t him?

"Come on," the elder Morton said. "It's pretty hard at my age. You'll
pay for this, George."

"Old Planter would never be that unfair," George encouraged him.

"Georgie! Georgie!" his mother said when the others were out of sight,
"what have you been up to?"

He walked closer and placed his arm around her shoulders.

"I've been getting my eyes opened," he answered. "I never ought to have
listened to them. I never ought to have gone up there. I did say
something to Miss Sylvia I had no business to. If I'd been one of her
own kind, instead of the son of a livery stable keeper, I'd have got
polite regrets or something. It's made me realize how low I am."

"No," she said with quick maternal passion. "You're not low. Maybe some
day those people'll be no better than we are."

He shook his head.

"I'd rather I was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up
with it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help
do the treating."

"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the
mare go."

But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than
that; something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for
one's self.

"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.

She glanced up quickly.

"Who's that?"

A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery:

"Young Morton! I say, young Morton!"

"It's Mr. Lambert," she breathed. "Go quick."

George remembered what Sylvia had said about someone else having the
strength.

"Can't you guess, Ma, what the young lady's brother wants of me?"

The bitterness left his face. His smile was engaging.

"To give me the devil."

"Young Morton! Young Morton!"

"Coming!" he called.

"George," she begged, "don't have any trouble with Mr. Lambert."

III

She watched him with anxious eyes, failing to observe, because she was
his mother, details that informed his boasts with power. His ancestry
of labour had given him, at least, his straight, slender, and unusually
muscular body, and from somewhere had crept in the pride, just now
stimulated, with which he carried it. His wilful, regular features,
moreover, guarded by youth, were still uncoarsened.

He found Lambert Planter waiting beyond the old boundary behind a screen
of bushes, his hands held behind his back. In his face, which had some
of Sylvia's beauty, hardened and enlarged, dwelt the devil George had
foreseen.

George nodde