He was deep in love.  He was also, by nature, rather obstinate.  Although she had said she thought it would be better for him not to see her off, yet he would go to the station, and see the last of her.

He came straight from the station to his mother.  She was upstairs.  He threw himself into a chair, and there she found him, looking ghastly.

“Oh, mother! what shall I do?”

“What is the matter, love?”

“She is false; she is false.  She has gone up to London with that Coventry.”

APPENDIX.

Extract from Henry Little’s report.

The File-cutters.

“This is the largest trade, containing about three thousand men, and several hundred women and boys.  Their diseases and deaths arise from poisoning by lead.  The file rests on a bed of lead during the process of cutting, which might more correctly be called stamping; and, as the stamping-chisel can only be guided to the required nicety by the finger-nail, the lead is constantly handled and fingered, and enters the system through the pores.

“Besides this, fine dust of lead is set in motion by the blows that drive the cutting-chisel, and the insidious poison settles on the hair and the face, and is believed to go direct to the lungs, some of it.

“The file-cutter never lives the span of life allotted to man.  After many small warnings his thumb weakens.  He neglects that; and he gets touches of paralysis in the thumb, the arm, and the nerves of the stomach; can’t digest; can’t sweat; at last, can’t work; goes to the hospital:  there they galvanize him, which does him no harm; and boil him, which does him a deal of good.  He comes back to work, resumes his dirty habits, takes in fresh doses of lead, turns dirty white or sallow, gets a blue line round his teeth, a dropped wrist, and to the hospital again or on to the file-cutter’s box; and so he goes miserably on and off, till he drops into a premature grave, with as much lead in his body as would lap a hundredweight of tea.”

The remedies.

A. What the masters might do.

“1.  Provide every forge with two small fires, eighteen inches from the ground.  This would warm the lower limbs of the smiths.  At present their bodies suffer by uneven temperature; they perspire down to the waist, and then freeze to the toe.

“2.  For the wet-grinders they might supply fires in every wheel, abolish mud floors, and pave with a proper fall and drain.

“To prevent the breaking of heavy grinding-stones, fit them with the large strong circular steel plate—­of which I subjoin a drawing—­instead of with wedges or insufficient plates.  They might have an eye to life, as well as capital, in buying heavy grindstones.  I have traced the death of one grinder to the master’s avarice:  he went to the quarry and bought a stone for thirty-five shillings the quarry-master had set aside as imperfect; its price would have been sixty shillings if it had been fit to trust a man’s life to.  This master goes to church twice a Sunday, and is much respected by his own sort:  yet he committed a murder for twenty-five shillings.  Being Hillsborough, let us hope it was a murderer he murdered.