If chance had not been on one’s side, what then?  And where was this man’s chance?  She had said to Rosy, in speaking of the wealth of America, “Sometimes one is tired of it.”  And Rosy had reminded her that there were those who were not tired of it, who could bear some of the burden of it, if it might be laid on their own shoulders.  The great beautiful, blind-faced house, awaiting its slow doom in the midst of its lonely unfed lands—­what could save it, and all it represented of race and name, and the stately history of men, but the power one professed to call base and sordid—­mere money?  She felt a sudden impatience at herself for having said she was tired of it.  That was a folly which took upon itself the aspect of an affectation.

And, if a man could not earn money—­or go forth to rob richer neighbours of it as in the good old marauding days—­or accept it if it were offered to him as a gift—­what could he do?  Nothing.  If he had been born a village labourer, he could have earned by the work of his hands enough to keep his cottage roof over him, and have held up his head among his fellows.  But for such as himself there was no mere labour which would avail.  He had not that rough honest resource.  Only the decent living and orderly management of the generations behind him would have left to him fairly his own chance to hold with dignity the place in the world into which Fate had thrust him at the outset—­a blind, newborn thing of whom no permission had been asked.

“If I broke stones upon the highway for twelve hours a day, I might earn two shillings,” he had said to Betty, on the previous day.  “I could break stones well,” holding out a big arm, “but fourteen shillings a week will do no more than buy bread and bacon for a stonebreaker.”

He was ordinarily rather silent and stiff in his conversational attitude towards his own affairs.  Betty sometimes wondered how she herself knew so much about them—­how it happened that her thoughts so often dwelt upon them.  The explanation she had once made to herself had been half irony, half serious reflection.

“It is a result of the first Reuben Vanderpoel.  It is because I am of the fighting commercial stock, and, when I see a business problem, I cannot leave it alone, even when it is no affair of mine.”

As an exposition of the type of the commercial fighting-stock she presented, as she paused beneath overshadowing trees, an aspect beautifully suggesting a far different thing.

She stood—­all white from slim shoe to tilted parasol,—­and either the result of her inspection of the work done by her order, or a combination of her summer-day mood with her feeling for the problem, had given her a special radiance.  It glowed on lip and cheek, and shone in her Irish eyes.

She had paused to look at a man approaching down the avenue.  He was not a labourer, and she did not know him.  Men who were not labourers usually rode or drove, and this one was walking.  He was neither young nor old, and, though at a distance his aspect was not attracting, she found that she regarded him curiously, and waited for him to draw nearer.