RUPERT was annoyed, and annoyed with himself for being annoyed, when he drove up to the main gate of Staithley Mills on the following afternoon and found that the gate-keeper did not know him. It was plainly the man’s duty to warn strangers off the premises, and Rupert was, by hypothesis and in fact, a stranger, but he felt it a reproach that Sir Rupert Hepplestall was forced to make himself known to Hepplestal’s gate-keeper.

The man, an old workman, who preferred this mildly honorific wardenship to a pension, made him a backhanded apology. “It’s so long sin’ we’ve seen thee,” he said. “Us had a hoam-coming ready for thee arter the war, but tha’ didno come.” No sirring and no obsequiousness from this old servant of the firm, and Rupert gave a quick, resentful glance as he pulled the car up in the yard.

Then he remembered that this was Lancashire—and he knew now what Lancashire thought of him. There was no reason why he should, and every reason why he should not, care what Lancashire thought, seeing that he came there solely to arrange his clean cut from Staithley; but an old fellow in a factory yard who did not scrape, but told him frankly that he had not come up to local expectations, had been able to thwack him shrewdly.

It was not much better after that to be treated like a prodigal, to be conducted possessively to the office entrance and to hear the gate-keeper announce in a great and genial voice, “I’ve a glad surprise for yo’, There’s th’ young maister.”

He was not and he refused to be “th’ young maister,” but he could not explain to this guide that he wasn’t what he seemed; the infernal fellow was so naively proud to be his herald. “I feel like Judas,” he thought, and tried wryly to laugh the thought away. It was a tremendous and a preposterous simile to be occasioned by the candid loyalty of one old workman, but things did not go much better with him inside the offices.

Theoretically, they should have shrunk, to his maturer gaze, from his boyish recollection of them, but they were authentically impressive. He couldn’t think lightly of this regiment of desks, nor could he pretend that the eyes which turned towards him as his loud-voiced pilot announced him, were hostile. Theory was in chancery again; all employees ought to hate all employers, but the elderly gentlemen who were hastening towards him wore on their faces expressions of genuine pleasure instead of the decent deference that might cloak a mortal hatred. Ridiculously as if he had been indeed a prince on the day when Sir Philip took him round and introduced him, he discovered a royal memory, and remembered their names. It was developing into a reception; this wasn’t at all what he had come for. He wondered what the younger clerks were thinking, men of his own age, ex-service men, but he had not the chance even to look at them. A positive guard of honor was escorting him to William’s room, that joss-house of the Hepplestalls.

If only he could laugh at their formality and at their quaint appreciativeness of his knowing their names! He felt he ought to laugh; he felt it was all something out of Dickens. Or if he could blurt out that he had come to slip the collar for ever from his neck! They would scuttle from him as though he were the plague; but he could neither laugh aloud nor tell the truth to those solemn mandarins. They were not pompous fools, or he could have laughed, he could have scattered them impishly with his truth; but they were captains in a Service where promotion went by merit, they were proven efficients in an organization whose efficiency was world-renowned, and their homage was not absurd because it was paid not to the young man, Rupert Hepplestall, but to Sir Philip’s son, to the successor to the Headship of the Service. That made it the more hypocritical in him to seem to accept their homage, but if he was going to forfeit what good opinion they retained of a truant, he was going to keep it, at any rate, until the die was unalterably cast.

It was certain to be cast, but Hepplestal’s was retorting on him with unexpected power. Mary was right: the bigness of Hepplestal’s had been escaping him. From London the sale had seemed no more than signatures on documents, and a check. Up here, confronted with Staithley Mills as so much brick, mortar and machinery, and confronted with no more than one crude loyalist in the yard and half a dozen grayboards of the Service in the office, the thing loomed colossal. Let it loom: he held its future in the hollow of his hand, and this, of all times, was no moment for second thoughts. He had to tackle William, the waverer, the fence-sitter who must be met with firmness, and not by one who was himself momentarily awed by the bigness of Hepplestal’s into being a waverer. With the air of nailing his colors to the mast, even if they were the skull and crossbones, he recovered his resolution in the moment when that ambassadorial figure, the Chief Cashier of Hepplestall’s, threw open William’s door and announced “Sir Rupert Hepplestall”; and a grave assurance, inflexible and self-reliant, seemed to enter the room with him.

