rt of his conduct
must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to
Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would
doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile,
took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be
condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man
without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought
of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was
powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had
been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the
larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift
and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained
by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that
he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous
enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between
the classes. But the last hours' experiences had shown him how vain it
was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and
labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther
back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only
through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and
financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political
career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been
nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was
only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their
fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of
the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of
his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he
would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper
initiation rather than the readier attainment.

But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on
the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate
care, amid which his own folly, and his mother's possible suffering from
it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if
his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a
pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of
his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state