A lonely man, yet a tender one.  The capacity of love was not less in him than the capacity of knowledge.  Yet herein too he was wronged by circumstance.  In youth an extreme shyness held him from intercourse with all women save his mother and his sister; he was conscious of his lack of ease in dialogue, of an awkwardness of manner and an unattractiveness of person.  On summer evenings, when other young fellows were ready enough in finding companions for their walk, Gilbert would stray alone in the quietest streets until he tired himself; then go home and brood over fruitless longings.  In love, as afterwards in study, he had his ideal; sometimes he would catch a glimpse of some face in the street at night, and would walk on with the feeling that his happiness had passed him—­if only he could have turned and pursued it!  In all women he had supreme faith; that one woman whom his heart imagined was a pure and noble creature, with measureless aspiration, womanhood glorified in her to the type of the upward striving soul—­she did not come to him; his life remained chaste and lonely.

Neither had he friends.  There were at all times good fellows to be found among those with whom he worked, but again his shyness held him apart, and indeed he felt that intercourse with them would afford him but brief satisfaction.  Occasionally some man more thoughtful than the rest would he drawn to him by curiosity, but, finding himself met with so much reserve, involuntary in Gilbert, would become doubtful and turn elsewhither for sympathy.  Yet in this respect Grail improved as time went on; as his character ripened, he was readier to gossip now and then of common things with average associates.  He knew, however, that he was not much liked, and this naturally gave a certain coldness to his behaviour.  Perhaps the very first man for whom he found himself entertaining something like warmth of kindness was Luke Ackroyd.  Ackroyd came to the factory shortly after Gilbert had gone to live in Walnut Tree Walk, and in the course of a few weeks the two had got into the habit of walking their common way homewards together.  As might have been anticipated, it was a character very unlike his own which had at length attached Gilbert.  To begin with, Ackroyd was pronounced in radicalism, was aggressive and at times noisy; then, he was far from possessing Grail’s moral stability, and did not care to conceal his ways of amusing himself; lastly, his intellectual tastes were of the scientific order.  Yet Gilbert from the first liked him; he felt that there was no little good in the fellow, if only it could be fostered at the expense of his weaker characteristics.  Yet those very weaknesses had much to do with his amiability.  This they had in common:  both aspired to something that fortune had denied them.  Ackroyd had his idea of a social revolution, and, though it seemed doubtful whether he was exactly the man to claim a larger sphere for the energies of his class, his thought often had