eat bitterness had taken possession of her.

As Mr. Hearty slowly climbed the ladder towards success, Mrs. Bindle's
thoughts went with him. He became her great interest in life. No wife
or mother ever watched the progress of husband or son with keener
interest or greater admiration than Mrs. Bindle watched that of her
brother-in-law.

Gradually she began to make him her "pattern to live and to die." She
joined the Alton Road Chapel, gave up all "carnal" amusements, and
began a careful and elaborate preparation for the next world.

Bindle, as the unconscious cause of her humiliation--the supreme
humiliation of a woman's life, marrying the wrong man--became also the
victim of her dissatisfaction. He watched the change, marvelling at
its cause, and with philosophic acceptance explaining it by telling
himself that "women were funny things."

As a girl Mrs. Bindle had been pleasure-loving, some regarded her as
somewhat flighty; and the course of gradual starvation of pleasure to
which she subjected herself had embittered her whole nature. There
was, however, no suggestion of sentiment in her attitude towards her
brother-in-law. He was her standard by which she measured the failure
of other men, Bindle in particular.

Like all women, she bowed the knee to success, and Alfred Hearty was
the most successful man she had ever encountered. He had begun life on
the tail-board of a parcels delivery van, he was now the owner of two
flourishing greengrocer's shops, to say nothing of being regarded as
one of Fulham's most worthy citizens.

From van-boy to a small greengrocer, he had risen to the important
position of calling on customers to solicit orders, and here he had
shown his first flash of genius. He had cultivated every housewife and
maid-servant assiduously, never allowing them to buy anything he could
not recommend. When eventually he started in business on his own
account, he had carefully canvassed his late employer's customers, who,
to a woman, went over to him.

"It was that 'oly smile of 'is wot done it," was Bindle's opinion.

When in the natural course of events his previous employer retired a
bankrupt, it was taken as evidence of the supreme ability of the man
who had taken from him his livelihood.

In the administration of his own business Alfred Hearty had shown his
second flash of genius--he never allowed his own employes an
opportunity of doing as he had done, but, by occasional personal calls