chance of changing the subject.

"It was a foolish notion," she said, "that of the Manchester school: that
men and women could be treated as mere figures in a sum."

To her surprise, he agreed with her. "The feudal system had a fine idea
in it," he said, "if it had been honestly carried out. A master should
be the friend, the helper of his men. They should be one family."

She looked at him a little incredulously, remembering the bitter periods
of strikes and lock-outs.

"Did you ever try, Dad?" she asked.

"Oh, yes," he answered. "But I tried the wrong way." "The right way
might be found," he added, "by the right man, and woman."

She felt that he was watching her through his half-closed eyes. "There
are those cottages," he continued, "just before you come to the bridge.
They might be repaired and a club house added. The idea is catching on,
they tell me. Garden villages, they call them now. It gets the men and
women away from the dirty streets; and gives the children a chance."

She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming
three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered
trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there
empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens
overgrown with weeds.

"Are they yours?" she asked. She had never connected them with the
works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might
have learnt that they were known as "Allway's Folly."

"Your mother's," he answered. "I built them the year I came back from
America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps
it would, if I had left her to her own ways."

"Why didn't they want them?" she asked.

"They did, at first," he answered. "The time-servers and the hypocrites
among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and
chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I
thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents
and share of profits. And then the Union came, and that of course
finished it."

So he, too, had thought to build Jerusalem.

"Yes," he said. "I'll sound him about giving up his lodgings."

Joan lay awake for a long while that night. The moon looked in at the
window. It seemed to have got itself entangled in the tops of the tall
pines. Would it not be her duty to come back--make her father happy, to
say nothing of