William raised careworn eyes as this bright incarnation of sanguine youth came into the office in which he sat almost as if it were a condemned cell. He knew, better than Rupert who knew the Hepplestalls so little, what wrath would come when they two faced an outraged Board, and this sedate, this almost smiling confidence seemed to him as offensive as buffoonery at a funeral. “You look very cheerful,” he greeted his nephew resentfully.

“Why not?” said Rupert. “It’s a mistake to call optimism a cheap virtue. How are you, Uncle?”

“I suppose you slept last night,” was the reply from which Rupert was to gather that sleep at such a crisis was considered gross.

“Yes, thanks,” he said. “At Matlock. I drove up quietly, because I wanted to think. Really, of course, I’d decided in the first five minutes after opening your letter.”

“You decided very quickly,” said William, who had come to no decision.

“My wife made the same remark,” said Rupert. “But that’s a day and a half ago, and my first opinion stands. I’ve decided to sell.” Speaking, he gave a just perceptible jerk of the head which William remembered as a characteristic of Sir Philip when he, too, announced one of his quick decisions, and the little movement was not a grateful sight to William. Sir Philip’s son had his father’s trick and, it seemed, his father’s way of arriving rapidly at a conclusion. William, victim to irresolution as he always was, was sliding off his fence into opposition, through nothing more logical than jealousy of this boy who had the gift of making up his mind swiftly. “Am I to understand that your wife has other views?” he asked. It was hardly likely in such a wife, in an actress, but Rupert’s words seemed to suggest that Mary had given him pause, and if William was going to oppose this headstrong boy, any ally, however unlikely, would be welcome.

But, “Wives don’t count in this,” said Rupert bruskly, and, he thought, truthfully. It was true at any rate between Rupert and the wife of William; Rupert’s decision had been made before he opened Gertrude’s prompting letter. But William and William’s wife were another matter, and William shuffled uneasily on his chair as he admitted the influence in this crisis of the Service of Gertrude who was not born a Hepplestall. He must be strong.

“Quite right,” lie said firmly. “Wives don’t count. But it isn’t the case that you decide, Rupert. The Board decides.”

“I make it from your letter that for the practical purposes of this deal, you and I decide.”

“It still is not the case that you decide.”

“Oh, naturally, when I said I’d decided, I meant as regards myself. I’m here to get your views. But, even if you’re against me, Uncle, that won’t stop me from going on. I mean there may be others who aren’t romantic about Hepplestall’s. I may find others who’ll pool their shares with mine in favor of a sale.”

William inclined to tell him to go and try. He didn’t think it likely that there would be any others, but if there were, let them join with Rupert and let William be able to say that his hand was forced. It would be a comforting solution.

“You’re hoping it, Uncle. I’m perfectly aware you want to sell. Why did you write to me at all if you didn’t want to sell?”

“Is that fair, Rupert? You would have been the first to blame me if I had not told you of this.”

“I should never have known anything about it. I know nothing of lots of important things you decide.”

“And doesn’t that seem a shameful thing for your father’s son to have to say, Rupert? Suppose I sent you that letter just to make you see what sort of important things we had to decide in your absence. To arouse your sense of responsibility.”

“That cock won’t fight, Uncle. You could decide other things very well without me. You could decide this, too, if the decision were a negative. But the decision you hoped for was an affirmative and so you wrote to me. Are you going to deny that you hoped I’d want to sell?”

“You’re... you’re very headstrong, Rupert.”

“I’ve come here to get down to facts. And the flat fact is that both you and I want to sell. You want more pleasure in life than being Head of Hepplestall’s allows you. You want to get out and I don’t mean to get in. We both know that from the point of view of those old Johnnies on the wall”—William shuddered at his catastrophic levity—“it’s a crime to sell Hepplestall’s. But I’m not a Chinaman and I won’t worship my ancestors. I’ve my own view of the sort of life I mean to live. And we both know that the whole of the rest of the Board may be against us and that some of them virulently will. Very well, then we don’t tell the Board before it’s necessary. We go into the question of price, and we quote the figure to these accountants. We see what reply we draw. As to the price, that’s your affair.”

“Well,” confessed William, “tentatively, purely as a matter of curiosity, I have gone into that.”

“Uncle,” said Rupert, surprising William with a giant’s hand-grip, “you and I speak the same language. And we won’t stammer, either. These accountants wrote to you, so the reply must be from you. You have not had an opportunity to consult your Board and you speak for yourself in estimating the market value of Hepplestall’s at so much. This figure should not be regarded as the basis of negotiation, but as the minimum financial consideration on which other terms of sale could be founded. Something like that, eh? Now show me the figure and tell me how you arrived at it.”

