Of late years Raymond seldom let a week elapse without seeing Miss Ironsyde if only for half an hour.  Her waning health occupied him on these occasions and, at his suggestion, she had gone to Bath to fight the arthritis that slowly gained upon her.  But during his present sojourn at Bridport as her guest, Raymond let her lead their talk as she would, indeed, he himself sometimes led it into channels of the past, where she would not have ventured to go.

Life had made an immense difference to the man and he was old for his age now, even as until his brother’s death he had been young for his age.  She could not fail to note the steadfastness of his mind, despite its limitations.  As Estelle had often done, she perceived how he set his faith on material things—­the steel and steam—­to bring about a new order and advance the happiness of mankind; but he was interested in social questions far more than of old time, and she felt no little surprise to hear him talk about the future.

“The air is full of change,” she said, on one occasion.

“It always is,” he answered.  “There is always movement, although the breath of advance and progress seems to sink to nothing, sometimes.  Now it’s blowing a stiff breeze and may rise to a hurricane in a few years.”

“It is for the stable, solid backbone of the nation—­we of the middle-class—­to withstand such storms,” she declared, and he agreed.

“If you’ve got a stake in the world, you must certainly see its foundations are driven deep and look to the stake itself, that it’s not rotting.  Some stakes are certainly not made of stuff stout enough to stand against the storms ahead.  Education is the great, vital thing.  I often feel mad to think how I wasted my own time at school, and came to man’s work a raw, ignorant fool.  We talk of the education of the masses and what I see is this:  they will soon be better educated than we ourselves; for we bring any amount of sense and modern ideas to work on their teaching, while our own prehistorical methods are left severely alone.  I believe the boys who come to working age now are better taught than I was at my grammar school.  I wish I knew more.”

“Yet we see education may run us into great dangers,” said Jenny Ironsyde.  “It can be pushed to a perilous point.  One even hears a murmur against the Bible in the schools.  It makes my blood run cold.  And we need not look farther than dear Estelle to see the peril.”

“What do you think of Estelle?” he asked.  “I almost welcome this stupid collapse, nuisance though it is, because it’s made a sort of resting-place and brought me nearer to you and Estelle.  You’ve both been so kind.  A man such as I am, is so busy and absorbed that he forgets all about women; then suddenly lying on his back—­done for and useless—­he finds they don’t forget all about him.”

“You ask what I think about Estelle?” she said.  “I never think about Estelle—­no more than I do about the sunshine, or my comfortable bed, or my tea.  She’s just one of the precious things I take for granted.  I love her.  She is a great deal to me, and the hours she spends with a rather old-fashioned and cross-grained woman are the happiest hours I know.”