him with vague apprehension and alarm. His nature had lost
all its adaptability; he trembled like a young girl at the prospect of
new experiences. On the return voyage the vessel was quarantined at
Liverpool for a fortnight, and Beechinor had an attack of low fever.
Eight months afterwards he was ill again. Beechinor went to bed for the
last time, cursing Providence, Wilbraham _v._ Wilbraham, and Rio.

Mark Beechinor was thirty, just nineteen years younger than his brother.
Tall, uncouth, big-boned, he had a rather ferocious and forbidding
aspect; yet all women seemed to like him, despite the fact that he
seldom could open his mouth to them. There must have been something in
his wild and liquid dark eyes which mutely appealed for their protective
sympathy, something about him of shy and wistful romance that atoned for
the huge awkwardness of this taciturn elephant. Mark was at present the
manager of a small china manufactory at Longshaw, the farthest of the
Five Towns in Staffordshire, and five miles from Bursley. He was an
exceptionally clever potter, but he never made money. He had the dreamy
temperament of the inventor. He was a man of ideas, the kind of man who
is capable of forgetting that he has not had his dinner, and who can
live apparently content amid the grossest domestic neglect. He had once
spoilt a hundred and fifty pounds' worth of ware by firing it in a new
kiln of his own contrivance; it cost him three years of atrocious
parsimony to pay for the ware and the building of the kiln. He was
impulsively and recklessly charitable, and his Saturday afternoons and
Sundays were chiefly devoted to the passionate propagandism of the
theories of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

'Is it true as thou'rt for marrying Sammy Mellor's daughter over at
Hanbridge?' Edward Beechinor asked, in the feeble, tremulous voice of
one agonized by continual pain.

Among relatives and acquaintances he commonly spoke the Five Towns
dialect, reserving the other English for official use.

Mark stood at the foot of the bed, leaning with his elbows on the brass
rail. Like most men, he always felt extremely nervous and foolish in a
sick-room, and the delicacy of this question, so bluntly put, added to
his embarrassment. He looked round timidly in the direction of the girl
at the window; her back was towards him.

'It's possible,' he replied. 'I haven't asked her yet.'

'Her'll have no money?'

'No.'

'Thou'lt want some brass to