From nephew to uncle, this did not strain courtesy; it was hot pace-making irresistibly recalling to William occasions when Sir Philip, well in his stride, had made him wonder whether such alert efficiency was quite gentlemanly. But with the figures in his pocket he had been no sloven himself, and if Rupert and he did indeed speak the same language, he hadn’t stammered.

At the same time, this production of the figures, to one so pertinacious as Rupert, advanced matters to a stage from which there was no retreat and he hesitated until a thought, sophistical but consoling, came into his mind. He had heard it rumored that the Banks were beginning to frown on the excessive speculation in mills; of course, and time, too. The Government had cried, “Trade! Trade!” and had inspired the Banks to encourage trade by lending money readily. Then it was found that too much of the money lent was being used not for sound trade but for speculation, and borrowers were faced with a decided change of front on the part of bank managers. William conveniently forgot that the type of rich man behind the accountants who had written to him would be above the caprice of bank managers, and decided happily that the whole affair had merely an academic interest; in that case, there was no harm in discussing the figures with Rupert behind the backs of the rest of the Board, and in submitting them to London. The nationally eminent accountants would have been infuriated to know that William Hepplestall imagined them capable of having to do with a mare’s-nest; but that it was all a mare’s-nest was the salve he applied to his conscience as he went to the safe to collect his data for Rupert.

Rupert had no sophistical conclusions to draw from a general situation of which he knew nothing; it was clear to him that they had passed the turning-point and were safely on the tack for home. There would be any amount of detail to be settled, but the supreme issue was decided; William and he were at one, and Hepplestal’s was to be sold! No wonder he had hectored a little. He had had to rout William and not only William but the belated hesitations in himself born of his dismay at the formidable size of Hepplestal’s; and success had justified his methods. In here, the massiveness of the mills did not oppress and a modern man whose thinking was not confused by the portraits of his ancestors could see this thing singly, stripped of sentiment, in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. If Staithley Mills were large, so would be the figure William was to declare; if the tradition was fine, it was commutable into the greater number of thousands. That was sanity, anything else was muddled-headedness, and he awaited William’s scratches on paper as one who has swept away obfuscating side-issues and concentrates on essentials.

“It makes a very considerable total, Rupert,” said William gravely.

“We’ve got used to considerable totals, haven’t we? I don’t suppose it’s more than a day’s cost of the war.”

“Then I’ve a surprise for you,” said William.

“Yes?” asked Rupert with an eager anticipation which was hardly due to greed so much as to impatience to learn what fabulous key to the pageant of life was to be his to turn. Let it only be big enough and he had no doubt that it would dazzle Mary out of her queer, old-fashioned timidities. He stood upon his peak in Darien. “Yes,” he asked again as William paused, not because he had a sense of the dramatic but because he was nervous.

There was a knock at the door, apologetic if ever knock apologized, and an embarrassed henchman of the Service came in upon William’s indignant response.

“I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you, sir, but Lady Hepplestall is here.”

“My wife?” cried Rupert, hoping against hope that it was his mother.

“Yes, Sir Rupert, and Bradshaw’s with her. Mr. Bradshaw of the spinners. The M. P. He... well, sir, he put it that he knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and he’s come to interrupt.”

“Thank you,” said William. “We will not keep Lady Hepplestall waiting.” William was very dignified as he said the only possible thing, and he hoped Rupert would perceive in his dignity a reproach to his own exhibition of crude amazement before an understrapper. Rupert was ludicrously like a boy caught in the act of robbing an orchard, and William’s eye was alight as he contrasted this crestfallen Rupert with the Rupert who had declared roundly that “Wives don’t count in this.” William had hopes of Mary, who was shown in with Tom before Rupert had time to attempt an explanation of her presence to his uncle.

Rupert recovered himself and made a tolerable show of hauteur; he wasn’t the small boy in the apple orchard but a very grand gentleman making his pained protest at her intrusion. “Mary!” he began.

“No, not now, Rupert,” she checked him. “I’m here to watch. I told Mr. Bradshaw and he is here to speak.” To watch, she did not add, with desperately anxious eyes the effect upon him both of her summons to Tom and of what Tom had to say. She thought she had saved Hep-plestall’s, she thought Tom had a medicine that would cure them of their wish to sell, but had she saved Rupert? That was her larger question and she saw no answer to it yet. She was there to watch and pray.

