He hesitated, having caught his mother’s eye.  He felt that this prudential course justified in a measure her anxiety.

‘She’s a girl,’ he pursued, ‘and we know that a girl with a lot o’ money gets run after by men who care nothing about her and a good deal about the money.  Then it’s quite certain ’Arry won’t be any the better for fancying himself rich.  H’s going to give us trouble as it is, I can see that.  We shall have to take another house, of course, and we can’t keep them from knowing that there’s money fallen to me.  But there’s no need to talk about the figures, and if we can make them think it’s only me that’s better off, so much the better.  Alice needn’t go to work, and I’m glad of it; a girl’s proper place is at home.  You can tell her you want her to help in the new house.  ’Arry had better keep his place awhile.  I shouldn’t wonder if I find work for him myself before long I’ve got plans, but I shan’t talk about them just yet.’

He spoke then of the legal duties which fell upon him as next-of-kin, explaining the necessity of finding two sureties on taking out letters of administration.  Mr. Yottle had offered himself for one; the other Richard hoped to find in Mr. Westlake, a leader of the Socialist movement.

‘You want us to go into a big house?’ asked Mrs. Mutimer.  She seemed to pay little attention to the wider aspects of the change, but to fix on the details she could best understand, those which put her fears in palpable shape.

’I didn’t say a big one, but a larger than this.  We’re not going to play the do-nothing gentlefolk; but all the same our life won’t and can’t be what it has been.  There’s no choice.  You’ve worked hard all your life, mother, and it’s only fair you should come in for a bit of rest.  We’ll find a house somewhere out Green Lanes way, or in Highbury or Holloway.’

He laughed again.

’So there’s the best of it—­the worst of it, as you say.  Just take a night to turn it over.  Most likely I shall go to Belwick again to-morrow afternoon.’

He paused, and his mother, after bending her head to bite off an end of cotton, asked—­

‘You’ll tell Emma?’

‘I shall go round to-night.’

A little later Richard left the house for this purpose.  His step was firmer than ever, his head more upright Walking along the crowded streets, he saw nothing; there was a fixed smile on his lips, the smile of a man to whom the world pays tribute.  Never having suffered actual want, and blessed with sanguine temperament, he knew nothing of that fierce exultation, that wrathful triumph over fate, which comes to men of passionate mood smitten by the lightning-flash of unhoped prosperity.  At present he was well-disposed to all men; even against capitalists and ‘profitmongers’ he could not have railed heartily Capitalists?  Was he not one himself?  Aye, but he would prove himself such a one as you do not meet with every day; and the