ment for one
of the infant Dillons. "She takes her pity out in action, like that
quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her
uniform--and then!" His face softened at the recollection of the girl's
outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm
exterior in emergencies, he had all a man's desire to know that the
springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.

Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a
moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.

"John, have you considered what you mean to do next?"

He threw back his head to meet her gaze.

"About this Dillon case," she continued. "How are all these
investigations going to help you?"

Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: "You
are afraid I am going to lose my place."

She flushed like a girl and murmured: "It's not the kind of place I ever
wanted to see you in!"

"I know it," he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on
his chair-back. "I ought to have followed a profession, like my
grandfather; but my father's blood was too strong in me. I should never
have been content as anything but a working-man."

"How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for
mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as
any statesman or lawyer."

Amherst smiled. "Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his
hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had
inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am,
rather than try to be somebody else." He laid her hand caressingly
against his cheek. "It's hard on you, mother--but you must bear with
me."

"I have never complained, John; but now you've chosen your work, it's
natural that I should want you to stick to it."

He rose with an impatient gesture. "Never fear; I could easily get
another job----"

"What? If Truscomb black-listed you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer
who was here when we came?"

"And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him," said
Amherst grimly; "but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this
time."

His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of
the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. "There's
Duplain," he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he
encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with the