“Well,” said Tom, “that’s a good opening. As she says, Lady Hepplestall told me what you’re up to and we’re saved the trouble of bluffing round the point. You’re out to sell Hepplestall’s; I’m here to stop you.”

“The devil you are,” cried Rupert.

Tom turned to William. “Does Sir Rupert know I’m secretary of the Spinners’ Union?” he asked.

“Indeed?” said Rupert. “And what business may this be of the Spinners’ Union, or any other Union?”

“Vital business,” said Tom, “of theirs and every other cotton trade Union. I’m usually asked to sit down in this office, Mr. Hepplestall.”

“You are usually asked to come into it, Mr. Bradshaw. You have hardly asked to-day,” said William.

“Please yourself,” said Tom. “I’ve been sitting a long while in the train. I can stand, only I’ve a bad habit of making speeches when I’m on my feet and I’d as lief have had this friendly.”

It surprised and annoyed Rupert that William pointed to a chair with an “If you please, Mr. Bradshaw.” Himself, he would have kicked the confounded fellow into the street and when he had gone it would have been Mary’s turn for—not for kicking, certainly, but for something severe in the way of disciplinary measures. “Friendly!” he scoffed.

“What you might call a benevolent enemy, Sir Rupert,” said Tom. “If I weren’t benevolent, I’d have gone into Staithley streets and cried it aloud that Hepplestall’s was being sold to Londoners, and I’d have watched the hornets sting you. But, being benevolent, I’d rather you didn’t get stung, and I’m here till I get your assurance that all thought of a sale is off.”

“That means you’re making quite a long stay with us, Mr. Bradshaw,” said Rupert elaborately.

“I wonder how much you know of the Staithley folk, Sir Rupert,” said Tom. “They’re fighting stock. You maybe know there’s a likely chance of things coming to a big strike in the cotton trade on the wages question, but that’s not just yet and if you don’t watch it there’ll be an urgency strike in Staithley that might begin to-night. One of these wicked strikes you read about. Without notice.”

“But you... Mr. Bradshaw, you’re the chief Union official.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tom, “and officially the strike would be unofficial. But I’d be roundabout, unofficially. Rum sort of strike, eh? Striking against the Hepplestalls for the Hepplestalls, and a Bradshaw leading it. If you knew owt of Bradshaws and Hepplestalls, you’ll see the rumminess of that.”

“Against us for us. Yes, I see. One might almost conclude you like the Hepplestalls, Mr. Bradshaw.”

“Like ‘em!” said Tom. “Like ‘em!” His eyes glanced at William with the suspicion of a twinkle in it. William wondered if there was a twinkle; Sir Philip would not have wondered, he would have seen and he would have understood. He would have discounted Tom’s next words, “I take the liberty of telling you the Hepplestalls are a thieving gang of blood-sucking capitalists, but I prefer to stick to the blood-suckers I know. I know the Hepplestalls and I can talk to them. I don’t know, I won’t talk to a soulless mob of a London syndicate. You can think of it like this, Sir Rupert. There was steam, and it fastened like a vampire on Lancashire. It fastened on your sort as well as on my sort, and we’ve been working up to where we’re getting steam in its place, obeying us, not mastering us. We’re doing well against steam. Shorter hours are here, and factory work before breakfast has gone. Half-timers are going, and education’s going to get a sporting chance. And we’re not beating steam to let ourselves be ruined by water.”

William nodded sober acquiescence, but Rupert was uninformed. “Water?” he asked.

“Watered capital,” Tom explained. “Lancashire’s water-logged, but we’ll keep Staithley out of what’s coming to Lancashire. You have mills here that are the pride of the county. You wouldn’t turn them into the pride of speculators as the biggest grab they ever made in Lancashire! You wouldn’t make Staithley suffer from the rot of watered capital.”

William stirred furtively on his chair and avoided Tom’s eye with the shiftiness of a wrongdoer who is shown the results of misdeed, and then remembered that he had done no wrong and nodded approval of Tom’s words which were not addressed to him but to Rupert. Mentally he thanked Tom for saying outright things which he had himself thought. He had merely kept them in reserve, unspoken until he had entertained himself by proceeding a little further with the accountants; but that was, perhaps, not the most honorable form of entertainment, based as it would have been on the false pretense that William was prepared to sell, and he was grateful to Tom for an intrusion which cleared the air. He did not blame himself: he had not played with fire, or, if he had, it had been while wearing asbestos gloves; but what Tom said to Rupert—of course it was to Rupert—was the final argument against a sale, and he drew out notepaper and bent to write.

