inded 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