di made pleasant, easy going. The town servants were cleaning
the smooth, elastic surface with big jets of water. Christopher went
slowly by with an eye on his handiwork. He fancied he saw a small
defect at a turn and stopped to examine it. An indignant worker told
him brusquely he needn't try to pick holes in their roads because
there weren't any, and Christopher returned meekly he thought they
looked good, but fancied the mark he examined was a flaw.

"It ain't any business of yours, anyway," was the angry retort, "the
men who laid this knew what they was a-doin'."

Another man had joined him who had worked on the new road when
Christopher was to and fro there, and recognised him. He plucked the
other by the sleeve.

"Shut up, you fool," he growled, though not so low but Christopher
heard him. "It's the Roadmaker himself. Mornin', sir."

Christopher gave him a few words of recognition and went on.

The slate roofs of Whitmansworth came into sight as the church clock
struck six. He could see the white Union House high on the hill to the
left, but he had no mind to halt there. He stopped the car at the gate
of the town cemetery. It was not a beautiful place. Just a little
square field with an avenue of young trees and an orderly row of green
mounds and haphazard monuments, but in one corner amongst a row of
unmarked graves was a white cross. "In remembrance of my mother," was
the sole inscription it bore. Christopher stood and looked at it
gravely. The thought of another grave amongst the family tombs in the
trim churchyard at Stormly crossed his mind. It was better here in the
little, plain unpretentious cemetery amongst the very poor whose
sorrows she had made her own. She would sleep more quietly so.

But he found no message from her here, nor had he expected it. Her
actual presence had not consecrated the spot for him, and he was
impatient to gain the road made sacred by reason of the tired, failing
footsteps that made their last effort there: the Via Dolorosa of his
mother's life.

He passed the milestone where he had waited for his fortune fifteen
years ago, and saw it in his mind's eye hastening towards him from the
east in the person of Charles Aston. That was the _true_
Fortune,--this spurious thing they were trying to harness to his back
was evil to the core. Had not that been the very meaning of those
painful steps that had struggled away from it along this very
road--the meaning of the lonely grave a