To Rupert, Tom was simply a nuisance. He had sighted victory, he had carried William, he had resolutely defeated such difficulties as sentiment and the frowning ponderosity of Hepplestall’s, and he saw Tom Bradshaw, with his croaking prophecies of after-effects of the sale upon some fifty thousand inhabitants of Staithley, as a monstrous impertinence. He was so busy seeing Tom as an impertinence that he did not see William writing a letter.

“I’ve heard of the tyranny of Trade Unions,” he said. “I’ve heard of what they call their rights and what most people call their privileges. But I’ve never heard of a Trade Union’s right to veto a sale. I have the right to transfer possession of my own to anubody. If you think you can engineer a strike against that elementary right of property, I tell you to go ahead and see what happens.”

“I know what will happen in this case, Sir Rupert. If we let you sell—”

“You let! You can’t prevent.”

“If you sold,” Tom went on, “some undesirable results would arise. I am dealing with them before they arise. I am dealing on the principle that prevention is better than cure.”

“Are you? Then suppose I said strike and be damned to you?”

“If you said that you would be a young man speaking in anger and I shouldn’t take you too seriously.”

“What!” cried Rupert. There was no doubt about his anger now.

“One moment,” said Tom. “I’m against a strike, but it’s a good weapon. It’s maybe a better weapon when it isn’t used than when it is. It can hit the striker as well as the struck.”

“Oh? That’s dawned on you, has it?”

“Some time before you were born. But this strike wouldn’t hurt the striker. There’s somebody ready to buy Hepplestall’s. I’ll call him Mr. B., because B stands for butcher, and a butcher will buy a bull but he won’t buy a mad bull. Mr. B. will think twice before he buys Hepplestall’s when Hepplestall’s men are on strike against being sold. No one buys trouble with his eyes open. That’s why we can stop this. That’s the public way, but I’ve still great hopes we’ll stop it privately, in this room.”

“Then you—” Rupert began hotly, but William interrupted. “You may have noticed that I was writing, Mr. Bradshaw. This letter goes to-night finally declining to treat in any way for a sale of Hepplestall’s. I have signed it and I am Head of Hepplestall’s. I hope, Sir Rupert, the future Head will sign it with me.”

“Uncle!” he said, and turned his back.

“It isn’t needful,” said Tom, “for me to add that nobody shall ever know from me that there was any question of a sale.”

“Thank you,” said William. “As a fact, Mr. Bradshaw, there never was.” He believed what he said, too. He believed he had never been influenced by Gertrude or convinced by Rupert. He believed he had merely toyed pleasantly with the idea, standing himself superior to it. “But that shall not prevent me from appreciating your actions, yours, Lady Hepplestall, and yours, Mr. Bradshaw. We Hepplestalls are all trustees, all of us,” he emphasized, looking at Rupert’s stiff back, “but you have shown to-day that you are sharer in the trust.”

Tom wondered for a moment what was the polite conversational equivalent of ironical cheers; William was escaping too easily, but the chief point was not the regent but the heir, Mary’s Rupert, and he could spare William the knowledge that he had deceived nobody.

“Sir Rupert spoke just now,” he said, “of the rights of property. They are rightful rights only when they are matched with a sense of responsibility, and capital that forgets responsibility is going to get it in the neck.”

“We have,” said William superbly, “the idea of service in this firm.”

“Man,” said Tom, “if you hadn’t had, I shouldn’t be here to-day talking to you in headlines. If you hadn’t had that idea and if you hadn’t lived up to it and if I didn’t hope you’d go on living up to it, I’d have had a very different duty. Shall I tell you what that duty would have been, Sir Rupert? To keep my mouth shut and let you sell. The higher you sold the higher they’d resell when they floated their company, and the sooner they’d start squeezing the blood out of Staithley.”

Rupert turned a puzzled face. “That would have been your duty? Why?” he asked.

