the acre!  ’Then take your disreputable old mill off my property!’ says Shackford,—­he called it a disreputable old mill!  I was hasty, perhaps, and I told him to go to the devil.  He said he would, and he did; for he went to Blandmann.  When the lawyers got hold of it, they bothered the life out of me; so I just moved the building forward two inches, at an expense of seven hundred dollars.  Then what does the demon do but board up all my windows opening on the meadow!  Richard, I make it a condition that you shall not lodge at Shackford’s.”

“Nothing could induce me to live another day in the same house with him, sir,” answered Richard, suppressing an inclination to smile; and then seriously, “His bread is bitter.”

Richard went back with a light heart to Welch’s Court.  At the gate of the marble yard he met William Durgin returning to work.  The steam-whistle had sounded the call, and there was no time for exchange of words; so Richard gave his comrade a bright nod and passed by.  Durgin turned and stared after him.

“Looks as if Slocum had taken him on; but it never can be as apprentice; he wouldn’t dare do it.”

Mr. Shackford had nearly finished his frugal dinner when Richard entered.  “If you can’t hit it to be in at your meals,” said Mr. Shackford, helping himself absently to the remaining chop, “perhaps you had better stop away altogether.”

“I can do that now, cousin,” replied Richard sunnily.  “I have engaged with Slocum.”

The old man laid down his knife and fork.

“With Slocum!  A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!”

There was so little hint of the aristocrat in Lemuel Shackford’s sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem.  He went as meanly dressed as a tramp, and as careless of contemporary criticism; yet clear down in his liver, or somewhere in his anatomy, he nourished an odd abstract pride in the family Shackford.  Heaven knows why!  To be sure, it dated far back; its women had always been virtuous, and its men, if not always virtuous, had always been ship-captains.  But beyond this the family had never amounted to anything, and now there was so very little left of it.  For Richard as Richard Lemuel cared nothing; for Richard as a Shackford he had a chaotic feeling that defied analysis and had never before risen to the surface.  It was therefore with a disgust entirely apart from the hatred of Slocum or regard for Richard that the old man exclaimed, “A Shackford a miserable marble-chipper!”

“That is better than hanging around the village with my hands in my pockets.  Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know that anybody has demanded that you should hang around the village.”

“I ought to go away, you mean?  But I have found work here, and I might not find it elsewhere.”

“Stillwater is not the place to begin life in.  It’s the place to go away from, and come back to.”

“Well, I have come back.”