artner with a small capital if he did
well.

"If you don't do well, of course it's off," concluded Aymer, rather
wearily, "the future is in your hands, not ours: we only supply an
opportunity."

Sam said stolidly he quite understood that: that he was much obliged,
and he'd do his best.

"It will be a race between you," remarked Mr. Aston, looking from one
boy to the other, "as to whether you become a full-fledged grocer
first or Christopher a full-fledged engineer."

But late that night when Mr. Aston was bidding Aymer good-night, he
remarked as he stood looking down at him:

"You have done a good piece of road-making to-day, old man."

"No, I haven't," retorted Aymer, rather crossly. "I've only supplied
material for someone else to use if they like."

"Just to please Christopher?"

But Aymer did not answer that. Mr. Aston really needed no answer, for
he knew that long ago Sam's mother had made smooth a very rough piece
of road for another woman's feet, and that woman was Christopher's
mother.

CHAPTER XIII

A thin, sickly-looking woman in a dingy black dress sat by the
roadside with a basket of bootlaces and buttons at her feet. She
rested her elbows on her knees and gazed with unseeing eyes at the
meadowland below.

The burst shoe, the ragged gown, and unkempt head proclaimed her a
Follower of the Road, and the sordid wretchedness that reached its
lowest depth in lack of desire for better things, was a sight to force
Philanthropist or Socialist to sink differences in one energetic
struggle to eradicate the type. If she thought at all it was in the
dumb, incoherent manner of her class: at the actual moment a vision of
a hat with red flowers she had seen in a shop window flickered across
her mind, chased away by a hazy wonder as to how much supper
threepence halfpenny would provide. That thought, too, fell away
before a sudden, shrewd calculation as to the possible harvest to be
gleaned from the two people just coming over the brow of the hill.

These two, a boy and a young man, were walking with the swinging step
and assurance of those who have never bent before grim need.

"Young toffs," she decided, and wondered if it were worth while
getting up or not.

The young man was listening eagerly to the equally eager chatter of
his companion, and they walked quickly as those who were in haste to
reach a goal until they were level with the tramp woman, who watched
them with speculative eyes. The b