“Hot fevers are short,” said Tom. “It ‘ud bring the end more quickly. I don’t know if you read the Times. If you do you may have seen that they mentioned my name the other day along with some more and called us the elder statesmen of the Labor Party. Too old to hurry. Brakes on the wheels of progress. Maybe; but I’m one that looks for other roads than the road that leads to revolution and you Hepplestalls have been a sign-post on a road I like. You’ve been too busy overpaying yourselves to go far up the road yet, but you’re leaders of the cotton trade and by the Lord that ship needs captaincy. That’s why I didn’t do what lots in the Party would tell me was my duty—to let you rip, and rip another rent in the rotting fabric of capitalism.” Mary’s hand was on his arm. “Because you love the Hepplestalls,” she said.

“And me a Bradshaw?” he said indignantly. “Me a Labor Member and they capital? Did you ever hear of the two old men who’d been mortal enemies all their lives, and when one of them was killed in a railway accident, the other took to his bed and died because he’d nothing left to live for? That’s me and the Hepplestalls.”

She shook her head, smiling. “It’s not like that,” she said.

“It ought to be,” said Tom, “but it isn’t. Service, not greed, and there’s a hope for all of us in that, and if you want to know who taught me to see it, it was Sir Philip Hepplestall.”

Rupert was in distress. Why should London, his schemes, theaters, seem so incredibly remote? Why wasn’t he angry with this grizzled fellow from the Staithley stews who dared, directly and indirectly, to lecture him? Why didn’t he resent Mary, another Bradshaw, who had brought Tom there to reprimand a Hepplestall? And why weren’t ladders provided for climbing down from high horses?

“My father?” he said. “My father taught you?” It was his ancestors he declined to worship. A father was not an ancestor, and Rupert was hearing again Sir Philip’s deep sincerity as he spoke of the Samurai. “We have both learned from Sir Philip, Mr. Bradshaw. I have been near to forgetting the lesson. Did he ever speak to you of Samurai?”

“Sam who?” asked Tom.

“Ah,” said Rupert happily. That was his secret, that intimate ideal which Sir Philip had revealed only to his son. He hadn’t, perhaps, the soundest evidence for supposing that the confidence had been uniquely to him, but in his present dilemma it seemed entirely satisfactory—a way out and a way down. And, after all, he came down by a ladder.

A great noise filled the room, ear-splitting, nerve-jarring to those who were not used to it. Rupert was not used to it, but for a moment wondered if it were external or the turmoil of his thoughts. “Only the buzzer,” William smiled.

“Staithley goes home,” said Tom.

But not yet. The Chief Cashier knocked perfunctorily on the door and came in with the bland air of one who had the entree at all times. “If Sir Rupert could speak to the workpeople,” he said. “Word was passed that he is here. This window looks upon the yard. May I open it?”

Rupert paused for one of time’s minor fractions, and his head jerked as his father’s used to jerk. “Mr. Bradshaw,” he said, “will you step to the window with us?”

It was grand; it was too grand; it was a gesture which began finely and ran to seed like rhubarb. It was florid when he wanted to be simple and he harked back in mind to a Punch cartoon of some years earlier, representing the Yellow Press as a horrible person up to the knee in mud, calling out, “Chuck us another ha’penny and I’ll wallow in it.” He felt himself up to the midriff in a mud of sentimentality; for two pins, he would with ironic grace wallow in the mud. His surrender was too loathsome and insincere: he held out his hand to Tom, feeling that he was going the whole hog, parading his humiliation before the men and women of Hepplestall’s who had the idiotic wish to salute a traitor as their prince.

Tom offered first aid here and shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve to be careful what company I keep in public. I’m Member for Staithley, but I’m Labor Member and you’re Capital.”

“Aren’t we to work together in the future?” asked Rupert.

“If they see me standing there with you, they’ll throw brickbats at me, and some of them will hit you. You’ve a lot to learn, Sir Rupert. Old-fashioned Labor men like me, that want to hurry slowly, are between the devil and the deep sea. If I show myself standing by the devil, the sea will come up and drown me.”

“By George,” said Rupert, feeling half clean of mud and insincerity, “by George, this is going to be interesting. I’ve... I’ve a lot to learn, haven’t I?”

“Thank God, you know it,” said Tom Bradshaw reverently.

