He did not answer for some time.  She had begun to wonder if he had heard.

“What do you think of him?” he said, without looking at her.

“Oh, he’s quite a nice lad,” she answered.

It was some while again before he spoke.  “He will be the last of the Allways,” he said.  “I should like to think of the name being continued; and he’s a good business man, in spite of his dreaminess.  Perhaps he would get on better with the men.”

She seized at the chance of changing the subject.

“It was a foolish notion,” she said, “that of the Manchester school:  that men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum.”

To her surprise, he agreed with her.  “The feudal system had a fine idea in it,” he said, “if it had been honestly carried out.  A master should be the friend, the helper of his men.  They should be one family.”

She looked at him a little incredulously, remembering the bitter periods of strikes and lock-outs.

“Did you ever try, Dad?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he answered.  “But I tried the wrong way.”  “The right way might be found,” he added, “by the right man, and woman.”

She felt that he was watching her through his half-closed eyes.  “There are those cottages,” he continued, “just before you come to the bridge.  They might be repaired and a club house added.  The idea is catching on, they tell me.  Garden villages, they call them now.  It gets the men and women away from the dirty streets; and gives the children a chance.”

She knew the place.  A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered trees in the centre.  Ever since she could remember, they had stood there empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens overgrown with weeds.

“Are they yours?” she asked.  She had never connected them with the works, some half a mile away.  Though had she been curious, she might have learnt that they were known as “Allway’s Folly.”

“Your mother’s,” he answered.  “I built them the year I came back from America and gave them to her.  I thought it would interest her.  Perhaps it would, if I had left her to her own ways.”

“Why didn’t they want them?” she asked.

“They did, at first,” he answered.  “The time-servers and the hypocrites among them.  I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them.  I thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents and share of profits.  And then the Union came, and that of course finished it.”

So he, too, had thought to build Jerusalem.

“Yes,” he said.  “I’ll sound him about giving up his lodgings.”