find
his father is of a mind with me. He'll not suffer such an arrangement
for a moment. It's bringing the trouble too near. He doesn't want his
skeleton walking out of the cupboard into the Mill, and whatever
happens, that won't."

She was right enough, for when Raymond heard all that Estelle could tell
him, he decided instantly against any such arrangement.

"Impossible," he said. "One needn't trouble even to argue about it. But
that he would like to be an engineer is quite healthy. He shall be; and
he shall begin at the beginning and have every advantage possible--not
his way, but mine. I argue ultimate success from this. It eases my
mind."

"All the same, if you don't do anything, he'll only run away again,"
said Estelle, who was disappointed.

"He won't run far. Let him stop where he is for a few months, till he's
heartily sick of it and ready to listen to sense. Then perhaps I'll go
over and see him myself. You've done great things, Estelle. I feel more
sanguine than I have ever felt about him. I wish I could do what he
wants; but that's impossible his way. However, I'll do it in my own.
Sense is beginning in him, and that is the great and hopeful discovery
you've made."

"I'm ever so glad you're pleased about it," she said. "He loved the
motor car much better than the sight of us. Yet he was glad to see us
too. He's really a very human boy, you know, Ray."

CHAPTER XV

CRITICISM

Upon a Sunday afternoon, Sarah Roberts and her husband were drinking tea
at 'The Seven Stars.' They sat in Nelly Legg's private room, and by some
accident all took rather a gloomy view of life.

As for Nelly, she had been recently weighed, and despite drastic new
treatment, was found to have put on two pounds in a month.

"Lord knows where it'll end," she said. "You can't go on getting heavier
and heavier for ever more. Even a vegetable marrow, and such like
things, reach their limit; and if they can it's hard that a creature
with an immortal soul have got to go growing larger and larger, to her
own misery and her husband's grief. To be smothered with your own fat is
a proper cruel end I call it; and I haven't deserved it; and it shakes
my faith in an all-wise God, to feel myself turning into a useless
mountain of flesh. Worse than useless in fact, because them that can't
work themselves are certain sure to make work for others. Which I do."

"I never knew anything so aggravating, I'm sure," assented Nicholas;
"bu