“Do you think it will?”

“I say no—­downright.”

“And what then, sir?”

“I really cannot say what I may do.  I have a bit of money from my father, and I know lots of good fellows who seem happy enough without business or work of any kind.  They just amuse themselves or have some fad of pleasure-making like fast horses.”

“Such men ought never to have been born, sir.  They only cumber the mills and the market-places, the courts of law and the courts of the church—­yes, even the wide spaces of the ocean.”

“Are you not a bit hard, Captain?”

“No; I am not hard enough.  Do you think God sent any man that had his five senses into this busy world to amuse himself?”

“Are you preaching me a sermon, Captain?”

“Nay, not I!  Preaching is nothing in my line.  But you are on a new road, sir, and no one can tell where it may lead to, so I’ll just remind you to watch your beginnings; the results will manage themselves.”

CHAPTER VI

LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM

Love is the only link that binds us to those gone; the only link that binds us to those who remain.  Surely it is the spiritual world—­the abiding kingdom of heaven, not far from any one of us.

On a day of grace, she came of God’s grace to me.

One night at the end of October Mrs. Hatton was sitting in the living-room of the Hall.  To say “sitting,” however, is barely true, for she was in that irritably anxious mood which both in men and women usually runs into motion, and Mrs. Hatton was more frequently off her chair than on it.  She lifted the brass tongs and put a few pieces of coal on the fire; she walked to the window and looked down the long vista of trees; she arranged chairs and cushions, that did not need arranging; she sent away the large tortoise-shell cat that was watching as eagerly as herself for John’s return; and finally her restlessness found a tongue.

“What for are you worrying about the lad, Martha Hatton?  He’s grown up, you know, and he isn’t worrying about you.  I’ll warrant that some way or other he’s with that Harlow girl, and where’s his poor mother then?  Clean forgotten, of course.  Sons and daughters, indeed!  They are a bitter pleasure, they are that.  Here’s John getting on to thirty years old, and I never knew it in his shoes to run after a girl before—­but there—­I’m down-daunted with the changes that will have to come—­yes, that will have to come—­well, well, life is just a hurry-push!  One trouble after another—­that’s John’s horse, I know its gallop, and it is high time he was here, it is that.  Besides, it’s dribbling rain, and I wouldn’t wonder if it was teeming down in half an hour—­and there’s Tom crying for all he’s worth—­I may as well let him in—­come in, Tom!”—­and Tom walked in with an independent air to the rug and lay down by John’s footstool.  Indeed, his attitude was impudent enough to warrant Mrs. Hatton’s threat to “turn him out-of-doors, if he did not carry himself more like a decent cat and less like a blackguard.”