rade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions
which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only
disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits
of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed
all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings
to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed
himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that
the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her
self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and
having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful
not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward
his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really
less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as
he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was
bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work
at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was
a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really
wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some
miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect
Truscomb's removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as
a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along
undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager's place; but his
dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in
sympathy with the awakening social movement--a man sufficiently
practical to "run" the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to
regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such
a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a
young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had
worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with
more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman's standpoint,
all Amherst's enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that
were making in some of the English and continental factories. His
strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore
before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see
before him as the sequel to his factory-training.

All these thoughts swept throu