re always so grand, and plain,
hard-working people weren't good enough for her. I'm very sorry indeed
that things have turned out so disastrously. My Selina, to tell the
truth, is a queer creature, sir, and, if I may take the liberty of
saying so, I think you were a fool to marry her."

Cleo, at her first interview with her parents, had made a clean breast
of the fact that her theatre had been a failure and that they had lost
all their money, though she did not omit to mention she was conducting
negotiations which would soon put them on their feet again. Morgan
smiled at Mr. Kettering's bluntness, and he somehow divined that there
was a shrewd pair of eyes behind those spectacles that took in far
more than they appeared to do.

"I'm hanged if _I'd_ ever have married her," pursued the
master-printer, "and that's telling you the plain truth, sir. You see
what she has done for you already. Why did you give her all that
money? You should have let her go on acting and drawing a regular
salary, instead of risking all that capital in that monstrously
foolish way. You'll excuse my freedom, I know, sir."

From which Morgan deduced that Cleo's version of the whole affair had
not been entirely coloured by truth. From the way Mr. Kettering
dropped his voice and looked reverential as he mentioned "all that
money," it was quite clear Cleo's imagination had magnified the loss
to accord with her sense of the fitness of things. A great loss of
money was the next glorious thing to a great success.

Mr. Kettering proceeded to lay it down as a general maxim that there
was nothing in life like drawing a regular salary. Ever since he had
been a master-printer on his own account, he had been regretting the
fact. A workman knew exactly how much he had to spend and how to spend
it. But in these days when competition was so severe and trade so
uncertain, the master had much to be thankful for if he could pay his
way at all. Not that he himself was not perfectly able to earn a
living at all times, he added in some haste, as if to reassure his
son-in-law; and certainly his daughter and her husband were quite
welcome to be his guests as long as they chose to stay under his roof.

Morgan felt drawn towards the old man, though he perceived that Simon
Kettering's soul could not take wing out of the atmosphere of his
workshop, and that whosoever wished to commune with him must descend
into it. But it was from this very atmosphere that Cleo had
em