ates on a scrap of
paper. Then he leant back in his chair thoughtfully.

"Hibbault says that boy has just got a rise in that berth of his in
Liverpool. I'll let him have a year or so more to prove his grit. I
suppose Hibbault's to be trusted, but I might write to the firm and
ask how he gets on! However, Aymer's boy shall have the vacancy!"

Therefore he took up his pen again and wrote the following brief
letter:

PRINCES BUILDING, Birmingham, April 10.

DEAR AYMER:--

Are you going to 'prentice that boy of yours to me or not?
I've an opening now in the Steel Axle Company, if you like to
take it.

Yours,
PETER MASTERS.

Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker

PART II

CHAPTER XI

Despite his honest intention never to stand between Christopher and
any fate that might serve to draw him into connection with his father,
Aymer had a hard fight to master his keen desire to put Peter's letter
in the fire and say nothing about it. Surely, after all, he had the
best right to say what his adopted charge's future should be. It was
he who had rescued him from obscurity, who had lavished on him the
love and care his selfish, erratic father, for his own ambitious ends,
denied him. Aymer believed, moreover, that a career under Peter's
influence would mean either the blunting if not the utter destruction
of every generous and admirable quality in the boy, or a rapid
unbalanced development of those socialistic tendencies, the seeds of
which were sown by his mother and nurtured in the hard experience of
his early days. Besides this, Peter's interest in the boy was probably
a mere freak, or at the best, sprang from a desire to serve his
cousin, unless by any remote chance he had stumbled on a clue to
Christopher's identity.

This last suspicion wove itself like a black thread into the grey woof
of Aymer's existence. His whole being by now had become concentrated
in the boy's life. It was a renewal of youth, hopes, ambitions, again
possible in the person of this child, and for the second time a
fierce, restless jealousy of his cousin began to stir in the inner
depths of Aymer's being, as fire which may yet break into life beneath
the grey, piled-up ashes which conceal it.

He sought help and advice from none and fought hard alone for his own
salvation through the long watches of a black