And in another minute, Rupert knew it better still, when he moved to the window with William. The factory yard below them was packed with a cheering mass of workpeople, and every inlet to it showed a sea of heads stretching as far as the eye could reach. Not one tenth the employees of the great mills could stand within sight of the window; those who were there had gained priority of place because they worked in the departments nearest the yard, but not by any means all whose work was nearby had come and it struck William, if not Rupert, that the people here assembled were chiefly elderly or very young. The elders, like the gate-keeper who had passed the word of Rupert’s coming into the mills, had genuinely an impulse of loyalty to a Hepplestall; the very young were ready to make a noise in a crowd gathered upon any occasion; and the merely young had for the most part made no effort to struggle into the yard.

To Rupert, this was Hepplestall’s making spontaneous levy in mass to welcome him; a little absurd of them, even if their prince had been princely, but undeniably affecting. He must play up to these acclamations, he must say something gracious, and he must not condescend. He was an ass whom they lionized, but he wouldn’t bray. He offered to speak, and the hearty roar below him diminished.

It has been observed before to-day that the contemptuous noise known as “booing” is unable to assert itself against cheers, whereas a few sharp hisses cut like a whip across any but the greatest uproar. As the cheers diminished in anticipation of his speech, the appearance of unanimity was shattered by derisive hissing, drowned at once by renewed volume of cheers, but more than sufficient to indicate an opposition.

Behind him in the room he heard Mary’s quick “What’s that?” he heard Tom say “Poor lad! Poor lad!” Who was a poor lad? He? He never did like honey; he didn’t want the leadership of sheep and he began to speak without preamble.

“It’s a tremendous thing to be a Hepplestall and if you cheered just now because my name is Hepplestall I think that you were right. Some of you hissed. If that was because I am a Hepplestall, I think that you were wrong, but if it was because I’ve been a long time in coming here, then you were right. I shirked the responsibility. I had the thought to take my capital out of Hepplestall’s and to put it into something soft. But a man said to me lately that capital that failed to accept responsibility was going to get it in the neck. I agreed and my capital stops in something tough, in Hepplestall’s. And another thing. We’ve made hay of the hereditary principle as such. If I’ve no merit, I shan’t presume on being Sir Philip’s son. In the mills side by side with you, it will be discovered whether I have merit or no. Now, I am not a socialist. I shall take the wages of capital and if I rise to be your manager, I shall take the wages of management. That’s blunt and I expect some of you are taking it as a challenge. Then those are the very fellows who are going to help me most. We’ll arrive amongst us at the knowledge of what is capital’s fair wage and what is management’s fair wage. I am here to learn and I am here to serve. If you will believe that, it will help us all; it will help more than had I kept my motives to myself and simply made you a speech of thanks for the home-coming welcome you have given me. The welcome expressed some disapproval and I should not have been honest if I had pretended that I didn’t notice it. I am not out to earn your approval by methods which might be contrary to the interests of Staithley Mills. I am out to serve Hepplestall’s, not sectionally, but as a whole. I look to you to show me my way, and while I have to thank you wholeheartedly for your cheers, I am absolutely sincere in thanking you for your hisses. They are the beginning of my education. I haven’t a sweet tooth and I liked them. We’re not going to get together easily, I and those fellows who hissed. Well, strong bonds aren’t forged easily and I can’t be more than a trier. I’m Hepplestall and proud of it, and I dare say that’s enough for some of you. It isn’t enough for me until I’ve proved myself and it isn’t enough for the fellows who hissed. I’m asking them for fair play for a Hepplestall. I’m asking for a chance. I’m going to do my best and I’m keeping you from home. It’s good of you to stay and I’ve said my say. You’ve not had butter; you’ve had facts. My thanks to you for listening. Good night.”

They cheered and he stood at the window as they dispersed, trying to remember what he had said, trying to gauge its effect upon the men. There were no hisses, but that meant nothing; a demonstration of opposition had been made and needn’t be repeated. But, anyhow, he hadn’t lied; he hadn’t pretended that he had their esteem before he earned it; and he meant to earn it.

He turned from the window to Tom Bradshaw; neither to Mary nor to William, but to Tom. “Did I talk awful tosh?” he asked. “Honestly, I don’t know what I said.”

“A young speaker never does, and, some ways, he’s the better for having no tricks of the trade. You’ll do, lad. You’ll do.”

Rupert’s face was bright as he heard the approbation of a Bradshaw under the portrait of Reuben Hepplestall. “Hepplestall and proud of it! Did I say that?”

William nodded and Rupert looked at him with a puzzled face. “Damn it, it’s true,” he said wonderingly. “May I sign that letter, Uncle William?”