and things regard one, before they finally run away.  I pretend I don’t notice it.  He’ll listen and even talk if I meet him with his mother; but if I meet him alone, he flies.  He generally bolts through a hole in the hedge, or somewhere.”